Right now that may be true, but that's not something inherent to currency itself.
Currency used to be worth the value of the metal in a coin itself, which while valued largely on the scarcity of a metal rarely used for anything other than currency and jewelry, was clearly not *imaginary*. Even up to the 20th century the gold standard backed many currencies (which could have just as well been gold itself except that it's hard to fold in your wallet).
Actually, IMO it's been a while since they were really a high-quality brand in many ways.
Their BD players are mostly crap - slow, clunky UI and takes FOREVER to boot and load a disc. Their digital cameras are mediocre (never could compete with Canon or Nikon) and until recently required a proprietary expensive flash card. Their TVs use LCD panels manufactured by Samsung and Sharp, with little value added (and a lot of cost added). Their stereos and home theater receivers are now all basically mass market crap as well - anyone who does their research would go with Denon, Yamaha, Onkyo, etc instead.
1/4? I just looked and it's about $2.35 GGE in the CA Bay Area, compared to $4 for gasoline. So more than 1/2. At $4500 more than the equivalent gas model, that's going to take a LONG time (or miles, really - over 90k) to pay off the difference.
Can't argue the clean burning aspect, that's a great thing about it. But then again the Civic Hybrid gets 30% more mileage (per GGE) than the GX for a similar price, and in the end CNG still generates CO2, whereas the extra mileage due to electric power doesn't...
Well, the Honda Civic GX (which is in fact my neighbor's model, and I think is the most common consumer CNG vehicle) is quoted at about 170 mile range. NG just has a lot lower energy content than gasoline and takes a lot more space to store (say goodbye to half of your trunk).
The Tesla Model S gets about 300 miles with it's largest battery option (which is $$ of course) - and with a rapid charging station can almost fully recharge in an hour. It's not *quite* a replacement for traditional autos on long trips, but it's clearly enough to be taken seriously - especially since the disadvantages of CNG (lower range, takes up more cargo space, limited refueling locations) make it more of a local/commuter car anyway.
Oh, and a 40-70 time of "a couple of seconds" is supercar territory;) In fact the Tesla could probably do it, but not because it's an exotic supercar, its because electric motors have great torque at low speeds...
Well, besides the fact there isn't remotely enough produced to power a significant fraction of cars, landfill gas is *not* just methane. It has a lot of other nasty things in it you don't want to burn in relatively cheap engines with relatively few regulations or oversight (ie. cars).
Probably better off leaving all of the extraction/filtering/clean burning/etc to centralized energy production facilities (ie power plants) - and possibly use it to produce actual clean forms of energy like H2 or electricity that can go in the automobiles themselves...
Except it wouldn't be remotely cost effective to *make* NG to use in cars... the reason it's used today is that mining *is* still cost effective.
If we are going to bother researching a replacement "rapid filling" fuel for cars that we need to manufacture ourselves (assuming battery technology doesn't catch up and make this all moot), might as well put the effort into fuel cells...
His point was cars may be ready for CNG, but CNG isn't ready for cars - the infrastructure just isn't there yet.
My neighbor has a CNG car, and he has to make a 20 mile round trip to the closest PG&E facility (after applying for a CNG refueling card, getting trained in the operation of the equipment, etc). It's just not practical right now for anything more than transit/public works vehicles and "hobbyists"...
He has a point... if you actually read the article the authors specifically pointed this out already. Clearly they understand the usual trite statistics adage, but that doesn't mean the study wasn't interesting.
Cohort studies demonstrating association do not necessarily imply causality, but the preferable randomised controlled trial method for assessing hypnotic risks may be impractical due to ethical and funding limitations.
Which IMO kind of makes the title of your comment almost as sensationalist/misleading as the Slashdot headline...
Those companies have a *lot* of employees, but when most of your employees make less than $300 a month that doesn't really make you "larger". In fact, that's kind of the point of why their contractors contract them, to outsource labor that would practically be indentured service in the parent company's home country...
Yeah, LG included this in their 2011 high end TVs, and I believe they are expanding to even more models this year.
It's pretty cool for apps designed for it (like the Wii or iPad interface is great for apps designed for them) but because of that, it does require rethinking UIs to really take advantage of it (which is ok for apps built to run on the TV itself, but not much of an option for separate boxes like DVRs, BD players, game consoles, etc)
Anyway, I generally agree tablets are not the answer (though that's about it with your post - most tablets are not tied to a phone contract and never were; and if you are happy with a $200 TV and $15 remote you are not a consumer in the target market anyway).
I have an iPad and a Harmony remote (which was a lot more than $15, I'll admit). If I wanted to I could get the Harmony iPad app and receiver and it would in theory do everything my remote can and more. The problem is, there are a handful things I use my remote for 90% of the time (set input, volume +/-, mute, pause/play and arrows/select are the vast majority). And a small remote with dedicated buttons that fits ergonomically in one hand does those things SO much faster and more easily than an annoying touchscreen tablet ever will.
Quote from the Foxconn CEO: “Hon Hai has a workforce of over one million worldwide and as human beings are also animals, to manage one million animals gives me a headache.”
So - my first thought was, "it couldn't have been that bad, I'm sure there was some confusion in the translations".
And then he LITERALLY invited the director to the Taipei Zoo to "share his experience with the audience on how to manage different animals according to their individual temperaments."
So yes, Foxconn may really be as bad as they seem.
At the same time, there *are* in fact real pedophiles, scammers, and other criminals that use Facebook, in which case it's probably not really productive (or even legal) to notify a suspect they are investigating.
Not that I think law enforcement should be able to violate someone's privacy at all without a warrant, just that in the end, as ignorant and misguided as they may sometimes be, it doesn't help being 100% cynical - their general goal is to catch people breaking the law.
Maybe start with a few easier problems to prove you have the capacity to tackle the harder ones? So you can "build up" some credibility and "tenure" (or whatever you want to call it... "publish buffer"?).
Again it's not *that* different as in industry - most investors won't just randomly give a pile of money to unproven people who want to start up a company, but if you have succeeded before they will flock to you. At the very least, a solid proposal explaining *why* you think you know something that all the "leading experts" don't would seem reasonable.
If you do solve the problem, you are pretty much set for life academically, but if after 5+ years you didn't get anywhere, well, maybe your employer is justified in encouraging your to look elsewhere for employment, after all you just cost them a bunch of money that they could have given to someone else. Academia seems like such a risk-averse field sometimes...
I have always heard that (as well as stories of profs dumping their lectures on TAs, etc), but in the end that wasn't the experience I had. A lot of it depends on the priorities of the University/department when recruiting their faculty...
But at the same time, if a computer scientist paid to produce results hasn't come up with anything but less accurate image features and less effective scheduling algorithms for the last three years, maybe the *should* be fired or switch to a pure teaching position.
There are plenty of other young, motivated new PhDs ready to take their place if given the opportunity. At some level it seems like it wouldn't hurt to treat academia a bit more like most other professions. Of course, everyone can have a dry spell/bad luck, so maybe some system of limited time tenure based on past productivity?
It would help if you would clarify what part is inaccurate. I will admit that I only have entry level bio under my belt, but I do think I recall that DNA and RNA were responsible for the formation of basically everything in a cell. Wikipedia doesnt seem to disagree.
Ok... one extended (sort of) analogy - being on/. you probably know about neural networks more than neuroanatomy - but there are plenty of similarities. It wouldn't be that hard to define the blueprints to construct a simple fully connected neural network. In fact, in theory it could even be as simple as "create this basic structure" and that structure also happened to have the property of connecting itself with other similar structures (possibly randomly - though little about biochemistry is really *random*, there are a reason polymers polymerize).
But then you provide inputs to that structure and a feedback loop starts modifying it, eventually to the point that it's largely determined by inputs that are not defined by the blueprints at all (a few examples: maybe they are defined by the circadian day/night cycle of the sun, audio cues, or a billion other inputs you take for granted). So now take that and apply it to the insane complexity of the brain and all of the neurons that grow and form (or cut) their vast numbers of connections to each other - in the end *very* little of it was really coded by DNA. And that's just a fairly simple example - doesn't even go into how neurons actually differentiate, grow to find/establish their initial axonal connections, etc.
I'm not saying the steps to get from DNA to a fully formed organism isn't amazingly complex, just that comparing DNA to a blueprint is really not a good analogy.
Actually - if I were to recommend one pop-sci book on the human genome (not as much neurobio, but that's a bit harder field to relate to) it would be Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters by Matt Ridley.
[Oh, and as far as your complexity comments... others have done a better job than I could of refuting that fairly standard creationist argument if you care to look them up...]
Yup. And it wasn't even created as an attack ad, it was created as a joke for an internal Microsoft conference last summer. I guess someone at MS thought it was funny enough that they posted it on YouTube...
No, I think its plenty complex to consider that the smallest virus genome contains around 3500 base pairs, which gives 2^3500 different combinatory possibilities of base pairs. For those who like things in nice, whole numbers, thats one out of 4.027 x 10^1053. I will spare you all the wall of text of actually trying to paste that number in here, but suffice it to say its a mind-bogglingly large number.
I think you need to understand statistics and biochemistry a bit better. You have just provided the chances of coming up with a single virus's code at random. Not only are there countless millions (billions?) of different viruses in the world, but due to the way transcription works there are many codons that result in the same transcribed amino acids, and a lot of those pairs do nothing at all (exons).
Now take the set of billions of viruses with thousands (at least) of ways to equivalently code them, and then let them recombine at the rate and quantities of large scale chemical reactions in a medium the size of the global oceans over billions of years. And now your number starts to look perfectly reasonable.
To put it another way, the chances of programming computers to randomly combine English words and come up with Hamlet is pretty low. The chances of those computers coming up with *any* intelligible paragraph is pretty much a given (it's already been done many times).
You can talk about how complicated the vertebrate nervous system is, but recall that all of the information behind it is in those base pairs, and that the genome is far more complicated. Consider the complexity of the nervous system as a mere subset of the genome, if you will.
Sigh, that's such an inaccurate statement and oversimplification I wouldn't even know where to begin... go take graduate classes in developmental bio, developmental neurobio, and neuroanatomy, come back and we can start talking about it:)
If you think Deus Ex Machina is the "simple explanation", pretty much everything can be answered by it. Why bother with science at all?
And what's wrong with nihilism? Existential nihilism just posits there is no inherent meaning to life. It's really just a semantic difference from atheism. It's not the same thing as moral nihilism, doesn't have to imply defeatism, and either way just because the universe didn't give us a purpose and morals, doesn't mean we can't create our own, that's the cool thing about sentience and free will.
Of course there is difference, but it's not all that big. You want a *big* difference, compare a bacterium and a human... that's a *lot* bigger than the difference between a nucelotide and a nucleic acid.
I think you vastly underestimate the complexity or RNA (which was most likely the first "genetic material"). Stick a bunch of nucleotides together with a simple sugar and a phosphate group and you're done. Then repeat for a billion years and eventually you get a combination that folds into the correct tertiary structure to transcribe other RNA, etc.
If you want complexity try to understand how the vertebrate nervous system evolved. Basic biochemistry is pretty trivial stuff in comparison.
Slashdot Mirror
So basically they are NOT a currency at all.
They are about as much "currency" (defined as "a widely accepted medium of exchange") as cancelled postage stamps or baseball cards.
Right now that may be true, but that's not something inherent to currency itself.
Currency used to be worth the value of the metal in a coin itself, which while valued largely on the scarcity of a metal rarely used for anything other than currency and jewelry, was clearly not *imaginary*. Even up to the 20th century the gold standard backed many currencies (which could have just as well been gold itself except that it's hard to fold in your wallet).
Actually, IMO it's been a while since they were really a high-quality brand in many ways.
Their BD players are mostly crap - slow, clunky UI and takes FOREVER to boot and load a disc.
Their digital cameras are mediocre (never could compete with Canon or Nikon) and until recently required a proprietary expensive flash card.
Their TVs use LCD panels manufactured by Samsung and Sharp, with little value added (and a lot of cost added).
Their stereos and home theater receivers are now all basically mass market crap as well - anyone who does their research would go with Denon, Yamaha, Onkyo, etc instead.
1/4? I just looked and it's about $2.35 GGE in the CA Bay Area, compared to $4 for gasoline. So more than 1/2. At $4500 more than the equivalent gas model, that's going to take a LONG time (or miles, really - over 90k) to pay off the difference.
Can't argue the clean burning aspect, that's a great thing about it. But then again the Civic Hybrid gets 30% more mileage (per GGE) than the GX for a similar price, and in the end CNG still generates CO2, whereas the extra mileage due to electric power doesn't...
Well, the Honda Civic GX (which is in fact my neighbor's model, and I think is the most common consumer CNG vehicle) is quoted at about 170 mile range. NG just has a lot lower energy content than gasoline and takes a lot more space to store (say goodbye to half of your trunk).
The Tesla Model S gets about 300 miles with it's largest battery option (which is $$ of course) - and with a rapid charging station can almost fully recharge in an hour. It's not *quite* a replacement for traditional autos on long trips, but it's clearly enough to be taken seriously - especially since the disadvantages of CNG (lower range, takes up more cargo space, limited refueling locations) make it more of a local/commuter car anyway.
Oh, and a 40-70 time of "a couple of seconds" is supercar territory ;) In fact the Tesla could probably do it, but not because it's an exotic supercar, its because electric motors have great torque at low speeds...
Well, besides the fact there isn't remotely enough produced to power a significant fraction of cars, landfill gas is *not* just methane. It has a lot of other nasty things in it you don't want to burn in relatively cheap engines with relatively few regulations or oversight (ie. cars).
Probably better off leaving all of the extraction/filtering/clean burning/etc to centralized energy production facilities (ie power plants) - and possibly use it to produce actual clean forms of energy like H2 or electricity that can go in the automobiles themselves...
Except it wouldn't be remotely cost effective to *make* NG to use in cars... the reason it's used today is that mining *is* still cost effective.
If we are going to bother researching a replacement "rapid filling" fuel for cars that we need to manufacture ourselves (assuming battery technology doesn't catch up and make this all moot), might as well put the effort into fuel cells...
His point was cars may be ready for CNG, but CNG isn't ready for cars - the infrastructure just isn't there yet.
My neighbor has a CNG car, and he has to make a 20 mile round trip to the closest PG&E facility (after applying for a CNG refueling card, getting trained in the operation of the equipment, etc). It's just not practical right now for anything more than transit/public works vehicles and "hobbyists"...
He has a point... if you actually read the article the authors specifically pointed this out already. Clearly they understand the usual trite statistics adage, but that doesn't mean the study wasn't interesting.
Cohort studies demonstrating association do not necessarily imply causality, but the preferable randomised controlled trial method for assessing hypnotic risks may be impractical due to ethical and funding limitations.
Which IMO kind of makes the title of your comment almost as sensationalist/misleading as the Slashdot headline...
I have never heard of any metric of company size where worker income played any role.
Same with number of employees - useless. It's all about profit and market cap, moron. And Apple's is currently #1 in the world at that.
Wait, who grew larger than their contractors now?
Those companies have a *lot* of employees, but when most of your employees make less than $300 a month that doesn't really make you "larger". In fact, that's kind of the point of why their contractors contract them, to outsource labor that would practically be indentured service in the parent company's home country...
Yeah, LG included this in their 2011 high end TVs, and I believe they are expanding to even more models this year.
It's pretty cool for apps designed for it (like the Wii or iPad interface is great for apps designed for them) but because of that, it does require rethinking UIs to really take advantage of it (which is ok for apps built to run on the TV itself, but not much of an option for separate boxes like DVRs, BD players, game consoles, etc)
damned fat figners!
Another reason not to get a tablet ;)
Anyway, I generally agree tablets are not the answer (though that's about it with your post - most tablets are not tied to a phone contract and never were; and if you are happy with a $200 TV and $15 remote you are not a consumer in the target market anyway).
I have an iPad and a Harmony remote (which was a lot more than $15, I'll admit). If I wanted to I could get the Harmony iPad app and receiver and it would in theory do everything my remote can and more. The problem is, there are a handful things I use my remote for 90% of the time (set input, volume +/-, mute, pause/play and arrows/select are the vast majority). And a small remote with dedicated buttons that fits ergonomically in one hand does those things SO much faster and more easily than an annoying touchscreen tablet ever will.
Quote from the Foxconn CEO: “Hon Hai has a workforce of over one million worldwide and as human beings are also animals, to manage one million animals gives me a headache.”
So - my first thought was, "it couldn't have been that bad, I'm sure there was some confusion in the translations".
And then he LITERALLY invited the director to the Taipei Zoo to "share his experience with the audience on how to manage different animals according to their individual temperaments."
So yes, Foxconn may really be as bad as they seem.
WHOOOSH! (that was the sound of a nuclear powered refrigerator flying over someone's head)
At the same time, there *are* in fact real pedophiles, scammers, and other criminals that use Facebook, in which case it's probably not really productive (or even legal) to notify a suspect they are investigating.
Not that I think law enforcement should be able to violate someone's privacy at all without a warrant, just that in the end, as ignorant and misguided as they may sometimes be, it doesn't help being 100% cynical - their general goal is to catch people breaking the law.
Maybe start with a few easier problems to prove you have the capacity to tackle the harder ones? So you can "build up" some credibility and "tenure" (or whatever you want to call it... "publish buffer"?).
Again it's not *that* different as in industry - most investors won't just randomly give a pile of money to unproven people who want to start up a company, but if you have succeeded before they will flock to you. At the very least, a solid proposal explaining *why* you think you know something that all the "leading experts" don't would seem reasonable.
If you do solve the problem, you are pretty much set for life academically, but if after 5+ years you didn't get anywhere, well, maybe your employer is justified in encouraging your to look elsewhere for employment, after all you just cost them a bunch of money that they could have given to someone else. Academia seems like such a risk-averse field sometimes...
I have always heard that (as well as stories of profs dumping their lectures on TAs, etc), but in the end that wasn't the experience I had. A lot of it depends on the priorities of the University/department when recruiting their faculty...
But at the same time, if a computer scientist paid to produce results hasn't come up with anything but less accurate image features and less effective scheduling algorithms for the last three years, maybe the *should* be fired or switch to a pure teaching position.
There are plenty of other young, motivated new PhDs ready to take their place if given the opportunity. At some level it seems like it wouldn't hurt to treat academia a bit more like most other professions. Of course, everyone can have a dry spell/bad luck, so maybe some system of limited time tenure based on past productivity?
It would help if you would clarify what part is inaccurate. I will admit that I only have entry level bio under my belt, but I do think I recall that DNA and RNA were responsible for the formation of basically everything in a cell. Wikipedia doesnt seem to disagree.
Ok... one extended (sort of) analogy - being on /. you probably know about neural networks more than neuroanatomy - but there are plenty of similarities. It wouldn't be that hard to define the blueprints to construct a simple fully connected neural network. In fact, in theory it could even be as simple as "create this basic structure" and that structure also happened to have the property of connecting itself with other similar structures (possibly randomly - though little about biochemistry is really *random*, there are a reason polymers polymerize).
But then you provide inputs to that structure and a feedback loop starts modifying it, eventually to the point that it's largely determined by inputs that are not defined by the blueprints at all (a few examples: maybe they are defined by the circadian day/night cycle of the sun, audio cues, or a billion other inputs you take for granted). So now take that and apply it to the insane complexity of the brain and all of the neurons that grow and form (or cut) their vast numbers of connections to each other - in the end *very* little of it was really coded by DNA. And that's just a fairly simple example - doesn't even go into how neurons actually differentiate, grow to find/establish their initial axonal connections, etc.
I'm not saying the steps to get from DNA to a fully formed organism isn't amazingly complex, just that comparing DNA to a blueprint is really not a good analogy.
Actually - if I were to recommend one pop-sci book on the human genome (not as much neurobio, but that's a bit harder field to relate to) it would be Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters by Matt Ridley.
[Oh, and as far as your complexity comments... others have done a better job than I could of refuting that fairly standard creationist argument if you care to look them up...]
Yup. And it wasn't even created as an attack ad, it was created as a joke for an internal Microsoft conference last summer. I guess someone at MS thought it was funny enough that they posted it on YouTube...
No, I think its plenty complex to consider that the smallest virus genome contains around 3500 base pairs, which gives 2^3500 different combinatory possibilities of base pairs. For those who like things in nice, whole numbers, thats one out of 4.027 x 10^1053. I will spare you all the wall of text of actually trying to paste that number in here, but suffice it to say its a mind-bogglingly large number.
I think you need to understand statistics and biochemistry a bit better. You have just provided the chances of coming up with a single virus's code at random. Not only are there countless millions (billions?) of different viruses in the world, but due to the way transcription works there are many codons that result in the same transcribed amino acids, and a lot of those pairs do nothing at all (exons).
Now take the set of billions of viruses with thousands (at least) of ways to equivalently code them, and then let them recombine at the rate and quantities of large scale chemical reactions in a medium the size of the global oceans over billions of years. And now your number starts to look perfectly reasonable.
To put it another way, the chances of programming computers to randomly combine English words and come up with Hamlet is pretty low. The chances of those computers coming up with *any* intelligible paragraph is pretty much a given (it's already been done many times).
You can talk about how complicated the vertebrate nervous system is, but recall that all of the information behind it is in those base pairs, and that the genome is far more complicated. Consider the complexity of the nervous system as a mere subset of the genome, if you will.
Sigh, that's such an inaccurate statement and oversimplification I wouldn't even know where to begin... go take graduate classes in developmental bio, developmental neurobio, and neuroanatomy, come back and we can start talking about it :)
Why would they want to do that? ;)
If you think Deus Ex Machina is the "simple explanation", pretty much everything can be answered by it. Why bother with science at all?
And what's wrong with nihilism? Existential nihilism just posits there is no inherent meaning to life. It's really just a semantic difference from atheism. It's not the same thing as moral nihilism, doesn't have to imply defeatism, and either way just because the universe didn't give us a purpose and morals, doesn't mean we can't create our own, that's the cool thing about sentience and free will.
Of course there is difference, but it's not all that big. You want a *big* difference, compare a bacterium and a human... that's a *lot* bigger than the difference between a nucelotide and a nucleic acid.
I think you vastly underestimate the complexity or RNA (which was most likely the first "genetic material"). Stick a bunch of nucleotides together with a simple sugar and a phosphate group and you're done. Then repeat for a billion years and eventually you get a combination that folds into the correct tertiary structure to transcribe other RNA, etc.
If you want complexity try to understand how the vertebrate nervous system evolved. Basic biochemistry is pretty trivial stuff in comparison.