I wish they would list battery life under "Heavy Use".
I remember reading a Netbook review where it pointed out how bogus the 10 hour claims are.
This is a pet peeve of mine. Claims of battery life have been steadily improving over the years, but in real life, in a laptop that's more than a few weeks old, the 'battery low' warning appears within an hour, 90 minutes maybe. According to the specs, the battery should last an entire trans-atlantic flight, but in reality it's low before you reach the airport. I've been disappointed so many times that I've given up on laptops altogether.
If that country won't take responsibility for the poisons they export to us, why are we dealing with them?
Because it's cheap.
Citation needed.
I know cadmium is very commonly used in plastics because of the bright and weather resistant colors that can be made with it, not because it's cheap. Bright yellow, red or orange plastic items that have to spend a lot of time outdoors without fading are often colored with cadmium. Plastic beer crates for example, or company logos.
Now it seems obvious that it's less suitable for children's toys, because kids of a certain age tend to put everything in their mouth, but remember that scandal a couple of years ago when lead based paint was used in children's toys manufactured in China? Everyone seems to have conveniently forgotten that the problem then wasn't in China, but in the specifications sent to them by the American company that had the toys made. I wouldn't be surprised if the same thing happened again.
It is terrible that someone would judge others by something as simple as an email address. Yet we all do it. *@aol.com instantly kicks in my "dumbass...." reflex, and I'm sure it does for most other nerds. Worse yet, can you image applying for an IT job with an aol email account? Right or wrong, it would be looked down on.
I don't see why the ISP or webmail provider would make a difference. Maybe AOL had the best offer in that person's area?
I remember a professor in college telling the class he had no intention of reading email from someone named darklordz777@example.com or hotchick1985@hotmail.com, I can sort of see that. (though, his list of excuses not to read mail was pretty comprehensive)
As for Autism, it's not ideal and can cause a lot of problems for people but it can also bring some big pluses too. Do we really all want to be clones? looking the way celeb culture says we should and having perfect personalities? Hell no! Rejoice in the difference.
Enlighten me, please explain what the pluses are of this severe disability.
Would you say the same about rheumatism, heart failure, emphysema, Parkinson or any other disability? I think it's probably best to let patients or their caregivers decide whether their condition is worth treating.
And 1400 years ago, the Muslim world was a shining beacon of science and philosophy. For example, Muhammad ibn Musa al-Kwarizmi, one of the founders of algebra, was a Persian who lived circa AD 800. In the 1200s, Latin translations of his book "Kitab al-Jabr wa-l-Muqabala" introduced the foundations of math as we know it to the Europeans. Up until that point, they were still using Roman numerals, with no concept of zero or decimals.
So basically, I would love it if the Muslim world went back to living the Qur'an like they did 1400 years ago - they'd probably be even more civilized than we are.
As it is, they stand as a stark example of what happens when fundamentalism and anti-intellectualism control a nation for extended periods of time. Sure, Obama isn't the greatest - but electing Palin as VP would have led us even further down that road.
It makes as much sense judging a civilization by what they were 1000 years ago as by judging them by what they might be 1000 years from now.
But if you insist on mentioning it; Persian civilization existed a thousand years before the birth of Mohammed; it wasn't Islam that made their most recent golden age possible. And don't forget that the golden age of Islam wasn't a case of bringing civilization to an empty desert, but brutal conquest of some of the most advanced civilizations of the time: Persia, Christian Egypt, the Greek and Christian eastern Mediterranean, North Africa and Spain.
In short, I don't believe people then were much different from the way they are now, the balance of power was just different.
Ironically, they are still angry about the response to these Muslim conquests of what was then the vast majority of the Christian world: the crusades.
> How does a country recover from such a tremendous brain drain
It's not correct to call that a brain drain from Ethiopia if that country doesn't build any brains itself. These brains are build by the US in the US. They are drained from nowhere.
If certain countries, especially muslim one's, would leave behind their cultural backwardness (trying to violently live Qur'an like 1400 years ago - stupid backwardness !) instead of killing christians or other other-faith-people, students would have real incentives to return to such countries. So these countries get what they act.
Oh yeah, I agree completely. Chances are such a small singularity would pass through all other matter and not touch anything.
But on the outside chance that it did touch something and start growing, eventually consuming the earth, it would pretty much stop there. There's simply no other mass to pull in that isn't in a stable orbit.
disclaimer: I am not a physiscist.
Touching matter is not enough, a black hole with such a tiny mass would have an event horizon that you'd consider well below the surface. They actually build particle accelerators to get collisions that close. Protons and neutrons in an atom's nucleus are much further apart than that.
I reckon a microscopic black hole, if it didn't evaporate, the following would happen: Since it's made of an atom's nucleus, it has a positive charge. It would just get some orbiting electrons and sit there, indistinguishable from an atom of the same mass.
So, the chances depend on how long such a relatively stationary (that is, oscillating in the earth, effectively) black hole would take to evaporate before it actually managed to consume much mass - which does involve it coming fairly close to matter, in itself no mean feat - but the two numbers you quote aren't enough to do that calculation, I think.
I am not a physiscist, but...
I argued here that it doesn't seem likely to me that these microscopic black holes are capable of consuming mass. I hope someone smarter and better educated than me can set me straight and explain why I really should be scared.
If you make a tiny black hole you start a race between evaporation and accretion. The black hole may well evaporate before it collects enough mass to be stable, but it is difficult to be completely sure about this. In theory the black hole can start from the mass of an atom and increase in mass to the mass of the Earth (plus us of course).
I am not a physiscist, but...
The gravitational pull of a body with the mass of a sub atomic particle is not very great. It won't be sucking matter towards itself like a gravitational vacuum cleaner. Another particle would have to get extremely close to pass the event horizon:
According to google, the event horizon is 2GM/c^2:
So for a black hole with the mass of a proton:
(2 x 6.7 e -11 * 1.7 e -27) / (3.0 e+8 ** 2) = 2.5e-54 meter. That distance is about 2.1e-39 times smaller than the radius of the proton, or some 1/7500th of the planck length.
The escape velocity according to google is: v = sqrt(2GM/r)
So with the proton mass black hole and at a distance of one proton radius, that would be about:
sqrt((2 * 6.7e-11 * 1.7e-27) / 1.2e-15) = 1.4e-11 m/s
Even something dead and buried moves faster than that due to thermal motion.
If my thinking is correct, I don't see how a microscopic black hole would be capable of any accretion. I haven't dabbled in science in many many years, so what I wrote above is probably mostly wrong, but I doubt it's so wrong that these microscopic black holes actually do function as an all devouring inescapable cosmic vacuum cleaner.
Of course, this is relevant because in the event of an LHC-created black hole destroying the planet, we will of course launch into space a "lifeboat" containing a judge, defense and plaintiff lawyers, Rusty the Bailiff to keep everyone in line, and one token normal person to be the plaintiff. Justice will be served no matter what the damage to the planet is.
Don't forget the scientist. There's no case if the suspect is dead.
How much would they cost the _employee_ each year instead though?
In the dot com recession, the boss justified saving on perks in terms average annual salaries. Something vaguely along these lines (don't remember the exact figures): - Leased art off the walls in all the offices: 1 job saved - Cancel coffee machine contracts: 0.5 jobs saved - Pick up after ourselves a bit more and have the cleaners come 3 rather than 5 nights a week: 0.5 jobs saved
The gist of it was that a list of seemingly small and petty savings that everybody thought would add up to peanuts actually did as much towards balancing the budget as laying off two people. When you look at it that way, free coffee seems less important, even if it's not _your_ job that's on the line.
Hmm, if your boss is willing to provide free power and tap water, employees could pool together to buy a coffee maker and some coffee. Should even taste better than that brown goo the coffee robot pees into our cups.
If you venture out from under the bridge, you'll find that most other people you share the planet with are naturally social beings.
By all means, return your unused assets to the department. Around here a contemporary laptop is like gold and could probably be bartered for sexual favors.
Bah, why so rude?
I'm a family man, not a kid, and I have a life outside of work. A life that company meetings eat into, so I'd prefer them to get down to business rather than pad them out with hours of activities aimed at the 20 - 30 yr old single male demographic.
Some company perks that I just don't want and will never use: - I don't want a company celphone. I have my own phone, I don't want to have to keep track of business and private calls, I don't want my boss to get a list of all the calls I make in a month, and I don't want to have to carry around two phones. The company phone is lying in the closet, unused, the subscription fee is being paid for nothing. - I don't want a company laptop. I don't need one for my work (customers *naturally* never allow machines on their network that they didn't provide themselves). For private use, it's useless. It does not have the specs I would have chosen for my own laptop, and I'm not free to modify it or change the software on it. It's been lying in the closet, unused. It's worse than useless, as I can't justify buying one for myself as long as I "have a perfectly ok laptop gathering dust in the closet". - Company presentations preceeded by Paintball or Casino: please keep it serious and treat me like an adult. I don't come to the office to play games with colleagues, just give the presentation. - Free coffee: I don't care. It's nice if it's there, but it's such a minor issue that if they want to save the shockingly huge amount of money that goes into rent and support of these machines, by all means do so, I'm not going to work less hard if I have to buy my own drinks.
From your style and demeanor I deduce that you are Dutch, am I right? You may kiss my Germanic bottom, rude and presumptuous xenophobe.
I'm trying to find out how long it would take for these turbines to pay for themselves without subsidies; not just counting production costs, but also considering the observation that even on these windswept coastal plains, half of them seem to be shut down or out of service at any time.
I'm also curious as to how cost effective solar cells would be without subsidies, in this climate where the sun shines only about 10% of the year.
> The carbon footprint of making one 60m high wind turbine is approximately the same as the carbon footprint said wind turbine will save in fossil fuel in its lifetime.
No. Not even close. Orders of magnitude wrong.
Can you provide a link? There are a lot of those very large windmills here, but at any one time it looks like about half of them are standing still (damaged? maintenance?) I can't seem to find any unbiased figures. Google seems to favor sites by either Al Gore fans or GW-hoax believers.
I'm also interested to know how long it would take for all these solar cells on roofs to pay for themselves, given that this climate sees just over 30 sunny days a year with an average of about 1.5 hours of sun a day in the winter when most energy is needed.
Indeed it is. Consumer hardware is so cheap, it's just easier to have more than one machine if you want more than one OS. I have different hardware requirements for the different OS-es anyway: my linux box is always on, so it needs to have a low power usage, quiet as a mouse, dual ethernet. No need for 3D graphics or lots of memory or a super fast CPU. How about an atom based small form factor thingie for about $250 ? Seriously, watching a kernel recompile while you wait, is that worth a few thousand extra? I expect it should be good for about 3 years, so the write-off is minimal.
If I wanted to own a mac, it would definitely be a laptop, and for windows I want it to run my windows software (mostly games) properly, so the requirements are again totally different.
Apophis isn't even a world disaster level event. It's not large enough.
If it crashes in your back yard, sure the effects will be mostly local, but imagine it splashing into the north Atlantic, the Indian ocean or in the middle of the pacific. Hundreds of millions of people would then be exposed to tsunamis.
Ok, you're right. I'd apologise, but it's getting late:)
Slightly off topic: In your settings you can check 'do not show scores', and you can also opt out of moderating. I'm not against moderation, but the system with scores just turns a forum into a video game, so it's turned off for me.
I'm not entirely sure what the poster's point was in comparing somewhat inflated/rounded-up numbers of US college graduates with other global regions, and how that makes them dime-a-dozen or whatever, but the actual percentages sourced appear to be closer than they were editorialized to be, in any event.
The point was showing google did not agree with the O.P's following quote:
Could it be that engineering degrees are a dime-a-dozen in oil-rich countries where middle-eastern terrorists usually originate? How many people in these countries don't have engineering degrees?
And I don't like quoting numbers to several figures accurately, it makes you sound like data from Star trek.
Captain, I estimate a 59.27% chance of someone disagreeing with this.
Slashdot Mirror
I wish they would list battery life under "Heavy Use".
I remember reading a Netbook review where it pointed out how bogus the 10 hour claims are.
This is a pet peeve of mine. Claims of battery life have been steadily improving over the years, but in real life, in a laptop that's more than a few weeks old, the 'battery low' warning appears within an hour, 90 minutes maybe. According to the specs, the battery should last an entire trans-atlantic flight, but in reality it's low before you reach the airport. I've been disappointed so many times that I've given up on laptops altogether.
If that country won't take responsibility for the poisons they export to us, why are we dealing with them?
Because it's cheap.
Citation needed.
I know cadmium is very commonly used in plastics because of the bright and weather resistant colors that can be made with it, not because it's cheap. Bright yellow, red or orange plastic items that have to spend a lot of time outdoors without fading are often colored with cadmium. Plastic beer crates for example, or company logos.
Now it seems obvious that it's less suitable for children's toys, because kids of a certain age tend to put everything in their mouth, but remember that scandal a couple of years ago when lead based paint was used in children's toys manufactured in China? Everyone seems to have conveniently forgotten that the problem then wasn't in China, but in the specifications sent to them by the American company that had the toys made. I wouldn't be surprised if the same thing happened again.
I get the feeling that you're using the tag autism where you really mean 'nerd'.
It is terrible that someone would judge others by something as simple as an email address. Yet we all do it. *@aol.com instantly kicks in my "dumbass...." reflex, and I'm sure it does for most other nerds. Worse yet, can you image applying for an IT job with an aol email account? Right or wrong, it would be looked down on.
I don't see why the ISP or webmail provider would make a difference. Maybe AOL had the best offer in that person's area?
I remember a professor in college telling the class he had no intention of reading email from someone named darklordz777@example.com or hotchick1985@hotmail.com, I can sort of see that. (though, his list of excuses not to read mail was pretty comprehensive)
As for Autism, it's not ideal and can cause a lot of problems for people but it can also bring some big pluses too. Do we really all want to be clones? looking the way celeb culture says we should and having perfect personalities? Hell no! Rejoice in the difference.
Enlighten me, please explain what the pluses are of this severe disability.
Would you say the same about rheumatism, heart failure, emphysema, Parkinson or any other disability? I think it's probably best to let patients or their caregivers decide whether their condition is worth treating.
And 1400 years ago, the Muslim world was a shining beacon of science and philosophy. For example, Muhammad ibn Musa al-Kwarizmi, one of the founders of algebra, was a Persian who lived circa AD 800. In the 1200s, Latin translations of his book "Kitab al-Jabr wa-l-Muqabala" introduced the foundations of math as we know it to the Europeans. Up until that point, they were still using Roman numerals, with no concept of zero or decimals.
So basically, I would love it if the Muslim world went back to living the Qur'an like they did 1400 years ago - they'd probably be even more civilized than we are.
As it is, they stand as a stark example of what happens when fundamentalism and anti-intellectualism control a nation for extended periods of time. Sure, Obama isn't the greatest - but electing Palin as VP would have led us even further down that road.
It makes as much sense judging a civilization by what they were 1000 years ago as by judging them by what they might be 1000 years from now.
But if you insist on mentioning it; Persian civilization existed a thousand years before the birth of Mohammed; it wasn't Islam that made their most recent golden age possible. And don't forget that the golden age of Islam wasn't a case of bringing civilization to an empty desert, but brutal conquest of some of the most advanced civilizations of the time: Persia, Christian Egypt, the Greek and Christian eastern Mediterranean, North Africa and Spain.
In short, I don't believe people then were much different from the way they are now, the balance of power was just different.
Ironically, they are still angry about the response to these Muslim conquests of what was then the vast majority of the Christian world: the crusades.
> How does a country recover from such a tremendous brain drain
It's not correct to call that a brain drain from Ethiopia if that country doesn't build any brains itself. These brains are build by the US in the US. They are drained from nowhere.
If certain countries, especially muslim one's, would leave behind their cultural backwardness (trying to violently live Qur'an like 1400 years ago - stupid backwardness !) instead of killing christians or other other-faith-people, students would have real incentives to return to such countries.
So these countries get what they act.
Ethiopia is a mostly christian country though
I really want to avoid Apple because they suck far harder than Google but it looks like Google is fast catching up.
Haha, you dissed apple. You're gonna get it now!
Oh yeah, I agree completely. Chances are such a small singularity would pass through all other matter and not touch anything.
But on the outside chance that it did touch something and start growing, eventually consuming the earth, it would pretty much stop there. There's simply no other mass to pull in that isn't in a stable orbit.
disclaimer: I am not a physiscist.
Touching matter is not enough, a black hole with such a tiny mass would have an event horizon that you'd consider well below the surface. They actually build particle accelerators to get collisions that close. Protons and neutrons in an atom's nucleus are much further apart than that.
I reckon a microscopic black hole, if it didn't evaporate, the following would happen: Since it's made of an atom's nucleus, it has a positive charge. It would just get some orbiting electrons and sit there, indistinguishable from an atom of the same mass.
So, the chances depend on how long such a relatively stationary (that is, oscillating in the earth, effectively) black hole would take to evaporate before it actually managed to consume much mass - which does involve it coming fairly close to matter, in itself no mean feat - but the two numbers you quote aren't enough to do that calculation, I think.
I am not a physiscist, but...
I argued here that it doesn't seem likely to me that these microscopic black holes are capable of consuming mass. I hope someone smarter and better educated than me can set me straight and explain why I really should be scared.
If you make a tiny black hole you start a race between evaporation and accretion. The black hole may well evaporate before it collects enough mass to be stable, but it is difficult to be completely sure about this. In theory the black hole can start from the mass of an atom and increase in mass to the mass of the Earth (plus us of course).
I am not a physiscist, but...
The gravitational pull of a body with the mass of a sub atomic particle is not very great. It won't be sucking matter towards itself like a gravitational vacuum cleaner. Another particle would have to get extremely close to pass the event horizon:
According to google, the event horizon is 2GM/c^2:
So for a black hole with the mass of a proton:
(2 x 6.7 e -11 * 1.7 e -27) / (3.0 e+8 ** 2) = 2.5e-54 meter. That distance is about 2.1e-39 times smaller than the radius of the proton, or some 1/7500th of the planck length.
The escape velocity according to google is:
v = sqrt(2GM/r)
So with the proton mass black hole and at a distance of one proton radius, that would be about:
sqrt((2 * 6.7e-11 * 1.7e-27) / 1.2e-15) = 1.4e-11 m/s
Even something dead and buried moves faster than that due to thermal motion.
If my thinking is correct, I don't see how a microscopic black hole would be capable of any accretion. I haven't dabbled in science in many many years, so what I wrote above is probably mostly wrong, but I doubt it's so wrong that these microscopic black holes actually do function as an all devouring inescapable cosmic vacuum cleaner.
Of course, this is relevant because in the event of an LHC-created black hole destroying the planet, we will of course launch into space a "lifeboat" containing a judge, defense and plaintiff lawyers, Rusty the Bailiff to keep everyone in line, and one token normal person to be the plaintiff. Justice will be served no matter what the damage to the planet is.
Don't forget the scientist. There's no case if the suspect is dead.
How much would they cost the _employee_ each year instead though?
In the dot com recession, the boss justified saving on perks in terms average annual salaries. Something vaguely along these lines (don't remember the exact figures):
- Leased art off the walls in all the offices: 1 job saved
- Cancel coffee machine contracts: 0.5 jobs saved
- Pick up after ourselves a bit more and have the cleaners come 3 rather than 5 nights a week: 0.5 jobs saved
The gist of it was that a list of seemingly small and petty savings that everybody thought would add up to peanuts actually did as much towards balancing the budget as laying off two people. When you look at it that way, free coffee seems less important, even if it's not _your_ job that's on the line.
Hmm, if your boss is willing to provide free power and tap water, employees could pool together to buy a coffee maker and some coffee. Should even taste better than that brown goo the coffee robot pees into our cups.
If you venture out from under the bridge, you'll find that most other people you share the planet with are naturally social beings.
By all means, return your unused assets to the department. Around here a contemporary laptop is like gold and could probably be bartered for sexual favors.
Bah, why so rude?
I'm a family man, not a kid, and I have a life outside of work. A life that company meetings eat into, so I'd prefer them to get down to business rather than pad them out with hours of activities aimed at the 20 - 30 yr old single male demographic.
I used to agree with you but changed my mind when I was told how much these machines cost the employer per year.
Some company perks that I just don't want and will never use:
- I don't want a company celphone. I have my own phone, I don't want to have to keep track of business and private calls, I don't want my boss to get a list of all the calls I make in a month, and I don't want to have to carry around two phones. The company phone is lying in the closet, unused, the subscription fee is being paid for nothing.
- I don't want a company laptop. I don't need one for my work (customers *naturally* never allow machines on their network that they didn't provide themselves). For private use, it's useless. It does not have the specs I would have chosen for my own laptop, and I'm not free to modify it or change the software on it. It's been lying in the closet, unused. It's worse than useless, as I can't justify buying one for myself as long as I "have a perfectly ok laptop gathering dust in the closet".
- Company presentations preceeded by Paintball or Casino: please keep it serious and treat me like an adult. I don't come to the office to play games with colleagues, just give the presentation.
- Free coffee: I don't care. It's nice if it's there, but it's such a minor issue that if they want to save the shockingly huge amount of money that goes into rent and support of these machines, by all means do so, I'm not going to work less hard if I have to buy my own drinks.
From your style and demeanor I deduce that you are Dutch, am I right? You may kiss my Germanic bottom, rude and presumptuous xenophobe.
I'm trying to find out how long it would take for these turbines to pay for themselves without subsidies; not just counting production costs, but also considering the observation that even on these windswept coastal plains, half of them seem to be shut down or out of service at any time.
I'm also curious as to how cost effective solar cells would be without subsidies, in this climate where the sun shines only about 10% of the year.
Re-reading my post, I can see it was phrased confusingly. With "GW-hoax believers" I meant people who believe GW is a hoax.
I tried to google for cold hard figures about the efficiency of wind turbines or solar cells but all I could find were political sites.
> The carbon footprint of making one 60m high wind turbine is approximately the same as the carbon footprint said wind turbine will save in fossil fuel in its lifetime.
No. Not even close. Orders of magnitude wrong.
Can you provide a link? There are a lot of those very large windmills here, but at any one time it looks like about half of them are standing still (damaged? maintenance?) I can't seem to find any unbiased figures. Google seems to favor sites by either Al Gore fans or GW-hoax believers.
I'm also interested to know how long it would take for all these solar cells on roofs to pay for themselves, given that this climate sees just over 30 sunny days a year with an average of about 1.5 hours of sun a day in the winter when most energy is needed.
Dual booting is just so 90s.
Indeed it is. Consumer hardware is so cheap, it's just easier to have more than one machine if you want more than one OS. I have different hardware requirements for the different OS-es anyway: my linux box is always on, so it needs to have a low power usage, quiet as a mouse, dual ethernet. No need for 3D graphics or lots of memory or a super fast CPU. How about an atom based small form factor thingie for about $250 ? Seriously, watching a kernel recompile while you wait, is that worth a few thousand extra? I expect it should be good for about 3 years, so the write-off is minimal.
If I wanted to own a mac, it would definitely be a laptop, and for windows I want it to run my windows software (mostly games) properly, so the requirements are again totally different.
Apophis isn't even a world disaster level event. It's not large enough.
If it crashes in your back yard, sure the effects will be mostly local, but imagine it splashing into the north Atlantic, the Indian ocean or in the middle of the pacific. Hundreds of millions of people would then be exposed to tsunamis.
Ok, you're right. I'd apologise, but it's getting late :)
Slightly off topic:
In your settings you can check 'do not show scores', and you can also opt out of moderating. I'm not against moderation, but the system with scores just turns a forum into a video game, so it's turned off for me.
I'm not entirely sure what the poster's point was in comparing somewhat inflated/rounded-up numbers of US college graduates with other global regions, and how that makes them dime-a-dozen or whatever, but the actual percentages sourced appear to be closer than they were editorialized to be, in any event.
The point was showing google did not agree with the O.P's following quote:
Could it be that engineering degrees are a dime-a-dozen in oil-rich countries where middle-eastern terrorists usually originate? How many people in these countries don't have engineering degrees?
And I don't like quoting numbers to several figures accurately, it makes you sound like data from Star trek.
Captain, I estimate a 59.27% chance of someone disagreeing with this.
Funny!
Lots of people (especially engineering types and other nerds) go through an Ayn Rand stage in early adulthood. Most of them get over it, though.
Easily the most ridiculous author in post war literature. "Selfishness is the only virtue" - the philosophy of a 6 year old.