(If the link breaks, the book is Merriam-Webster's dictionary of English usage)
The link is not broken, and here are two snippets that jumped right out at me:
"But since part of the criticism seems to be based on the erroneous notion that that the verb is derived from the noun based on functional shift, we must first pursue a little "
and
"But impact was a verb in English before it was a noun."
and
"This is not a case of a verb derived from an earlier noun."
In summary: While impact as a verb has been around for a long time, it was not until the '80's that it began to be used in business and political contexts as a buzzword substitute for 'affect'.
To the extent that the link supports that view (m-w says you can avoid impact(v) if you like, but does not suggest it's in any way incorrect, and has numerous examples from the 70s), it's talking about the figurative uses of the verb. Whereas the usage in question here is the literal use of the verb, and is 100% irrefutably correct usage since 1601.
So if that usage "sounds wrong", I think the advice of Meriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage is to get over yourself and your incorrect notions.
Oil producers have no motivation to lie about oil reserves. They need the price to rise as the supply falls so that they maximize their profits. This will inevitably lead to your Reality A, a slow increase in price as supply falls.
Yes, the need the price to rise (as it will naturally when the amount produced decreases, as has been happening already). But they need the price of oil to not rise so rapidly or for the supply to appear so ephemeral that everyone goes "oh shit!" and does everything possible to switch off of oil.
So the ideal situation for the oil producers is for the current supply of oil to appear strained, so prices increase, but for the long-term supply of oil to appear solid, so nobody panics and moves off of oil. To the extent that this doesn't match reality, there's your motivation to lie. The price of oil is largely determined by the futures market which tries to take into account the future supply, so if it was commonly known that oil was going to run out much sooner than expected, the price of oil today could shoot up past the point of pain.
Reality A: No withheld data. Data is disseminated with some initial shock that by 20xx we will have oil shortages. People get a chance to plan accordingly. Private business gets a chance to cash in on better alternatives and more efficient products marketed to the consumer. California starts to look a little less crazy. Gasoline and fuel slowly becomes more expensive over the years as production slows. People adjust.
Um, California has been looking a lot less crazy ever since gas hit $5.00/gal, even if it since dropped down to half that but still more than twice the cost it was in 2000. The government is funding alternative energy development and alternative energy is being developed and deployed. Fuel/energy efficiency has become a major selling point for a wide variety of consumer products, especially vehicles but also refrigerators, A/C units, even basic home construction in the form of extra insulation paying for itself.
Everyone knows the long term price of gas is only going to go up, up, up. I'm not sure exactly how much more planning you think people could do or would do. Is some hard date 20 years in the future going to make people more proactive today, if the simple cost of fuel and electricity isn't already doing it?
Reality B: It's 20xx, suddenly there's no oil. Mass panic.
I can't imagine a reality where the IEA "downplaying" peak oil today translates into an imminent oil shortage being completely unknown and unanticipated up to the very moment it happens "xx" years in the future. Over time, the simple realities of rising fuel costs will make it obvious that the oil party is going to end soon. If the IEA is still trying to downplay the risk, then they'll necessarily have to change their story.
Downplaying the danger to prevent a panic today is a strategy for today. The logic is probably based around not wanting to cause panic buying of gas, which would reduce the supply and increase the cost of fuel, which would further increase the costs of practically everything in our hobbling economy, which is the opposite of what we need.
I still think it's a bad move... Hiding data like this in general is a bad idea because when the truth is leaked it just further erodes any sort of trust in anything the government does say. When they finally announce that peak oil is really here and we all need to do something right now, everyone will just be saying "yeah right, what's their agenda this time?"
I know one plant was required to build a "slide for life" to get some of the fish out of the intake. Got the fish out all-right, but their fate wasn't much delayed. The birds on the other hand, thought it was the best fucking invention ever.
Another obvious case of the influence of the Big Bird lobby.
So much for the argument that nukes are better than oil because the fuel is less limited.
Um... recycling warheads doesn't do anything to the argument that there is more energy to be had from uranium stores than oil. It's just a convenient, already-processed source.
And how cheap is this ex-Soviet fuel, while it lasts? Shouldn't we count the cost to get them, which includes $TRILLIONS on the Cold War?
Uh, no, you should not attribute the cost of the Cold War to nuclear power as though the whole thing was just an elaborate scheme to acquire enriched uranium. The cost of the Cold War was to wage the Cold War. Now that it's over, Russia is willing to sell us warheads for recycling for relatively cheap, and that is the cost we pay.
I'm not sure, but I think it may be this drug which treats this form of leukemia. The treatment and the frequency of the type of leukemia both sound right. It was longer ago than I thought, though, since the drug was approved in 2001. That would have put me in college still while the study was going on, so yeah that's probably right.
I'm not joking guys. We really planned on making our money on patenting our business model.
What will happen if you can't patent a business model is the behemoths who were in the same niche but slightly less profitable will look over and see you making money hand over fist and decide to copy your homework. What can you do? You're tiny. You're toast! But wait! I have a business model patent!
Great. You have a patent. And when your lawyer slaps that patent down on the table in front of the army of lawyers representing the corporation who has copied your methods, that army of lawyers is going to laugh in unison, and slap down their seventy-five patents that you potentially violate. And then they're going to say, again in unison, "Well this looks like a simple matter -- we'll just cross-license each others patents, with compensation proportional to our relative patent holdings. Everyone wins!"
Fight it, and you're going after them for one patent violation and they're going after you for seventy five. Can your lawyer handle seventy five cases? They've got a team of lawyers on each one.
Agree, and well, you pay out the nose for the 'right' to use their patents and they can still eat your lunch by duplicating your methods.
This happens all the time in software and technology in general. Your patent is not going to save you from crap, unless you don't actually do or make anything yourself and thus can't possibly be the victim of this tactic -- i.e. you're a patent troll, only you aren't, so good fucking luck!
The study took place over 5 years ago, so I don't remember much of the details. I could find out the non-marketing name of the drug, but I should warn you that it was only for his particular type of leukemia, which is one of the least common ones (I think roughly 3000 people have it in the U.S.).
Oh and not that it matters, but it was my godfather, as in my dad's best friend and the guy that would have become my legal guardian in the event that I was orphaned.
I don't think we can use induction, in this case, to try to say that since we uracil can be formed with natural processes, all building blocks of life can be, too.
We can't use induction as proof, because this is not mathematics.
We can use induction to say that we can reasonably expect to discover that other building blocks can form from natural processes as well, though. At the very least, this reduces -- again -- the number of things we know can be formed naturally. The trend is pretty obvious, and if you're holding out on something coming up that can't be formed naturally then you'll probably be disappointed.
If you just assume then it is not science. Science is about testing your assumptions.
Not necessarily, but you should at least state them.
Newton's theory was based on the assumption that time is the same for all observers. An assumption so obvious that it took a brilliant man like him to even note that he was making it.
If you can think of how Newton could have plausibly tested this assumption, then bravo to you. If you think you can argue that Newton was not doing science by not testing this assumption, then LOL.
If it were, it would be deterministic, hence not NP.
Which assumes NP != P, which is unproven. We think they are non-deterministic, but they might not be.
But if I had to bet, I'd bet that NP != P. And I'd bet even more that the OP's bet is bollocks.:)
Though if they are right, and can somehow prove it, they should end up more than wealthy enough not to care about what anyone thought of them beforehand.:)
It's heading towards understanding the origins of life on earth and anywhere else it may have arisen or came from.
If you need an application to appreciate that, then we have very little in common, but uh it could help in our search for life on other planets, creating useful life-like things on earth, and hey why not some medical applications? Geeze who cares at this point? Not I. This is basic research of the most important kind. Who knows what could result?
Trying to run it in Linux. Think back to when you set up your system, I'm sure there's a good reason to have that WinXP partition there.
You did buy it, right?
Windows XP? No, I didn't, which is why I don't have that option for playing games.
Oh, you meant games. Yeah, well, I knew what I was getting myself into when I went Linux-only, so no I don't tend to buy many games. I will only if wine/cedega users report that the game works great (e.g. World of Warcraft), or they have a download-able demo I can test (a test which most games fail, though sometimes it's only because of the demo installer heh). If the demo does work, and I buy the game, but the full game won't work... well, guess I should have checked winehq more closely!
The only time I've really felt like this bit me was with Popcap games. The Peggle demo worked perfectly in Wine. So I bought the full version, which basically just means 'registering' the demo you already downloaded. Well it didn't work. Long story short, it requires you to have Internet Explorer running some funky ActiveX control while the demo-version of the game is also running. Ugh. The reason this ticked me off is because it's the first time that the only obstacle between me and playing a game was their method of letting me buy the game. Oh well. I consider that $10 to be a donation to the indie game developer scene, and the Peggle demos are still fun.:P
Comparing this game to NWN just seems off. NWN had a really lousy single player game, and the game essentially only succeeded because of the online multiplayer aspect.
More to the point, NWN was designed entirely around the multiplayer aspect, with the single-player campaign basically being a showcase for the game design tools and an obligatory device to get people to buy it who wouldn't want to play online. User-made adventures were fun to play with a friend, but what truly made the game awesome, and clearly where it was designed to shine, was when you had a group of friends and (at least) one of them was using the DM client.
NWN with a DM beats every other multiplayer computer RPG experience EVER.
However as a single player game, it suffered (and even the expansions where they did a much better job creating the single-player campaigns, the game was still not that great).
Dragon Age was designed around being a single player game. Trying to force in multiplayer would mean that the multiplayer was bad, or worse, that the single player game suffered.
If the side effects are more tolerable than the disease itself most people would opt to use the medicine. Waiting for perfect solutions has never really worked, especially for diseases that slowly rob you of any ability to manage your daily life.
Indeed. If and when it comes time to do trials in humans, they can probably expect to have volunteers lined up around the block. There are certain diseases where "we don't know if this is safe" is not that big a concern.
My godfather was in a study for an experimental treatment for a particular kind of leukemia. He was very close to entering the "acute" (as in acutely fucked) stage and the best matching marrow donor he'd found in years of searching would have left him with an under 10% chance of surviving the transplant if it came to that. He was sick and miserable thanks to his chemotherapy. So, what exactly did he have to lose? Not a whole hell of a lot. What was the outcome? The drug, as far as they could tell, cured him and everyone else in the study. All signs of leukemia vanished.
That's a long shot to happen in any particular case, but how many people who are facing nasty death if they don't try wouldn't be willing to take it?
On a related note, my graduate algorithms professor had a side gig of consulting for the medical industry. He related that he had worked on an algorithm for situations like this one, where as the study progresses and (assuming) the drug is showing signs of being effective you want to move people from the control group to the active group as quickly as possible while still maintaining the validity of the study. The algorithm was exponential in the size of the study, so study sizes or the ability to move people into the active group could be seriously constrained by available computing power. His optimizations (didn't change the big-O iirc) improved the performance and thus allowed larger study sizes and thus, as a result, could have literally saved lives.
Reversing this process is the very last resort your body does when literally nothing else is left to "digest".
Look, forget about the "metabolizing for energy" part. Because that happens, but it isn't why your body cuts back on your muscles. It cuts back on your muscles because muscles use a lot of energy just existing. It takes energy to sustain them, so when the famine time comes, your body is going to shed the excess muscle as an unnecessary source of energy consumption.
By the way, this actually happens. It's what has been observed in people who take in too few calories without exercise to maintain muscle mass (relative to taking in sufficient calories also without exercise, duh). So, you can call what your body actually does bullshit all day long. It won't care. Stop eating, and it's going to see your muscles as useless wastes and decide its better to burn them for energy.
My understanding is that the current flow does indeed reverse several times during a strike, that it's A/C and not D/C. Commentary?
Yes and not really, respectively. There are at least two transfers of charge, one in each direction, but they're by and large discreet events with current flowing one way. So, "alternating" in a sense, but each stroke is best understood as a DC event.
I'd be pretty pissed too that I was having material issues with my 40nm process that was affecting my customers in a significant way.
Oh but wait I'm sure it was AMD's executives that somehow made TSMC admit that they have still-unresolved problems even though they really don't.
How about take a good hard look at your company that's losing money out the ass and fire and all the moronic windbags in upper management who are too busy cutting insider trading deals to actually instill some fucking leadership in the company.
I hear ya there! I laughed my ass off when Hector the Sector Wrecker (as Motorola/Freescale folks call him) got fingered in the insider trading scandal. Maybe he'll be cooling his heels and get more comeuppance than he ever could just by being fired with a golden parachute. Oh well he already wasn't the CEO.
I believe global foundaries can do 40nm standard silicon either now or soon, so AMD should perphaps switch to there part owned foundary.
No, they can't. Global Foundries can do 45nm, and soon 32nm, but not 40. Also, Global Foundries uses SOI while TSMC is bulk.
I'm sure AMD will use GF eventually for their graphics chips, but for right now, I'm also sure it will take less time for TSMC to sort themselves out than it would to modify the design for a very different process.
Also, don't expect graphics by itself to make or break AMD. It helps being on top their, but it's a small portion of their overall revenue. To stay afloat, AMD has to compete with Intel and that's all there is to it.
Slashdot Mirror
But no matter how much I like apples, there's one price I will never pay for one, and that is two apples.
Well, obviously! But how about one and a half apples?
BSD fans want to legalize slavery and murder, and GPL fans want to set up communist dictatorships and destroy the world's economy.
Yeah, well my communist dictatorship would have slavery and murder. Also blackjack and hookers.
(If the link breaks, the book is Merriam-Webster's dictionary of English usage)
The link is not broken, and here are two snippets that jumped right out at me:
"But since part of the criticism seems to be based on the erroneous notion that that the verb is derived from the noun based on functional shift, we must first pursue a little "
and
"But impact was a verb in English before it was a noun."
and
"This is not a case of a verb derived from an earlier noun."
In summary:
While impact as a verb has been around for a long time, it was not until the '80's that it began to be used in business and political contexts as a buzzword substitute for 'affect'.
To the extent that the link supports that view (m-w says you can avoid impact(v) if you like, but does not suggest it's in any way incorrect, and has numerous examples from the 70s), it's talking about the figurative uses of the verb. Whereas the usage in question here is the literal use of the verb, and is 100% irrefutably correct usage since 1601.
So if that usage "sounds wrong", I think the advice of Meriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage is to get over yourself and your incorrect notions.
Oil producers have no motivation to lie about oil reserves. They need the price to rise as the supply falls so that they maximize their profits. This will inevitably lead to your Reality A, a slow increase in price as supply falls.
Yes, the need the price to rise (as it will naturally when the amount produced decreases, as has been happening already). But they need the price of oil to not rise so rapidly or for the supply to appear so ephemeral that everyone goes "oh shit!" and does everything possible to switch off of oil.
So the ideal situation for the oil producers is for the current supply of oil to appear strained, so prices increase, but for the long-term supply of oil to appear solid, so nobody panics and moves off of oil. To the extent that this doesn't match reality, there's your motivation to lie. The price of oil is largely determined by the futures market which tries to take into account the future supply, so if it was commonly known that oil was going to run out much sooner than expected, the price of oil today could shoot up past the point of pain.
Reality A: No withheld data. Data is disseminated with some initial shock that by 20xx we will have oil shortages. People get a chance to plan accordingly. Private business gets a chance to cash in on better alternatives and more efficient products marketed to the consumer. California starts to look a little less crazy. Gasoline and fuel slowly becomes more expensive over the years as production slows. People adjust.
Um, California has been looking a lot less crazy ever since gas hit $5.00/gal, even if it since dropped down to half that but still more than twice the cost it was in 2000. The government is funding alternative energy development and alternative energy is being developed and deployed. Fuel/energy efficiency has become a major selling point for a wide variety of consumer products, especially vehicles but also refrigerators, A/C units, even basic home construction in the form of extra insulation paying for itself.
Everyone knows the long term price of gas is only going to go up, up, up. I'm not sure exactly how much more planning you think people could do or would do. Is some hard date 20 years in the future going to make people more proactive today, if the simple cost of fuel and electricity isn't already doing it?
Reality B: It's 20xx, suddenly there's no oil. Mass panic.
I can't imagine a reality where the IEA "downplaying" peak oil today translates into an imminent oil shortage being completely unknown and unanticipated up to the very moment it happens "xx" years in the future. Over time, the simple realities of rising fuel costs will make it obvious that the oil party is going to end soon. If the IEA is still trying to downplay the risk, then they'll necessarily have to change their story.
Downplaying the danger to prevent a panic today is a strategy for today. The logic is probably based around not wanting to cause panic buying of gas, which would reduce the supply and increase the cost of fuel, which would further increase the costs of practically everything in our hobbling economy, which is the opposite of what we need.
I still think it's a bad move... Hiding data like this in general is a bad idea because when the truth is leaked it just further erodes any sort of trust in anything the government does say. When they finally announce that peak oil is really here and we all need to do something right now, everyone will just be saying "yeah right, what's their agenda this time?"
I know one plant was required to build a "slide for life" to get some of the fish out of the intake. Got the fish out all-right, but their fate wasn't much delayed. The birds on the other hand, thought it was the best fucking invention ever.
Another obvious case of the influence of the Big Bird lobby.
So much for the argument that nukes are better than oil because the fuel is less limited.
Um... recycling warheads doesn't do anything to the argument that there is more energy to be had from uranium stores than oil. It's just a convenient, already-processed source.
And how cheap is this ex-Soviet fuel, while it lasts? Shouldn't we count the cost to get them, which includes $TRILLIONS on the Cold War?
Uh, no, you should not attribute the cost of the Cold War to nuclear power as though the whole thing was just an elaborate scheme to acquire enriched uranium. The cost of the Cold War was to wage the Cold War. Now that it's over, Russia is willing to sell us warheads for recycling for relatively cheap, and that is the cost we pay.
Lawmakers and people don't know shit about science and technology. There is no absolute speed or stationary point.
But there are relative speeds, which is why your vehicle's speed is always considered to be relative to the surface of the earth.
Lawmakers may not know shit, but you know just enough to fail to notice the blindingly obvious.
Hey, to be fair, it was kdawson who added the part which basically says "By the way, this was no big deal".
I'm not sure, but I think it may be this drug which treats this form of leukemia. The treatment and the frequency of the type of leukemia both sound right. It was longer ago than I thought, though, since the drug was approved in 2001. That would have put me in college still while the study was going on, so yeah that's probably right.
I'm not joking guys. We really planned on making our money on patenting our business model.
What will happen if you can't patent a business model is the behemoths who were in the same niche but slightly less profitable will look over and see you making money hand over fist and decide to copy your homework. What can you do? You're tiny. You're toast! But wait! I have a business model patent!
Great. You have a patent. And when your lawyer slaps that patent down on the table in front of the army of lawyers representing the corporation who has copied your methods, that army of lawyers is going to laugh in unison, and slap down their seventy-five patents that you potentially violate. And then they're going to say, again in unison, "Well this looks like a simple matter -- we'll just cross-license each others patents, with compensation proportional to our relative patent holdings. Everyone wins!"
Fight it, and you're going after them for one patent violation and they're going after you for seventy five. Can your lawyer handle seventy five cases? They've got a team of lawyers on each one.
Agree, and well, you pay out the nose for the 'right' to use their patents and they can still eat your lunch by duplicating your methods.
This happens all the time in software and technology in general. Your patent is not going to save you from crap, unless you don't actually do or make anything yourself and thus can't possibly be the victim of this tactic -- i.e. you're a patent troll, only you aren't, so good fucking luck!
The study took place over 5 years ago, so I don't remember much of the details. I could find out the non-marketing name of the drug, but I should warn you that it was only for his particular type of leukemia, which is one of the least common ones (I think roughly 3000 people have it in the U.S.).
Oh and not that it matters, but it was my godfather, as in my dad's best friend and the guy that would have become my legal guardian in the event that I was orphaned.
I don't think we can use induction, in this case, to try to say that since we uracil can be formed with natural processes, all building blocks of life can be, too.
We can't use induction as proof, because this is not mathematics.
We can use induction to say that we can reasonably expect to discover that other building blocks can form from natural processes as well, though. At the very least, this reduces -- again -- the number of things we know can be formed naturally. The trend is pretty obvious, and if you're holding out on something coming up that can't be formed naturally then you'll probably be disappointed.
If you just assume then it is not science. Science is about testing your assumptions.
Not necessarily, but you should at least state them.
Newton's theory was based on the assumption that time is the same for all observers. An assumption so obvious that it took a brilliant man like him to even note that he was making it.
If you can think of how Newton could have plausibly tested this assumption, then bravo to you. If you think you can argue that Newton was not doing science by not testing this assumption, then LOL.
If it were, it would be deterministic, hence not NP.
Which assumes NP != P, which is unproven. We think they are non-deterministic, but they might not be.
But if I had to bet, I'd bet that NP != P. And I'd bet even more that the OP's bet is bollocks. :)
Though if they are right, and can somehow prove it, they should end up more than wealthy enough not to care about what anyone thought of them beforehand. :)
It's heading towards understanding the origins of life on earth and anywhere else it may have arisen or came from.
If you need an application to appreciate that, then we have very little in common, but uh it could help in our search for life on other planets, creating useful life-like things on earth, and hey why not some medical applications? Geeze who cares at this point? Not I. This is basic research of the most important kind. Who knows what could result?
OC = Original Campaign?
Agreed 100%.
Trying to run it in Linux. Think back to when you set up your system, I'm sure there's a good reason to have that WinXP partition there.
You did buy it, right?
Windows XP? No, I didn't, which is why I don't have that option for playing games.
Oh, you meant games. Yeah, well, I knew what I was getting myself into when I went Linux-only, so no I don't tend to buy many games. I will only if wine/cedega users report that the game works great (e.g. World of Warcraft), or they have a download-able demo I can test (a test which most games fail, though sometimes it's only because of the demo installer heh). If the demo does work, and I buy the game, but the full game won't work... well, guess I should have checked winehq more closely!
The only time I've really felt like this bit me was with Popcap games. The Peggle demo worked perfectly in Wine. So I bought the full version, which basically just means 'registering' the demo you already downloaded. Well it didn't work. Long story short, it requires you to have Internet Explorer running some funky ActiveX control while the demo-version of the game is also running. Ugh. The reason this ticked me off is because it's the first time that the only obstacle between me and playing a game was their method of letting me buy the game. Oh well. I consider that $10 to be a donation to the indie game developer scene, and the Peggle demos are still fun. :P
Comparing this game to NWN just seems off. NWN had a really lousy single player game, and the game essentially only succeeded because of the online multiplayer aspect.
More to the point, NWN was designed entirely around the multiplayer aspect, with the single-player campaign basically being a showcase for the game design tools and an obligatory device to get people to buy it who wouldn't want to play online. User-made adventures were fun to play with a friend, but what truly made the game awesome, and clearly where it was designed to shine, was when you had a group of friends and (at least) one of them was using the DM client.
NWN with a DM beats every other multiplayer computer RPG experience EVER.
However as a single player game, it suffered (and even the expansions where they did a much better job creating the single-player campaigns, the game was still not that great).
Dragon Age was designed around being a single player game. Trying to force in multiplayer would mean that the multiplayer was bad, or worse, that the single player game suffered.
It might do it for you if you had the disease.
If the side effects are more tolerable than the disease itself most people would opt to use the medicine. Waiting for perfect solutions has never really worked, especially for diseases that slowly rob you of any ability to manage your daily life.
Indeed. If and when it comes time to do trials in humans, they can probably expect to have volunteers lined up around the block. There are certain diseases where "we don't know if this is safe" is not that big a concern.
My godfather was in a study for an experimental treatment for a particular kind of leukemia. He was very close to entering the "acute" (as in acutely fucked) stage and the best matching marrow donor he'd found in years of searching would have left him with an under 10% chance of surviving the transplant if it came to that. He was sick and miserable thanks to his chemotherapy. So, what exactly did he have to lose? Not a whole hell of a lot. What was the outcome? The drug, as far as they could tell, cured him and everyone else in the study. All signs of leukemia vanished.
That's a long shot to happen in any particular case, but how many people who are facing nasty death if they don't try wouldn't be willing to take it?
On a related note, my graduate algorithms professor had a side gig of consulting for the medical industry. He related that he had worked on an algorithm for situations like this one, where as the study progresses and (assuming) the drug is showing signs of being effective you want to move people from the control group to the active group as quickly as possible while still maintaining the validity of the study. The algorithm was exponential in the size of the study, so study sizes or the ability to move people into the active group could be seriously constrained by available computing power. His optimizations (didn't change the big-O iirc) improved the performance and thus allowed larger study sizes and thus, as a result, could have literally saved lives.
You don't eat the whole serving they give you and take the rest home to eat another day. You CAN do that you know. ;)
Don't you know that other kids are starving in Japan?! So... Eat it!
Reversing this process is the very last resort your body does when literally nothing else is left to "digest".
Look, forget about the "metabolizing for energy" part. Because that happens, but it isn't why your body cuts back on your muscles. It cuts back on your muscles because muscles use a lot of energy just existing. It takes energy to sustain them, so when the famine time comes, your body is going to shed the excess muscle as an unnecessary source of energy consumption.
By the way, this actually happens. It's what has been observed in people who take in too few calories without exercise to maintain muscle mass (relative to taking in sufficient calories also without exercise, duh). So, you can call what your body actually does bullshit all day long. It won't care. Stop eating, and it's going to see your muscles as useless wastes and decide its better to burn them for energy.
My understanding is that the current flow does indeed reverse several times during a strike, that it's A/C and not D/C. Commentary?
Yes and not really, respectively. There are at least two transfers of charge, one in each direction, but they're by and large discreet events with current flowing one way. So, "alternating" in a sense, but each stroke is best understood as a DC event.
If I were TSMC I'd be pretty pissed.
I'd be pretty pissed too that I was having material issues with my 40nm process that was affecting my customers in a significant way.
Oh but wait I'm sure it was AMD's executives that somehow made TSMC admit that they have still-unresolved problems even though they really don't.
How about take a good hard look at your company that's losing money out the ass and fire and all the moronic windbags in upper management who are too busy cutting insider trading deals to actually instill some fucking leadership in the company.
I hear ya there! I laughed my ass off when Hector the Sector Wrecker (as Motorola/Freescale folks call him) got fingered in the insider trading scandal. Maybe he'll be cooling his heels and get more comeuppance than he ever could just by being fired with a golden parachute. Oh well he already wasn't the CEO.
I believe global foundaries can do 40nm standard silicon either now or soon, so AMD should perphaps switch to there part owned foundary.
No, they can't. Global Foundries can do 45nm, and soon 32nm, but not 40. Also, Global Foundries uses SOI while TSMC is bulk.
I'm sure AMD will use GF eventually for their graphics chips, but for right now, I'm also sure it will take less time for TSMC to sort themselves out than it would to modify the design for a very different process.
Also, don't expect graphics by itself to make or break AMD. It helps being on top their, but it's a small portion of their overall revenue. To stay afloat, AMD has to compete with Intel and that's all there is to it.