Sitka spruce is used in the upper stage of Trident II SLBM missile
It is nice to know that our nuclear arsenal is based on renewable and sustainable carbon sources. That certainly makes me feel better about vaporizing our adversaries.
The shareholders think differently, or their stock would not have dropped. If they avoid taxes by leaving money offshore, it will be harder than ever for them to create jobs in America. It is easier for foreign corporations to invest in America than for American companies to invest in America.
the u.s. economy won't see that supposed $20 billion boost, either. this is just some more trump bullshit.
Totally agree. The net effect on the American economy will likely be zero or negative.
More American job opportunities for engineers is great news.
That is not what this is about. This is just a legal change. Maybe a folder will move from one filing cabinet to another. The company is already "co-headquartered" in both Singapore and San Jose. The CEO is not likely to move, and it is possible no one else will either. Technical jobs are the least likely to move.
All that is changing is that the company will be registered in America instead of Singapore. They will pay higher taxes, but have an easier time with acquisitions. The CEO apparently thought that was a good tradeoff. The shareholders apparently thought otherwise, thus the sell off. CEOs tend to like acquisitions because it makes their companies bigger and activates the primitive "hunter" instincts in their brains as they seek out "prey". But they are usually bad deals for the shareholders of the acquiring company.
I saw a construction project in Hainan that used bamboo and coconut fiber to reinforce concrete. They still used some steel rebar, in addition to a mesh of bamboo. The coconut fiber was dumped into the mixer. According to the foreman, the result was lighter, cheaper, and more resistant to seismic shear. But less resistant to compressive force, so it was only used for buildings of 3 stories or fewer.
Then have the arabs contributed anything to this world besides destruction, murder, rape, torture, fear, and hatred?
Arab civilization had a golden age when math and science (especially astronomy) flourished. That came to an end in the 13th century for a number of reasons, but mostly because of the repercussions from political and military failure. The Mongols destroyed Baghdad, and almost reached Suez. The Spanish Reconquista was pushing the Moors out of Iberia. Then the Turks showed up.
When civilizations are threatened with decline, they tend to become less tolerant, turn inward, and look for scapegoats... which tends to accelerate decline. Finding parallels for this in the modern world is left as an exercise for the reader.
Especially considering this century is only 17 years old.
Not in Egypt. According to the Islamic Calendar this is the year 1439. The ancient Egyptians had two calendars: a lunar calendar for religious purposes, and a civil calendar for government administration, but they didn't have leap years so it is hard to project their calendars to the present.
It has been years since bitcoin mining was profitable on GPUs, and you don't need PCIe slots since bitcoin mining requires near zero bandwidth. Go to Google (or Amazon) and type "bitcoin asic". But keep in mind that the best ASICs are not for sale.
I feel like no one has learned anything from the first dotcom bubble.
What should they have learned? During the 1990s, hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth were created, and many of what are now the world's most valuable companies were either born or were greatly expanded. Sure, it got frothy at the end, but mostly investments in tech paid off very, very well.
Early investors in Pets.com lost their money. Early investors in Google made their money back a thousandfold. If you invested X in both you would have made 500X instead of 1000X. A few winners make up for a lot of losers.
...everyone is throwing massive amounts of money at anything remotely linked to these buzzwords.
Then slap together a business plan, and go talk to some VCs. Chance of you getting funding: ~0%. To have any chance at all, you will need working code, a solid path to profit and/or growth, and a team with a successful track record... and even with that you are going to get maybe 6 months of runway before you have to go back for your next round.
NO (x) removes methane from the atmosphere, and you result in more nitrates in the soil. So there is a response, and its quite a good one.
NOx is a powerful oxidizer, a neurotoxin, and destroys ozone. Also we don't have gigatonnes lying around. So not so good.
atmospheric methane levels have at times be MUCH higher than today (which is why there is so much trapped methane)
Nonsense. Methane clathrates form from methane from localized organic decay, not from the atmosphere. They can also form when NG leaks into the deep ocean. The only time atmospheric methane levels have been high is when clathrates were degrading, not forming.
Are they something that survived the previous interglacial periods
Some methane was released at the end of the last ice age, but not enough to trigger a feedback loop. But current temperatures have exceeded interglacial temps, so we don't know what could happen. There is evidence for a runaway methane release about 110M years ago.
The arctic contains about 1400 Giga-Tonnes of methane. A release of 50 GT would be equivalent to a doubling of current atmospheric CO2 levels.
The Clathrate Gun is possibly the biggest danger in delaying agressive action on global warming.
Neither nickel nor cobalt is needed for lithium batteries. Tesla batteries contain both, but the Nissan Leaf uses manganese instead, and there are billions of tonnes of manganese reserves.
We will likely find both better ways to extract ore, and better ways to build batteries. Just ask Paul Ehrlich about betting against human ingenuity.
She will clean you out of half your net worth soon enough
Perhaps. But she is a well-paid Silicon Valley engineer, and she makes more than I do. So if she only gets half I will still be ahead. She makes enough to pay for the iPhone X with two days' salary.
I would rather buy her a new phone than have a non-nerd wife who wanted something even more pretentious, like jewelry. Her favorite earrings are made from the silicon die of her first IC design. I had the earrings made for less than $100.
This will remove one of the only and best options for upward class mobility.
Maybe. TFA is predicting that AI will lead to narrow ownership and more wage employment. Many others (perhaps more) are predicting the opposite: That AI and cheap automation will make it easier than ever to work independently.
A factory costs millions. But you can buy a 3D printer for $199. When you are ready to scale, you can outsource to Foxconn. Then you can sell on eBay and Amazon.
You can run an ANN on the GPU in your laptop, or rent an array of TPUs in Google's cloud.
It has never been easier. We may screw it up, especially if we get the legal framework wrong, but the future is not fated to be a few capitalists and a vast pool of proletariat wage slaves.
Spend $1000 on a phone based purely on a name with basically no real reviews to go on?
I am married to one of these people. She wants an iPhone X for Christmas, despite knowing nothing about it, other than that it is the "new thing from Apple", and that she wants it before any of her friends have it. I already pre-ordered.
AlphaGo doesn't just play games, it also teaches itself how to play. The version of AlphaGo that beat Lee Sedol used a dataset of human games to train itself. But the latest version uses no human input other than the rules. It taught itself from scratch, learning not only strategy, but also rediscovering "joseki" tactics, and then going on to discover new tactics that humans never learned. It then beat Ke Jie, widely considered the world's strongest player.
After his 0-3 defeat by AlphaGo, Ke Jie studied the program's behavior, and then went on a 20 game winning streak using the new insights, which is impressive even for someone of his standing: Statistically, he should have won only 60% of the games.
Because the sun is going to go supernova evenutally.
Nitpick: The sun is too small to supernova. In roughly 5 billion years, it will expand into a red giant, the solar wind will blow away the outer layers until only a white dwarf is left, and then it will slowly cool.
You are correct that we only have 5 billion years, since the earth will be destroyed during the red giant phase. Even if no one trips over the power cord, that is not enough time to brute force Go.
With that attitude NASA doesn't need to do jack shit while the private industry develops the products and services NASA needs, except fund it.
That would be fantastic. But we aren't quite there yet.
NASA is supposed to do the experimental science, making rovers and probes and testing new propulsion technologies, power sources, zero-g experiments, spaceships, landers, habitats etc.
NASA already outsources many of those tasks to industry contractors.
Reusable rockets is exactly the sort of thing NASA should have been first to do.
They were first. It was called "The Space Shuttle", and is a classic example of a government project driven by politics, rather than a commercial project driven by profit.
Except for the SLS, which I'm guessing will be their last chemical rocket project ever.
Slashdot Mirror
With a programmer you usually get a logical, well constructed interface
Gimp is an obvious counterexample.
Sitka spruce is used in the upper stage of Trident II SLBM missile
It is nice to know that our nuclear arsenal is based on renewable and sustainable carbon sources. That certainly makes me feel better about vaporizing our adversaries.
their shit is made in china
Most of their sales are also in China.
they won't pay higher taxes. are you kidding?
The shareholders think differently, or their stock would not have dropped. If they avoid taxes by leaving money offshore, it will be harder than ever for them to create jobs in America. It is easier for foreign corporations to invest in America than for American companies to invest in America.
the u.s. economy won't see that supposed $20 billion boost, either. this is just some more trump bullshit.
Totally agree. The net effect on the American economy will likely be zero or negative.
More American job opportunities for engineers is great news.
That is not what this is about. This is just a legal change. Maybe a folder will move from one filing cabinet to another. The company is already "co-headquartered" in both Singapore and San Jose. The CEO is not likely to move, and it is possible no one else will either. Technical jobs are the least likely to move.
All that is changing is that the company will be registered in America instead of Singapore. They will pay higher taxes, but have an easier time with acquisitions. The CEO apparently thought that was a good tradeoff. The shareholders apparently thought otherwise, thus the sell off. CEOs tend to like acquisitions because it makes their companies bigger and activates the primitive "hunter" instincts in their brains as they seek out "prey". But they are usually bad deals for the shareholders of the acquiring company.
I saw a construction project in Hainan that used bamboo and coconut fiber to reinforce concrete. They still used some steel rebar, in addition to a mesh of bamboo. The coconut fiber was dumped into the mixer. According to the foreman, the result was lighter, cheaper, and more resistant to seismic shear. But less resistant to compressive force, so it was only used for buildings of 3 stories or fewer.
Then have the arabs contributed anything to this world besides destruction, murder, rape, torture, fear, and hatred?
Arab civilization had a golden age when math and science (especially astronomy) flourished. That came to an end in the 13th century for a number of reasons, but mostly because of the repercussions from political and military failure. The Mongols destroyed Baghdad, and almost reached Suez. The Spanish Reconquista was pushing the Moors out of Iberia. Then the Turks showed up.
When civilizations are threatened with decline, they tend to become less tolerant, turn inward, and look for scapegoats ... which tends to accelerate decline. Finding parallels for this in the modern world is left as an exercise for the reader.
Especially considering this century is only 17 years old.
Not in Egypt. According to the Islamic Calendar this is the year 1439. The ancient Egyptians had two calendars: a lunar calendar for religious purposes, and a civil calendar for government administration, but they didn't have leap years so it is hard to project their calendars to the present.
Arabs and women....
The ancient Egyptians were not Arabs. The Arabs arrived in the 7th century ... from Arabia. The pyramids had been built more than 3000 years earlier.
If you want mine your own bitcoin, you need a motherboard with 19 PCIe 1X slots to plug in 19 GPUs and a couple of 1200W PSUs.
It has been years since bitcoin mining was profitable on GPUs, and you don't need PCIe slots since bitcoin mining requires near zero bandwidth. Go to Google (or Amazon) and type "bitcoin asic". But keep in mind that the best ASICs are not for sale.
I feel like no one has learned anything from the first dotcom bubble.
What should they have learned? During the 1990s, hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth were created, and many of what are now the world's most valuable companies were either born or were greatly expanded. Sure, it got frothy at the end, but mostly investments in tech paid off very, very well.
Early investors in Pets.com lost their money. Early investors in Google made their money back a thousandfold. If you invested X in both you would have made 500X instead of 1000X. A few winners make up for a lot of losers.
...everyone is throwing massive amounts of money at anything remotely linked to these buzzwords.
Then slap together a business plan, and go talk to some VCs. Chance of you getting funding: ~0%. To have any chance at all, you will need working code, a solid path to profit and/or growth, and a team with a successful track record ... and even with that you are going to get maybe 6 months of runway before you have to go back for your next round.
Christopher Hitchens.
Dead from esophageal cancer at age 62. Also, he thought the Iraq War was a good idea. So maybe not so smart.
NO (x) removes methane from the atmosphere, and you result in more nitrates in the soil. So there is a response, and its quite a good one.
NOx is a powerful oxidizer, a neurotoxin, and destroys ozone. Also we don't have gigatonnes lying around. So not so good.
atmospheric methane levels have at times be MUCH higher than today (which is why there is so much trapped methane)
Nonsense. Methane clathrates form from methane from localized organic decay, not from the atmosphere. They can also form when NG leaks into the deep ocean. The only time atmospheric methane levels have been high is when clathrates were degrading, not forming.
Are they something that survived the previous interglacial periods
Some methane was released at the end of the last ice age, but not enough to trigger a feedback loop. But current temperatures have exceeded interglacial temps, so we don't know what could happen. There is evidence for a runaway methane release about 110M years ago.
The arctic contains about 1400 Giga-Tonnes of methane. A release of 50 GT would be equivalent to a doubling of current atmospheric CO2 levels.
The Clathrate Gun is possibly the biggest danger in delaying agressive action on global warming.
Addiction to legal substances is a disability under the ADA.
Wrong: "smokers are not expressly protected under any federal statutes regarding employment rights."
you would really pass up a chance to hire the next Tesla or Hawkings, because they smoke?
Tesla did not smoke. Hawkings does not smoke.
It is telling that you used non-smokers as examples of really smart people that smoke.
This is the number of really smart smokers that I know: 0.
In fact, I can't think of a better test for dumbness.
Are non-smokers going to have to pay for smokers' healthcare too
Not where I work. We don't hire smokers. We ask about tobacco use at the very beginning of the interview process, and reject all users.
This is perfectly legal. Smokers have no rights.
We hold down our healthcare costs, and it helps employee morale since nobody resents the smokers going on breaks and taking extra sick days.
I don't think there is much downside, since there are few smokers in California, and they tend to not be super bright.
Neither nickel nor cobalt is needed for lithium batteries. Tesla batteries contain both, but the Nissan Leaf uses manganese instead, and there are billions of tonnes of manganese reserves.
We will likely find both better ways to extract ore, and better ways to build batteries. Just ask Paul Ehrlich about betting against human ingenuity.
She will clean you out of half your net worth soon enough
Perhaps. But she is a well-paid Silicon Valley engineer, and she makes more than I do. So if she only gets half I will still be ahead. She makes enough to pay for the iPhone X with two days' salary.
I would rather buy her a new phone than have a non-nerd wife who wanted something even more pretentious, like jewelry. Her favorite earrings are made from the silicon die of her first IC design. I had the earrings made for less than $100.
This will remove one of the only and best options for upward class mobility.
Maybe. TFA is predicting that AI will lead to narrow ownership and more wage employment. Many others (perhaps more) are predicting the opposite: That AI and cheap automation will make it easier than ever to work independently.
A factory costs millions. But you can buy a 3D printer for $199. When you are ready to scale, you can outsource to Foxconn. Then you can sell on eBay and Amazon.
You can run an ANN on the GPU in your laptop, or rent an array of TPUs in Google's cloud.
It has never been easier. We may screw it up, especially if we get the legal framework wrong, but the future is not fated to be a few capitalists and a vast pool of proletariat wage slaves.
The bulk of the US economy is in high-end finance.
Bullcrap. Finance is 8% of the economy, and most of that is not "high-end".
Spend $1000 on a phone based purely on a name with basically no real reviews to go on?
I am married to one of these people. She wants an iPhone X for Christmas, despite knowing nothing about it, other than that it is the "new thing from Apple", and that she wants it before any of her friends have it. I already pre-ordered.
Playing games isn't AI.
AlphaGo doesn't just play games, it also teaches itself how to play. The version of AlphaGo that beat Lee Sedol used a dataset of human games to train itself. But the latest version uses no human input other than the rules. It taught itself from scratch, learning not only strategy, but also rediscovering "joseki" tactics, and then going on to discover new tactics that humans never learned. It then beat Ke Jie, widely considered the world's strongest player.
After his 0-3 defeat by AlphaGo, Ke Jie studied the program's behavior, and then went on a 20 game winning streak using the new insights, which is impressive even for someone of his standing: Statistically, he should have won only 60% of the games.
Because the sun is going to go supernova evenutally.
Nitpick: The sun is too small to supernova. In roughly 5 billion years, it will expand into a red giant, the solar wind will blow away the outer layers until only a white dwarf is left, and then it will slowly cool.
You are correct that we only have 5 billion years, since the earth will be destroyed during the red giant phase. Even if no one trips over the power cord, that is not enough time to brute force Go.
So folks could pour money into it with impunity.
Indeed. If we let people go around speaking with impunity, we will lose our freedom.
With that attitude NASA doesn't need to do jack shit while the private industry develops the products and services NASA needs, except fund it.
That would be fantastic. But we aren't quite there yet.
NASA is supposed to do the experimental science, making rovers and probes and testing new propulsion technologies, power sources, zero-g experiments, spaceships, landers, habitats etc.
NASA already outsources many of those tasks to industry contractors.
Reusable rockets is exactly the sort of thing NASA should have been first to do.
They were first. It was called "The Space Shuttle", and is a classic example of a government project driven by politics, rather than a commercial project driven by profit.
Except for the SLS, which I'm guessing will be their last chemical rocket project ever.
I certainly hope so.