I hate net neutrality. Not only in principle, but in practice. I WANT my neighbor's porn-and-bittorrent diet throttled, so that when I use our shared resource (our local chunk of bandwidth), it actually works. "Net neutrality" is just a cry for the bandwidth hogs to screw it up for the rest of us.
I had my first cell phone while I lived in Japan and it taught me to be a big fan of SMS. Too bad that here in the US, prices are completely irrational.
A text message costs your provider FAR less than does a phone call, as the amount of data is less and it does not need the highest priority on the network.
Yet unlike most of the world, SMS is more expensive here than a minute of calling.
Hence people yap and annoy everyone within a country mile rather than type out "I'll be five minutes late". It drives me insane.
There is no scientific or technical reason to fear cloned meat any more than cloned fruits any more than any other food.
Claims of something being "natural" have no precise or technical meaning. It is just religious gibberish.
Meat is just a pile of chemicals. There is no significant difference between a cloned lump of meat and a "natural" one, other than in your mind. Or at least, as far as anyone knows.
By the time the "degraded" DNA gets through your belly, it has been ripped apart by the acid bath anyway.
My company (a medium-to-large sized chemical company) is also spending hundreds of millions in capital in order to further enter the renewables market. We aren't the only ones. Some bigger companies are investing billions. And compared to Google, these companies already know what they are doing and aren't dabbling on the sides.
Slashdot has always been too pro-Google and pro-Apple.
Wrong, solar cost per watt is flat
on
Google Goes Green
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· Score: 1
That's the gist of is. It is compounded by the ~25% of the population that is dead-set against abortion, and will bring fetuses with no chance of survival to term. Other nations have such people as well, but generally not to such a high degree.
That reminds me of the same problem international comparisons of "infant mortality" have: each nation has a different qualification for a "live birth", which of course must precede the death of an infant. I once read that this accounted for most of the difference in "infant mortality" in advanced nations.
"Comcast should be bitchslapped (and probably at the state level) for fraud: they fail to supply what they lead prospective customers to believe they supply. And in states where there are laws against impersonation, that should be enforced as well (or else repealed)."
Can you point me to the fraudulent advertising? If you believe that subscribing to broadband means "maximum possible bandwith all of the time" then you are an idiot. No one pretends to offer that, and the big ol' words "up to" are in every add ever seen.
The civil war is not a "direct" result of our invasion. There were dozens of deliberate choices made by other human beings between what we chose to do and what is going on now. This is far, far, far from "direct".
You are a tool of the terrorists. They DELIBERATELY ignited a civil war, banking on the fact that your hatred of your political opponents would cause you to blindly place the blame on Bush rather than the terrorists. OUR war in Iraq ended in 2004 with a minimum of causualties. AQ's war in Iraq is ongoing and extraordinarily bloody.
Frankly, there is a more DIRECT line of reasoning that leads to the conclusion that the war is the fault of people like you. AQ started the war precisely because they wanted to manipulate you. Unfortunately, you have proven them right.
Most people eat out with others most of the time. You don't want to look cheap in front of your friends, family, clients, or coworkers either.
Additionally, tipping differs from downloading in that when I download someone's song, they incur almost no marginal cost. On the other hand, when I consume a waiter or waitress's service, they incur a large cost. Almost anyone with any sort of empathy will feel a stronger desire to reward the server than the abstract song-writer or singer.
These payments are anonymous. Tipping is not. I bet a lot of people wouldn't tip if they could do it without showing their face...and then, of course, restaurants would finally move away from our stupid tipping system itself.
In anonymous situations, many people are jerks. How often does someone cut you off when driving? How often does someone barge in front of you in a line at a store or restaurant. What is the difference? Anonimity.
How many people paid THIS TIME to prove a point to the RIAA...and will pay little or nothing next time, or the time after, or the time after that?
Do you really think people will continue to pay $10 for something they can get for nothing? Neither do I. In the end, this incident is a gimmick with no sustainability.
"I think what they've shown here is that P2P sharing does not decrease CD sales. That is, there is not a negative correlation. In fact, there may even be a positive correlation. But claiming that one causes the other strikes me as a politically biased conclusion. In other words, they set out to prove a position, and interpreted the facts in order to support that conclusion"
They have shown nothing of the sort. To do that, they would have to show that people who download purchase the same or more CD's than they would in the absence of p2p. In no way have they down this.
Actually, this study just confirms common sense. People who are interested in music both DOWNLOAD and BUY CD's. Duh. One would EXPECT a very strong correlation between the two. All this study has down is to show that the positive correlation driven by interest is larger than the negative correlation of p2p (presumably) decreasing CD sales. It has not in any way shown that this correlation does not exist.
I heard it from someone in my own company and have heard similar numbers before. Since we (actually our subsidiary) make the silicon, I doubt we are skewing the data in favor of the nuclear industry. Instead, the point was that we have to get our energy costs down and figure out a better way to make this stuff. Indeed we have, but we are still the biggest consumer of electricity in the state now due to our efforts to make silicon for the solar industry. How ironic.
25Gj for a panel comes out to a little under 2000 Kj/mol of silicon. That is a totally plausible number given the number of steps and high temperatures required (above 1000C in some phases). The other 10% is not just installation, but also includes wires, back-panels, sealents, etc.
Putting things into space is enormously energy intensive. You would never come out ahead unless you built a space elevator first. Unfortunately, no material known to man is strong enough to build one, not even in theory (carbon nanotubes fall just short in theory and far short in practice).
It actually takes an enormous amount of energy to make solar (or IC) grade silicon. The estimates I have seen calculate that about 20% of the total energy produced by a typical crystalline silicon solar panel is necessary to construct and install the cell. Roughly half that energy is embedded in the silicon itself.
I disagree with the parent's parent post. There is no reason that silicon cells are not viable renewable energy sources. They produce five units of energy over the long haul for every one put in (excluding sunlight, of course!) - and that one could be renewable itself.
Silicon for IC and solar is so expensive and energy intensive because it must be so pure. To produce it, SiO2 (quartz, sand, etc) first reduced with carbon (similar to how iron oxide is made into iron). This requires lots of energy. This product, however, is crude. To purify it, it must be gassified to various chlorosilane molecules and then distilled (lots of energy in both steps). The highly pure gas species are again reduced to silicon metal and then recrystallized carefully to eliminate even more impurities...again, energy intensive. In most cases, these steps are undertaken at different facilities or companies, requiring shipment at each step as well.
Solar has long fed off the scraps of the IC industry. Indeed, until a few years ago, this was solar's primary source of silicon, which they have now outgrown. IBM has merely decided that a few more scraps worth saving (probably due to silicon's new high prices).
I wouldn't be expected to be paid more because of my PhD if I applied at McDonald's, either. If a PhD, out of some sort of desparation, applies for a BS level job, than that is exactly what he or she will get.
That being said, most of us do not apply for BS-level jobs. We apply for PhD level jobs, which have starting salaries higher than those that a typical 30-year-old engineer will make, with more upside potential and more inroads into management, where the real money is. We are expected to have zero "real-world-experience" but instead have expertise in some particular technical area, for which we are hired. Guess what? After a couple of years, we have that "real-world-experience" as well. PhD hiring is generally quite different than BS level. For the latter, large companies just hire a cohort of smart kids and then sort them into various openings. For PhDs, particular people with particular skills are hired to fill particular critical needs of the company.
Oh, and most engineers are paid to go to grad school. There is a huge opportunity cost, but you need not spend "a small fortune" or even run up any debt at all.
First, a PhD will enter a company at a much higher level than someone with a BS, and generally will have far more advancement opportunities than someone with a BS. I work at a major chemical company, where I would guess we have eight BS-holders for each PhD, yet nearly half of the management has a PhD, including the CEO. PhDs generally have more respect, more flexibility, and more independance. They also have the opportunity to switch to academia full or part time, which BS-holders generally do not.
That being said, it is a hard road. A BS engineer entering my company at 22 has a HUGE financial head start on someone like me, who entered at age 31 after PhD/post-doc. I have estimated that I will be around 50 years old by the time that I have the same sort of assets as that hypothetical engineer of my same age cohort. Yes, I will RETIRE richer than that engineer, but I had to spend my mid-to-late 20's working 70h/week for $20,000 a year to achieve this. Many people rightfully choose not to make this trade-off.
Additionally, MD's have similar training periods with a higher payoff, and lawyers and MBAs have a shorter training period with a similar payoff (and are more likely to hit the big-time upside). Since it is more difficult for a foreign student to enter these fields, their wages can stay a bit higher due to the lack of competition.
Slashdot Mirror
I hate net neutrality. Not only in principle, but in practice. I WANT my neighbor's porn-and-bittorrent diet throttled, so that when I use our shared resource (our local chunk of bandwidth), it actually works. "Net neutrality" is just a cry for the bandwidth hogs to screw it up for the rest of us.
I had my first cell phone while I lived in Japan and it taught me to be a big fan of SMS. Too bad that here in the US, prices are completely irrational. A text message costs your provider FAR less than does a phone call, as the amount of data is less and it does not need the highest priority on the network. Yet unlike most of the world, SMS is more expensive here than a minute of calling.
Hence people yap and annoy everyone within a country mile rather than type out "I'll be five minutes late". It drives me insane.
There is no scientific or technical reason to fear cloned meat any more than cloned fruits any more than any other food.
Claims of something being "natural" have no precise or technical meaning. It is just religious gibberish.
Meat is just a pile of chemicals. There is no significant difference between a cloned lump of meat and a "natural" one, other than in your mind. Or at least, as far as anyone knows.
By the time the "degraded" DNA gets through your belly, it has been ripped apart by the acid bath anyway.
I am glad I do not live in Australia, based on this law alone.
What an egregious violation of human freedom.
Just wait until if and when airlines start allowing phone calls (cell or internet-based) on flights.
There will be blood drawn over this one.
I can imagine few horrors worse than being trapped next to a yapper for hours.
My company (a medium-to-large sized chemical company) is also spending hundreds of millions in capital in order to further enter the renewables market. We aren't the only ones. Some bigger companies are investing billions. And compared to Google, these companies already know what they are doing and aren't dabbling on the sides.
Slashdot has always been too pro-Google and pro-Apple.
http://www.solarbuzz.com/index.asp
It went up significantly a few years ago and is now flat. It will probably drift downward in the future, but not nearly as much as one would hope.
That's the gist of is. It is compounded by the ~25% of the population that is dead-set against abortion, and will bring fetuses with no chance of survival to term. Other nations have such people as well, but generally not to such a high degree.
That reminds me of the same problem international comparisons of "infant mortality" have: each nation has a different qualification for a "live birth", which of course must precede the death of an infant. I once read that this accounted for most of the difference in "infant mortality" in advanced nations.
Having gotten my PhD in a technical field, I feel the following are true:
1: In most classes (including any that I was a TA for), the professor was about as smart as the smartest students in the class, if not smarter.
2: The professor had a heck of a lot more subject knowledge and experience than any student I ever encountered.
Most people whining and complaining about professors were just losers that wanted excuses for their screw-ups and laziness.
"Comcast should be bitchslapped (and probably at the state level) for fraud: they fail to supply what they lead prospective customers to believe they supply. And in states where there are laws against impersonation, that should be enforced as well (or else repealed)."
Can you point me to the fraudulent advertising? If you believe that subscribing to broadband means "maximum possible bandwith all of the time" then you are an idiot. No one pretends to offer that, and the big ol' words "up to" are in every add ever seen.
The civil war is not a "direct" result of our invasion. There were dozens of deliberate choices made by other human beings between what we chose to do and what is going on now. This is far, far, far from "direct".
You are a tool of the terrorists. They DELIBERATELY ignited a civil war, banking on the fact that your hatred of your political opponents would cause you to blindly place the blame on Bush rather than the terrorists. OUR war in Iraq ended in 2004 with a minimum of causualties. AQ's war in Iraq is ongoing and extraordinarily bloody.
Frankly, there is a more DIRECT line of reasoning that leads to the conclusion that the war is the fault of people like you. AQ started the war precisely because they wanted to manipulate you. Unfortunately, you have proven them right.
It is only carbon neutral when both the manufacture of the fuel cell and the processing and distribution of the fuel are carbon neutral at every step.
Most people eat out with others most of the time. You don't want to look cheap in front of your friends, family, clients, or coworkers either.
Additionally, tipping differs from downloading in that when I download someone's song, they incur almost no marginal cost. On the other hand, when I consume a waiter or waitress's service, they incur a large cost. Almost anyone with any sort of empathy will feel a stronger desire to reward the server than the abstract song-writer or singer.
These payments are anonymous. Tipping is not. I bet a lot of people wouldn't tip if they could do it without showing their face...and then, of course, restaurants would finally move away from our stupid tipping system itself.
In anonymous situations, many people are jerks. How often does someone cut you off when driving? How often does someone barge in front of you in a line at a store or restaurant. What is the difference? Anonimity.
How many people paid THIS TIME to prove a point to the RIAA...and will pay little or nothing next time, or the time after, or the time after that?
Do you really think people will continue to pay $10 for something they can get for nothing? Neither do I. In the end, this incident is a gimmick with no sustainability.
Holy wrong, Batman!
"I think what they've shown here is that P2P sharing does not decrease CD sales. That is, there is not a negative correlation. In fact, there may even be a positive correlation. But claiming that one causes the other strikes me as a politically biased conclusion. In other words, they set out to prove a position, and interpreted the facts in order to support that conclusion"
They have shown nothing of the sort. To do that, they would have to show that people who download purchase the same or more CD's than they would in the absence of p2p. In no way have they down this.
Actually, this study just confirms common sense. People who are interested in music both DOWNLOAD and BUY CD's. Duh. One would EXPECT a very strong correlation between the two. All this study has down is to show that the positive correlation driven by interest is larger than the negative correlation of p2p (presumably) decreasing CD sales. It has not in any way shown that this correlation does not exist.
I heard it from someone in my own company and have heard similar numbers before. Since we (actually our subsidiary) make the silicon, I doubt we are skewing the data in favor of the nuclear industry. Instead, the point was that we have to get our energy costs down and figure out a better way to make this stuff. Indeed we have, but we are still the biggest consumer of electricity in the state now due to our efforts to make silicon for the solar industry. How ironic.
25Gj for a panel comes out to a little under 2000 Kj/mol of silicon. That is a totally plausible number given the number of steps and high temperatures required (above 1000C in some phases). The other 10% is not just installation, but also includes wires, back-panels, sealents, etc.
Putting things into space is enormously energy intensive. You would never come out ahead unless you built a space elevator first. Unfortunately, no material known to man is strong enough to build one, not even in theory (carbon nanotubes fall just short in theory and far short in practice).
It actually takes an enormous amount of energy to make solar (or IC) grade silicon. The estimates I have seen calculate that about 20% of the total energy produced by a typical crystalline silicon solar panel is necessary to construct and install the cell. Roughly half that energy is embedded in the silicon itself.
I disagree with the parent's parent post. There is no reason that silicon cells are not viable renewable energy sources. They produce five units of energy over the long haul for every one put in (excluding sunlight, of course!) - and that one could be renewable itself.
Silicon for IC and solar is so expensive and energy intensive because it must be so pure. To produce it, SiO2 (quartz, sand, etc) first reduced with carbon (similar to how iron oxide is made into iron). This requires lots of energy. This product, however, is crude. To purify it, it must be gassified to various chlorosilane molecules and then distilled (lots of energy in both steps). The highly pure gas species are again reduced to silicon metal and then recrystallized carefully to eliminate even more impurities...again, energy intensive. In most cases, these steps are undertaken at different facilities or companies, requiring shipment at each step as well.
Solar has long fed off the scraps of the IC industry. Indeed, until a few years ago, this was solar's primary source of silicon, which they have now outgrown. IBM has merely decided that a few more scraps worth saving (probably due to silicon's new high prices).
Which is why a carbon tax would do the job without any complicated, draconian state.
little ponies for every girl...until they know what the heck is being talked about.
What a pointless survey. 95% of people don't know enough about the issue to have an informed opinion.
I wouldn't be expected to be paid more because of my PhD if I applied at McDonald's, either. If a PhD, out of some sort of desparation, applies for a BS level job, than that is exactly what he or she will get.
That being said, most of us do not apply for BS-level jobs. We apply for PhD level jobs, which have starting salaries higher than those that a typical 30-year-old engineer will make, with more upside potential and more inroads into management, where the real money is. We are expected to have zero "real-world-experience" but instead have expertise in some particular technical area, for which we are hired. Guess what? After a couple of years, we have that "real-world-experience" as well. PhD hiring is generally quite different than BS level. For the latter, large companies just hire a cohort of smart kids and then sort them into various openings. For PhDs, particular people with particular skills are hired to fill particular critical needs of the company.
Oh, and most engineers are paid to go to grad school. There is a huge opportunity cost, but you need not spend "a small fortune" or even run up any debt at all.
First, a PhD will enter a company at a much higher level than someone with a BS, and generally will have far more advancement opportunities than someone with a BS. I work at a major chemical company, where I would guess we have eight BS-holders for each PhD, yet nearly half of the management has a PhD, including the CEO. PhDs generally have more respect, more flexibility, and more independance. They also have the opportunity to switch to academia full or part time, which BS-holders generally do not.
That being said, it is a hard road. A BS engineer entering my company at 22 has a HUGE financial head start on someone like me, who entered at age 31 after PhD/post-doc. I have estimated that I will be around 50 years old by the time that I have the same sort of assets as that hypothetical engineer of my same age cohort. Yes, I will RETIRE richer than that engineer, but I had to spend my mid-to-late 20's working 70h/week for $20,000 a year to achieve this. Many people rightfully choose not to make this trade-off.
Additionally, MD's have similar training periods with a higher payoff, and lawyers and MBAs have a shorter training period with a similar payoff (and are more likely to hit the big-time upside). Since it is more difficult for a foreign student to enter these fields, their wages can stay a bit higher due to the lack of competition.