But seriously, we are the most powerful race on the planet, we use over 30 billion barrels of oil per year (over 1.2 trillion gallons). Nobody knows exactly how much oil there is, but as a rough estimate from a layman it seems likely that we could estimate that in less than a thousand years we'll have probably burnt over a million years worth of natural carbon storage, i.e. it is being released over a thousand times faster than it was stored.
To me that it as least suggestive that we as a species could have an effect on atmospheric CO2 concentration and through that global climate and ocean acidity.
Do you understand that EM energy harvesting power will be directly proportional to size? It's not a matter of being a "miniaturization expert" it's a matter of physics and how much radiated WiFi power you can harvest with a given antenna aperture.
Moore's Law has never been a law and nobody treats it as one.
It started off as an observation which happened to basically be correct. Then it became more of a roadmap, with industry using it to set technology targets and allocating R&D resources so that they can continue following Moore's "Law".
Yeah the graphene comparison is spurious, except that it's a wider audience article and graphene has been getting inexplicably large amounts of press recently. A fair point, but I still don't excuse them for being part of the graphene press problem instead of the solution.
As for the other comparisons: what's the maximum speed of a MOSFET? You can get silicon BJTs into the hundreds of GHz, but I'm not sure about MOSFETS Maximum published speed I've seen for a Si N-MOSFET is around 450GHz at 32nm, not sure of the best reference but here is a non-peer-reviewed one I quickly dug up: http://www.intel.co.kr/content... obviously as this is silicon the voltages are extremely low so it can't do much in the way of power but people have made circuits in the 100GHz range
And as for advantages over Group III-V transistors: it works with silicon which is less faffy to work with than GaAs for example. GaAs is still in play because it's the most mature III-V technology and is capable but application space is being taken over by Si, GaN, and InP so it's not IMHO a great point of comparison. The nice thing about vacuum electronics is that it doesn't require a III-V material which may make for easier integration with CMOS, though there are groups working on III-V CMOS integration. And I don't think there's that much advantage to it being on Silicon, most wafer fab tools can handle a variety of wafer types, the processes are not so different, plus GaN-on-silicon is being produced though it still isn't quite as good as GaN-on-SiC for example.
The full article doesn't actually make a bunch of wild-ass claims and is pretty good. They're not making lots of OMG YOAR NEXT COMPUTAR SI TEH VALVES!!11 claims. The description of the technology is well-written. But I can make any technology look good by simply not comparing it against the best of its competitors, and outright mis-reporting the capabilities of the technologies I do compare it to. Just because they're not as bad as,many "2D" device papers out there doesn't mean they should get a pass for being deliberately misleading.
1 atmosphere of helium needs to be sealed from air, but mechanically is simpler because of the lower pressure difference.
That's not how partial pressures work at all. It only matters about the relative pressure of each individual gas if you don't want it leaking in. If you want to keep out nitrogen and oxygen it makes no difference if the package has 1atm of helium only or a vacuum.
I just noticed another disingenuous aspect to their claim - they say that because this operates at "atmospheric" pressure it will be more reliable than vacuum tubes of yore.
But these vacuum FETs are filled with 1 atmosphere of helium, so the partial pressure difference with the outside world for all other gases will still be the same as though it was operating with a full vacuum, and this device would require the same long-term hermetic packaging as a vacuum tube. It relies on helium to extend the mean free path of the electrons, though to be fair as dimensions are scaled down further from the current 100nm to say 20nm perhaps neither helium nor vacuum would be required. Still it seems to be a very misleading claim.
Vacuum micro/nano-electronics are interesting for RF/mm-wave applications as the transport can be ballistic which could theoretically enable ultra-high-frequencies with scaling of the size.
I haven't yet found a paper for the 460GHz claim in the IEEE Spectrum article so I'm not sure exactly which figure of merit they have picked for that claim, but rest assured that their comparisons to other transistor technologies are highly flawed.
InP devices for example already operate up to 1THz power gain cutoff frequencies and have for some years. Simple circuits including amplifiers have been demonstrated in the 600GHz range with both InP HBTs and HEMTs. Even silicon certainly operates in the multi-hundred-GHz range, not the 40GHz which is for some reason cited in the article. Using graphene as a point of comparison is somewhat laughable as graphene has yet to demonstrate any truly practical advantage over group-IV or III-V transistor technologies, and has never been close to beating other leading device technologies on clock speed despite heavy press coverage.
Even though shot noise comes about due to the quantized nature of electrons flowing over a barrier it is not treated at the circuit level as a quantized phenomenon, just as a white noise source like thermal noise.
This is unlike "telegraph" or "popcorn" noise which appears at the circuit level as a definitively quantized noise source.
Re:Lead is mentioned some 16 times
on
How LEDs Are Made
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· Score: 2
The lead frames are not typically made with any lead, it is just a case of easily confused homonyms.
In "lead frames", "lead" refers to the metal pins coming out of the packages, which are connected to the LED die. It not typically made with any lead content (Pb, element 82) due to RoHS restrictions. It could be made of tin-plated copper, or various alloys of tin, copper, and silver. Older ones would likely have been Pb-plated copper.
Yup, I stopped reading the expanded universe during the New Jedi Order series. It's been many years since I read a NJO series book but it seemed like they were all filled with war and unhappiness. Bad stuff happened in other books too but it didn't seem hopeless and the other books/trilogies/series generally had a happy ending of some sort.
And how is your fight against heterosexual marriage going?
Since there is no credible movement to end legal marriage for opposite sex couples the only equitable approach the government can take is to extend marriage rights to cover same sex couples.
A bit of salt makes most foods taste better (in the opinion of most people) and adding salt is in no way a scam.
I personally have a strong taste preference for the natural style peanut butters which have just peanuts and salt, but I have been disappointed whenever I have tried an unsalted nut butter.
At my uni some labs rely on a RFID badge system for charging for the access, others rely on a logsheet. Access is basically always restricted to authorized users by RFID badge.
The logsheet works well if a lab has proper oversight, most labs I've seen that run like this have a fully booked reservation calendar anyway so they know pretty well who is using it at any time. People who don't show up for reserved time or don't log time properly get in trouble and may have access restricted or revoked if the problem continues.
No matter the system you basically need to have "boots on the ground", i.e. somebody in charge of the equipment who is in the lab pretty regularly and makes sure that people show up for their reservations, makes sure they stay logged in with their swipe card or fill out the logbook properly, and makes sure they use the equipment properly and safely.
This is mainly a people problem, not a technical problem.
I don't think you fully understand how this type of setup works in a University - this type of billing setup is common in the labs and departmental machine shops at my uni. It's important to keep in mind that even within a department there are a number of fairly independent faculty members and their research groups who win grants to do their work and buy equipment with this grant money for their labs, and then there may be multiple departments within a single building. Overhead charged to research grants helps pay for the building maintenance and department staff but usually doesn't generally pay for any upkeep of equipment, supplies, or staffing of any of the research labs.
If a professor lets other people use his equipment without paying for it then lots of people will want to use it (because it's free) and it can become a money sink where the professor who owns the equipment is paying for all supplies and upkeep but he can't enforce oversight of the equipment because there's no cost recovery to pay for a tech or grad student to maintain the tool, train new users, and watch over usage. Since there's no oversight parts will get misplaced, people will mistreat it and damage the tool. I've seen it happen. So they need to charge other users something, to fairly allocate cost it might as well be hourly.
If there is a group of professors who all benefit from each others' labs then they can share access equally, and each professor is responsible for the cost of maintaining and staffing their lab, much like a network peering arrangement. But if it's a very one-sided sharing then charging for access makes a lot of sense, otherwise one professor ends up subsidizing the others.
By redefining marriage, in turn the effect is telling religions that they must redefine themselves. Are you really going to claim that all religions, many with histories extending back for millennia, must all redefine themselves? All the Jewish variants, the Christian and assorted protestant faiths, the Muslim believers, the native American nations with their beliefs, they must all redefine their religions for the convenience of the US government?
I don't care whether or not churches redefine themselves. I make no demand on them whatsoever. They can do whatever they please within the bounds of the law because it does not affect me. I even respect their right to grant the marriage sacrament only to straight couples, though I would personally prefer that such discrimination not be legal for an organization which is able to claim significant tax privileges.
My point in my first post was that if a religious organization wants a sacrament of union that doesn't share a name with a civil status that can be conferred on homosexual couples then the churches can rename their sacrament. That's all.
Maybe I got a little carried away by telling religious groups to suck it up but it makes so unhappy to hear about people who oppose gay marriage and homosexuality in general, or think that homosexuality is a choice, or a sign of moral decay, or a result of sexual trauma. Many of the staunchest critics of homosexuality push their views in the context of an organized religion, which tends to make me think poorly of organized religions in general since I can find no logical reason to be opposed to homosexuality.
I decided to spend 5 minutes looking into the precedence issue and found a random online source about the history of marriage which seems to suggest that civil marriage predates religious marriage in Rome anyway. This may persuade some (if civil marriage does truly predate religious marriage), but religious and civil origins or marriage are both millennia past and don't matter much in my opinion.
The word marriage is heavily entrenched in law and contract as a civil status. Religion may have used the term first (I don't actually know, nor do I care) but it's a legal word now and religious institutions should suck it up. It would probably even be expensive for the government to change the name of marriage to civil union.
If religious institutions don't like sharing a word for marriage because gays are finally allowed to get married in a subset of states then religions should invent a new term which refers solely to their religions sacrament (maybe "religious union"? "no-gays-allowed union"?) because they are the ones who have a problem, not us.
Religious people who oppose homosexuality are fleeing in vain from the march of history, because the march towards equal rights will not stop despite the loud but few voices against homosexuality. If religions can get on board we'll get equal rites too.
I have to wonder what the killer app is for flexible chips? Wearable electronics is always mentioned in this sort of press release, but we have Google Glass already which doesn't require flexible chips. Flexible circuit boards are already in wide use, sometimes with rigid areas to reinforce specific areas that don't need to flex. What applications truly require a flexible integrated circuit?
Flexible displays make sense for flexible integrated circuits but I'm still a bit skeptical about that because it seems like the sort of thing which would get damaged really easily. Unless flexible displays end up being used primarily for conforming to non-flat rigid surfaces but that seems like a pretty limited application still.
Maybe I'm not thinking ambitiously enough but I just don't see flexible integrated circuits meriting the buzz that they get.
If you can't easily divide the number ten into two equal halves, then perhaps you have bigger problems than just which set of units to use.
GP never said it couldn't be... you're deliberately missing the obvious point that 12 can be divided into by thirds and quarters with integer results while 10 cannot.
A base 10 unit system is better because (and only because) base 10 is our primary number system. A meter is better than a foot because (and only because) it is the more popular international standard. We could scale Imperial unis with base-10 SI prefixes if we wanted to, and some people do.
I would tend to argue that Imperial units tend to be more natural since things like inches, feet, tablespoons, teaspoons, gallons, and miles came out of practical usage rather than a top-down choice of a base unit standard and subsequent base-10 scaling by SI prefixes. But I also readily admit that I may be wrong and merely biased since I grew up with Imperial units.
I cannot imagine having to eat the same thing every day,
Funnily enough nobody is forcing you. You are clearly not the target for this product, but so far about 20,000 other people are.
I am one of the pre-orderers of Soylent. Why? I enjoy tasty and varied food but I don't always have the time or money to eat the way I'd like to eat, so I end up spending more money than I'd like on restaurants/takeout or eating really unhealthy food like Cup Noodles. Soylent appears to be a relatively affordable way to get a fast and nutritious meal replacement. While I try it out I will probably replace lunch and/or dinner with Soylent since for me these tend to be the most inconvenient meals. Other pre-orderers seem to view it differently and see food as more of a hastle that Soylent will help them avoid, but to each their own.
You might ask why Soylent and not an existing meal replacement drink? *shrug* For me at least it's really down to supporting Rob's stated vision for the project. I haven't done detailed research on how or if Soylent is different from existing products but I do know that his goal is different and going for total food replacement is probably a higher standard than instant breakfast drinks or diet drinks, which may mean something or nothing. I just ordered one of the lower tiers to try it out and if I like it I'll buy more, assuming the product continues to be produced.
It's a good feature, but an important feature of any UI is discoverability since most people don't read manuals anymore. Buttons are easy to discover and manipulate. It took me about 2 months to discover the single-handed map zoom gesture. I also think it requires slightly more brainpower to use while driving which is when you really want an easy to use single handed map zoom function.
Don't even get me started other poor discoverability and fiddly gesture features in Android Kit Kat that replace the older more discoverable features like the fiddly camera settings tree, and swipe to reject/accept calls which has no indication of which direction is which until you start swiping. Some of these changes may predate KitKat, I was happily sitting on Android version 2.something for a couple of years, but I'm not as happy with the new version.
I doubt they really have 25,000 members, that's probably the number of people who have signed up on their forums at one point or another. Active membership is surely much smaller.
I know it's a supply and demand problem, but an overabundance of supply for internships in certain fields shouldn't allow companies to accept unpaid interns. This can make it very hard for people without significant financial support from their family to enter these fields.
Engineering students in the US have pretty good internship opportunities which are frequently paid well over minimum wage and if they like you it can lead to job offers and help young engineers build their professional network.
That other industries might not even pay their interns seems very wrong to me. Companies aren't in the business of training interns for charity so the company must derive some benefit, therefore the interns should be paid at least minimum wage. Even if the work output is low the company can use internships as a recruitment and assessment method for hiring new full-time workers.
Slashdot Mirror
Not with that attitude you can't!
But seriously, we are the most powerful race on the planet, we use over 30 billion barrels of oil per year (over 1.2 trillion gallons). Nobody knows exactly how much oil there is, but as a rough estimate from a layman it seems likely that we could estimate that in less than a thousand years we'll have probably burnt over a million years worth of natural carbon storage, i.e. it is being released over a thousand times faster than it was stored.
To me that it as least suggestive that we as a species could have an effect on atmospheric CO2 concentration and through that global climate and ocean acidity.
Do you understand that EM energy harvesting power will be directly proportional to size? It's not a matter of being a "miniaturization expert" it's a matter of physics and how much radiated WiFi power you can harvest with a given antenna aperture.
Moore's Law has never been a law and nobody treats it as one.
It started off as an observation which happened to basically be correct. Then it became more of a roadmap, with industry using it to set technology targets and allocating R&D resources so that they can continue following Moore's "Law".
Yeah the graphene comparison is spurious, except that it's a wider audience article and graphene has been getting inexplicably large amounts of press recently.
A fair point, but I still don't excuse them for being part of the graphene press problem instead of the solution.
As for the other comparisons: what's the maximum speed of a MOSFET? You can get silicon BJTs into the hundreds of GHz, but I'm not sure about MOSFETS
Maximum published speed I've seen for a Si N-MOSFET is around 450GHz at 32nm, not sure of the best reference but here is a non-peer-reviewed one I quickly dug up: http://www.intel.co.kr/content... obviously as this is silicon the voltages are extremely low so it can't do much in the way of power but people have made circuits in the 100GHz range
And as for advantages over Group III-V transistors: it works with silicon which is less faffy to work with than GaAs for example.
GaAs is still in play because it's the most mature III-V technology and is capable but application space is being taken over by Si, GaN, and InP so it's not IMHO a great point of comparison. The nice thing about vacuum electronics is that it doesn't require a III-V material which may make for easier integration with CMOS, though there are groups working on III-V CMOS integration. And I don't think there's that much advantage to it being on Silicon, most wafer fab tools can handle a variety of wafer types, the processes are not so different, plus GaN-on-silicon is being produced though it still isn't quite as good as GaN-on-SiC for example.
The full article doesn't actually make a bunch of wild-ass claims and is pretty good. They're not making lots of OMG YOAR NEXT COMPUTAR SI TEH VALVES!!11 claims.
The description of the technology is well-written. But I can make any technology look good by simply not comparing it against the best of its competitors, and outright mis-reporting the capabilities of the technologies I do compare it to. Just because they're not as bad as,many "2D" device papers out there doesn't mean they should get a pass for being deliberately misleading.
That's not how partial pressures work at all. It only matters about the relative pressure of each individual gas if you don't want it leaking in. If you want to keep out nitrogen and oxygen it makes no difference if the package has 1atm of helium only or a vacuum.
I just noticed another disingenuous aspect to their claim - they say that because this operates at "atmospheric" pressure it will be more reliable than vacuum tubes of yore.
But these vacuum FETs are filled with 1 atmosphere of helium, so the partial pressure difference with the outside world for all other gases will still be the same as though it was operating with a full vacuum, and this device would require the same long-term hermetic packaging as a vacuum tube. It relies on helium to extend the mean free path of the electrons, though to be fair as dimensions are scaled down further from the current 100nm to say 20nm perhaps neither helium nor vacuum would be required. Still it seems to be a very misleading claim.
Vacuum micro/nano-electronics are interesting for RF/mm-wave applications as the transport can be ballistic which could theoretically enable ultra-high-frequencies with scaling of the size.
I haven't yet found a paper for the 460GHz claim in the IEEE Spectrum article so I'm not sure exactly which figure of merit they have picked for that claim, but rest assured that their comparisons to other transistor technologies are highly flawed.
InP devices for example already operate up to 1THz power gain cutoff frequencies and have for some years. Simple circuits including amplifiers have been demonstrated in the 600GHz range with both InP HBTs and HEMTs. Even silicon certainly operates in the multi-hundred-GHz range, not the 40GHz which is for some reason cited in the article. Using graphene as a point of comparison is somewhat laughable as graphene has yet to demonstrate any truly practical advantage over group-IV or III-V transistor technologies, and has never been close to beating other leading device technologies on clock speed despite heavy press coverage.
Even though shot noise comes about due to the quantized nature of electrons flowing over a barrier it is not treated at the circuit level as a quantized phenomenon, just as a white noise source like thermal noise.
This is unlike "telegraph" or "popcorn" noise which appears at the circuit level as a definitively quantized noise source.
The lead frames are not typically made with any lead, it is just a case of easily confused homonyms.
In "lead frames", "lead" refers to the metal pins coming out of the packages, which are connected to the LED die. It not typically made with any lead content (Pb, element 82) due to RoHS restrictions. It could be made of tin-plated copper, or various alloys of tin, copper, and silver. Older ones would likely have been Pb-plated copper.
Yup, I stopped reading the expanded universe during the New Jedi Order series. It's been many years since I read a NJO series book but it seemed like they were all filled with war and unhappiness. Bad stuff happened in other books too but it didn't seem hopeless and the other books/trilogies/series generally had a happy ending of some sort.
... For most applications a single load test suffices.
Is that the "yank it and see if it breaks test"? Always a good one to run.
And how is your fight against heterosexual marriage going?
Since there is no credible movement to end legal marriage for opposite sex couples the only equitable approach the government can take is to extend marriage rights to cover same sex couples.
A bit of salt makes most foods taste better (in the opinion of most people) and adding salt is in no way a scam.
I personally have a strong taste preference for the natural style peanut butters which have just peanuts and salt, but I have been disappointed whenever I have tried an unsalted nut butter.
At my uni some labs rely on a RFID badge system for charging for the access, others rely on a logsheet. Access is basically always restricted to authorized users by RFID badge.
The logsheet works well if a lab has proper oversight, most labs I've seen that run like this have a fully booked reservation calendar anyway so they know pretty well who is using it at any time. People who don't show up for reserved time or don't log time properly get in trouble and may have access restricted or revoked if the problem continues.
No matter the system you basically need to have "boots on the ground", i.e. somebody in charge of the equipment who is in the lab pretty regularly and makes sure that people show up for their reservations, makes sure they stay logged in with their swipe card or fill out the logbook properly, and makes sure they use the equipment properly and safely.
This is mainly a people problem, not a technical problem.
I don't think you fully understand how this type of setup works in a University - this type of billing setup is common in the labs and departmental machine shops at my uni. It's important to keep in mind that even within a department there are a number of fairly independent faculty members and their research groups who win grants to do their work and buy equipment with this grant money for their labs, and then there may be multiple departments within a single building. Overhead charged to research grants helps pay for the building maintenance and department staff but usually doesn't generally pay for any upkeep of equipment, supplies, or staffing of any of the research labs.
If a professor lets other people use his equipment without paying for it then lots of people will want to use it (because it's free) and it can become a money sink where the professor who owns the equipment is paying for all supplies and upkeep but he can't enforce oversight of the equipment because there's no cost recovery to pay for a tech or grad student to maintain the tool, train new users, and watch over usage. Since there's no oversight parts will get misplaced, people will mistreat it and damage the tool. I've seen it happen. So they need to charge other users something, to fairly allocate cost it might as well be hourly.
If there is a group of professors who all benefit from each others' labs then they can share access equally, and each professor is responsible for the cost of maintaining and staffing their lab, much like a network peering arrangement. But if it's a very one-sided sharing then charging for access makes a lot of sense, otherwise one professor ends up subsidizing the others.
This is a good point, thanks.
I don't care whether or not churches redefine themselves. I make no demand on them whatsoever. They can do whatever they please within the bounds of the law because it does not affect me. I even respect their right to grant the marriage sacrament only to straight couples, though I would personally prefer that such discrimination not be legal for an organization which is able to claim significant tax privileges.
My point in my first post was that if a religious organization wants a sacrament of union that doesn't share a name with a civil status that can be conferred on homosexual couples then the churches can rename their sacrament. That's all.
Maybe I got a little carried away by telling religious groups to suck it up but it makes so unhappy to hear about people who oppose gay marriage and homosexuality in general, or think that homosexuality is a choice, or a sign of moral decay, or a result of sexual trauma. Many of the staunchest critics of homosexuality push their views in the context of an organized religion, which tends to make me think poorly of organized religions in general since I can find no logical reason to be opposed to homosexuality.
I decided to spend 5 minutes looking into the precedence issue and found a random online source about the history of marriage which seems to suggest that civil marriage predates religious marriage in Rome anyway. This may persuade some (if civil marriage does truly predate religious marriage), but religious and civil origins or marriage are both millennia past and don't matter much in my opinion.
The word marriage is heavily entrenched in law and contract as a civil status. Religion may have used the term first (I don't actually know, nor do I care) but it's a legal word now and religious institutions should suck it up. It would probably even be expensive for the government to change the name of marriage to civil union.
If religious institutions don't like sharing a word for marriage because gays are finally allowed to get married in a subset of states then religions should invent a new term which refers solely to their religions sacrament (maybe "religious union"? "no-gays-allowed union"?) because they are the ones who have a problem, not us.
Religious people who oppose homosexuality are fleeing in vain from the march of history, because the march towards equal rights will not stop despite the loud but few voices against homosexuality. If religions can get on board we'll get equal rites too.
I have to wonder what the killer app is for flexible chips? Wearable electronics is always mentioned in this sort of press release, but we have Google Glass already which doesn't require flexible chips. Flexible circuit boards are already in wide use, sometimes with rigid areas to reinforce specific areas that don't need to flex. What applications truly require a flexible integrated circuit?
Flexible displays make sense for flexible integrated circuits but I'm still a bit skeptical about that because it seems like the sort of thing which would get damaged really easily. Unless flexible displays end up being used primarily for conforming to non-flat rigid surfaces but that seems like a pretty limited application still.
Maybe I'm not thinking ambitiously enough but I just don't see flexible integrated circuits meriting the buzz that they get.
If you can't easily divide the number ten into two equal halves, then perhaps you have bigger problems than just which set of units to use.
GP never said it couldn't be... you're deliberately missing the obvious point that 12 can be divided into by thirds and quarters with integer results while 10 cannot.
A base 10 unit system is better because (and only because) base 10 is our primary number system. A meter is better than a foot because (and only because) it is the more popular international standard. We could scale Imperial unis with base-10 SI prefixes if we wanted to, and some people do.
I would tend to argue that Imperial units tend to be more natural since things like inches, feet, tablespoons, teaspoons, gallons, and miles came out of practical usage rather than a top-down choice of a base unit standard and subsequent base-10 scaling by SI prefixes. But I also readily admit that I may be wrong and merely biased since I grew up with Imperial units.
Funnily enough nobody is forcing you. You are clearly not the target for this product, but so far about 20,000 other people are.
I am one of the pre-orderers of Soylent. Why? I enjoy tasty and varied food but I don't always have the time or money to eat the way I'd like to eat, so I end up spending more money than I'd like on restaurants/takeout or eating really unhealthy food like Cup Noodles. Soylent appears to be a relatively affordable way to get a fast and nutritious meal replacement. While I try it out I will probably replace lunch and/or dinner with Soylent since for me these tend to be the most inconvenient meals. Other pre-orderers seem to view it differently and see food as more of a hastle that Soylent will help them avoid, but to each their own.
You might ask why Soylent and not an existing meal replacement drink? *shrug* For me at least it's really down to supporting Rob's stated vision for the project. I haven't done detailed research on how or if Soylent is different from existing products but I do know that his goal is different and going for total food replacement is probably a higher standard than instant breakfast drinks or diet drinks, which may mean something or nothing. I just ordered one of the lower tiers to try it out and if I like it I'll buy more, assuming the product continues to be produced.
It's a good feature, but an important feature of any UI is discoverability since most people don't read manuals anymore. Buttons are easy to discover and manipulate. It took me about 2 months to discover the single-handed map zoom gesture. I also think it requires slightly more brainpower to use while driving which is when you really want an easy to use single handed map zoom function.
Don't even get me started other poor discoverability and fiddly gesture features in Android Kit Kat that replace the older more discoverable features like the fiddly camera settings tree, and swipe to reject/accept calls which has no indication of which direction is which until you start swiping. Some of these changes may predate KitKat, I was happily sitting on Android version 2.something for a couple of years, but I'm not as happy with the new version.
I doubt they really have 25,000 members, that's probably the number of people who have signed up on their forums at one point or another. Active membership is surely much smaller.
I know it's a supply and demand problem, but an overabundance of supply for internships in certain fields shouldn't allow companies to accept unpaid interns. This can make it very hard for people without significant financial support from their family to enter these fields.
Engineering students in the US have pretty good internship opportunities which are frequently paid well over minimum wage and if they like you it can lead to job offers and help young engineers build their professional network.
That other industries might not even pay their interns seems very wrong to me. Companies aren't in the business of training interns for charity so the company must derive some benefit, therefore the interns should be paid at least minimum wage. Even if the work output is low the company can use internships as a recruitment and assessment method for hiring new full-time workers.