I have seen these images so many times before. Standing waves, traveling waves, plane polarized wave entering a ferrite core and its plane of polarization turning and twisting, all in glorious 24 bit color.
But all those images and animations came from Ansoft High Frequency Structure Simulator software. Not actual experimental physically observed phenomena. And not at light frequencies. Microwave wavelengths mostly.
So seen it so many times before, but definitely not meh.
It is very well known that if you smear face with lemon juice the security camera can not record your face. Don't believe it? Have you done the invisible writing trick when you were a kid using lemon juice. Same principle. Many well known crooks have used this method. Big universities are studying the method.
I have put together IKEA like furniture a lot, took them apart and reassembled it.
The most important thing to remember is the back cardboard thing that closed the shelves and stuff is not a purely decorative item. It is not for aestherics. This provides the torsional rigidity needed to keep the shelf square. Make sure it is maintained right. The nails go into the soft exposed particle board and comes loose. Make sure it is nailed back in.
Get some 1inch x 1 inch steel L clams and lots of M5 or M6 nuts and washers too. Stress concentration is murder on particle boards, so use washers to spread the load around the clamps. Shake the furniture, find which parts shake and "give", add a few L clamps judiciously, the furniture will feel a lot more solid.
It is one of those mail-in-rebate houses. I am surprised there are people who still use them. The whole idea is a scam. To help them advertise a low low price, but small print reveals mail-in rebate to get the advertised price. I stopped using them long ago. They rely on consumers not bothering to send in the rebate coupons. Looks like now they allow the mail-in rebate to be claimed over the net, and the proof of purchase could be credit card statements.
It is a security hole and all the dire warnings by others are true. Most of these companies are run by people with no IT or computer expertise. The top man is going to haul the IT dept on the carpet and demand an explanation. You think the IT chief is going to admit that he/she was running a moronic system? No, she/he is going to shift blame and find some convenient scape goat. Given the top honchos don't know much about anything other than their bonus calculation, IT chief is going to claim, "It is a hack! That guys hacked into my super secure site". Then the PHBs running the company would call in the lawyers and make a mess out of the situation.
One thing the anonymous guy can do is to call the company that issued the mail-in-rebate and tell them, the outfit they had out sourced their rebate processing has holes in the system. Now it is the very big company that issued the rebate coupons run by PHBs fighting a smaller company that got the rebate processing contract run by PHBs. And quietly withdraw without drawing too much attention.
There's tons of very skilled and usually-careful criminals in prison.
The above is complete bullshit.
The prisons house people who were sloppy, stupid, and lazy.
The smart criminals are in political office and on boards of corporations.
No. Medium level smart criminals become politicians. The real top level smart criminals become C?O of publicly traded corporations, usually banks, and mutual funds. The super smart criminals buy the politicians to provide safety net for the smart C?O criminals and they remain largely opaque to scrutiny.
In a surprising move the Supreme Court of the United States took unprecedented action, active pro actively they endowed artificial intelligence with political beliefs, religious beliefs, freedom of expression, right to form associations, the right to petition government, and voting rights. Chief Justice Roberts said, "What the heck? Why wait for some astro-turf group to fake a grass root campaign, force a pointless lawsuit and wind its way all the way back to us? This is more efficient."
Come on. Artificial intelligence is the direct antithesis of natural stupidity, which is a synonym for religion. AI getting religion would be like matter vs anti-matter colliding! They will annihilate each other leaving being a puff of energy and a track on the cloud chamber.
Technology has been decimating jobs since the industrial revolution. But all the jobs destroyed were in India and China. They had 25% of the world GDP before industrialization. They had even higher fraction before the age of exploration distributed cash crops (sugarcane, tea, coffee, breadfruit, cotton) around the world. So for centuries all the philosophers, economists and sociologists did not even understand the full impact of the industrialization. Mostly they saw it as political issues, colonialism, anti-colonialism, etc etc.
Read the The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley to get an idea of the doom and gloom being predicted for centuries. Matt takes the view all these gloom predictors were wrong and the industrialization is an unadulterated success for humanity. He seems to think humanity consists of Europe and USA.
This review sums it up nicely
The job destruction is also accompanied with wealth transfers and power transfers. Finally the job destruction finally lapped up the shores of Europe and USA by 1980s. Slowly middle class of America is waking up to what has been done to them. Their jobs are gone. The "wealth" they have as home equity is a fickle fictional paper gain. Their pensions are gone. Their investments in 401K funds is being used to transfer more power to the top 0.5% of the rich.
Typically very smart and hard working people end up in the top 2% by income and usually end up in the band 98th percentile and 99.5percentile. (To reach the top 0.5% you must have inherited wealth or take huge risks and be lucky). The wealth transfers from third world to industrialized nations had run its course, wealth transfer from the bottom 80% to top 20% has run its course. Till then these guys were very happy and egging it along. Now there is no real wealth left below 90%. The momentum of the economic policies set in motion by them is taking money from the 90 to 98 band and moving it to the top 0.5%.
If you finish college and get in to the 99% cut off entry level salary and stay exactly at the 99% cut off all through your career, it is not enough to get you into the top 1% by wealth (5 million according to IRS and 8 million according to the feds). Till about 2000s, top doctors, lawyers, accountants routinely made it to the top 1% without inheritance. Not any longer. Citation provided
Looks like the linked site is a pay wall or something. Renders the article in low res, throws a lot of pop ups.
It seems to be a bad mash up of javascript running flash and pdf. Malware purveyors dream.
Wonder why the editors let such bad sites and auto playing videos to be posted.
Typically the grid operates at full load on sunny days in the afternoon when all the airconditioners are at full blast. The spot price for electricity fluctuates a lot. And most utilities buy and sell power in this spot market where they make most of their profits. The base load is just 40% of the peak load and there is so much of excess capacity electricity basically sold at cost or at a loss.
Enter, Solar.
It provides power exactly when the demand peaks. If solar meets the peak power demand, the spot price for electricity will fall. For brief period an Australian utility had to sell power at *negative* prices at the peak! There was so much solar power feeding into the grid, they had to pay people to take their power, lest their generators overheat and burn.
The amount of solar electricity created might be small in terms of energy produced. But when it comes to profits, this probably cuts deep into the profits of the utilities.
Eventually the utilities will reduce their peak capacity to create an artificial shortage and trade. The net metered roof top solar energy is bought back at wholesale prices by law. They typically get sold instantly in the spot market at peak prices. The utilities are making tons of money on the net metering, all their talk about roof top solar being free loading is just bull shit.
The whole concept of Intellectual Property is created by the government, and you need government to enforce it. When regular real estate is subject to eminent domain, why patents, copyrights etc should be above it? If some drug company develops a drug that can cure Hep-C and is profitable enough to sell it in third world countries for 20$ a dose, but insists on charging 160,000$ per dose for USA, I think the government should just step in, take over the patent based on eminent domain, pay the company something along the lines of what is suggested in the summary. Take a billion or two, and the entire cost of development, testing and regulatory approval too. But we can't let the drug companies game our government and treat us like a milch cow.
You know there is this well proven technology, that has been used for more than 200 years by the ranchers. Just punch a hole through the ear lobe and slip in a string and a token. We can modernize it by making the token RFID.
Why don't we ask the question, "Does putting RFID ear tags on the employees improve Business?
Looks like the Business will not rest till it turns every fiscal conservative who still believes in the free markets into foaming in the mouth rabid raving lunatic communist.
This pandemic is generally understood as the consequence of a singular introduction of Yersinia pestis, after which the disease established itself in European rodents over four centuries.
The microbe lived in the damned rats for 400 years. The rats are responsible for black death. The article merely claims the microbe originated in Asia and was introduced to Europe via gerbils on the land route.
writing from memory, any errors mine, not the article's:
Original theory was that the microbes could not survive the cold climates and long distance travel of the silk road. But the direct sea route shortened the journey and provided a warmer passage. Thus the black death microbe traveled on rats on ships. This article moves the date of introduction of the microbe to 1347 CE, at least 130 years before Barthalomiyo (sp?) Diaz rounded cape of storms, and Vasco Da Gama reached India.
I installed a recent version of Firefox in Google Nexus 5 phone. I could not install NoScript. Says not supported. I desperately need an alternative to Chrome in my phone. All kinds of pop-ups. Does this version support NoScript?
There are tons of people from India, China and many other countries who do graduate studies in USA in student visa F1. Then they get to work for 12 months as "Practical Training" period. If they hold a STEM degree they get an additional 15 months. After that they get H1B and stay on it till they get their green cards. This group will get very competitive salaries and they are usually world class graduates demanding and getting world class salary.
Then there is a whole different set of H1Bs, fresh from India, no American degree or qualifications. The claimed Indian degree and qualifications are often unverifiable. Their quality of work is poor, their educating is poor, their English is poor. For them even a 45K a year is paying them too much.
Most slashdotters think the corporations lobby for H1B to depress wages for Americans. No, people. They don't care whatever pay you get. They are not paying for it out of their pocket. The real reason is corporate corruption. Many top executives of these American companies own shell companies through intermediaries. These shell companies get the contract to supply warm bodies to the corporations they manage. They sign both sides of the contract, one as the CIO of XYZ corporation and the other side as the owner of some shell company contracting with XYZ corporation. Indian companies like TCS, Infosys, Cognizant, Wipro get contracts from these shell companies. They knowingly supply substandard workers with fake resumes and fake work experience. They know it will not be scrutinized well. They know the H1-Bs will play along with the fake resume. Every step of the way the billing rate is padded up. It is them who actually spend tons of money to lobby the congress.
3. I love short three month gigs. After all I earn in three month more than I need for 15 month of living.
You must be living very frugally. Never got out of the spending habits formed during the grad student days, I suppose.
When I transitioned from being one of the PIGS[*] to a regular employee on a small not too fancy company with median starting salary, I earned more in that year than I did in the previous four years as a graduate student and as the root (of all evils) of the computer lab.
All the fortran programs I wrote as a grad student in Indian Institute of Science, back in 1980s live for ever in that 2400 feet of half-inch tape recorded at 6250 Bytes-per-inch lives digitally for ever. The only good thing about that was that I swiped the blank media from my former employer instead of paying half-a-month salary of a gazetted (civilian equivalent of commissioned) officer to buy the blank tape in the open market. Back in those days, in India, imported items were that expensive.
Then I also have Watfor compiler and ChiWriter in 5.5 inch floppy disks. I have my grad student work at UT in a unix mini tape. I also have some IOmega 100 MB disks. In my basement somewhere I have the backups of my WindowsNT machine in 3.5 inch floppy disks. All of them are digital. All of them are as dead as any corpse buried in a cemetery.
This is Microsoft we are talking about. I am seriously thinking of buying a new desktop because pretty soon I won't be able to buy a new Windows7 machine. Google will keep it in beta forever. Microsoft will slap a new version number of end of life it in 10 years.
Almost all the migrator birds would be severely confused if they can not see the stars for extended periods of time. Many of them sense the Earth's magnetic field. But the species that have survived the periodical shifts in Earth's magnetic field and polarity reversals, they must be using celestial navigation. Losing the stars would leave them very confused.
The way the contracts are structured, these companies have so many escape clauses and poinson pills. "If the red light cameras were removed by a future government, the red light camera company should be paid xyz million dollars". It is an outrage officials elected in elections with tiny voter turn out and small margins sign contracts on behalf of the city or county stretching to millions of dollars over the coming decades
City of Chicago sold all its parking meters for a one time payment for the next 99 years. The clauses are so egregious, City can not create new parking spaces,
no new parking garages by the city etc etc. And the enforcement is so bloody aggressive.
The city (or the state) nearly sold the Midway airport for peanuts. Luckily the buyer went bankrupt in the last financial crisis.
There is cost of storage, inventory management, liability insurance etc. You think it would cost them 57$ for that? Then there can be nothing that is priced lower than 57$ because the cost of the product is negligible. If some one can make rounds ahead of the garbage truck, pick discarded fridges, TV sets, VCRs and random stuff off the garbage pile, strip them for parts, classify, store and ship for 10$, why does it take Sears 57$?
I would have gladly paid 10$ for that part to Sears. If it manages to keep its storage and inventory management low it would amortize to less than 3$ per part. It could have made a 230% profit margin on that sale. No, it wants 1000% margin on that part. That is why I said cry me a river Sears.
I actually paid 57$ + S&H/. (Long story. Wife involved). I never forgave them for holding me to ransom like that. I am crazy like that.
Slashdot Mirror
But all those images and animations came from Ansoft High Frequency Structure Simulator software. Not actual experimental physically observed phenomena. And not at light frequencies. Microwave wavelengths mostly.
So seen it so many times before, but definitely not meh.
More citations:
http://awesci.com/the-astonish...
http://gagne.homedns.org/~tgag...
The most important thing to remember is the back cardboard thing that closed the shelves and stuff is not a purely decorative item. It is not for aestherics. This provides the torsional rigidity needed to keep the shelf square. Make sure it is maintained right. The nails go into the soft exposed particle board and comes loose. Make sure it is nailed back in.
Get some 1inch x 1 inch steel L clams and lots of M5 or M6 nuts and washers too. Stress concentration is murder on particle boards, so use washers to spread the load around the clamps. Shake the furniture, find which parts shake and "give", add a few L clamps judiciously, the furniture will feel a lot more solid.
It is a security hole and all the dire warnings by others are true. Most of these companies are run by people with no IT or computer expertise. The top man is going to haul the IT dept on the carpet and demand an explanation. You think the IT chief is going to admit that he/she was running a moronic system? No, she/he is going to shift blame and find some convenient scape goat. Given the top honchos don't know much about anything other than their bonus calculation, IT chief is going to claim, "It is a hack! That guys hacked into my super secure site". Then the PHBs running the company would call in the lawyers and make a mess out of the situation.
One thing the anonymous guy can do is to call the company that issued the mail-in-rebate and tell them, the outfit they had out sourced their rebate processing has holes in the system. Now it is the very big company that issued the rebate coupons run by PHBs fighting a smaller company that got the rebate processing contract run by PHBs. And quietly withdraw without drawing too much attention.
I am sure this line of furniture will get some name like Nokaard (with two dots over the o).
Fox news will be ranked very low and the Republicans will scream. But some relief to Rick Santorum after all these years.
There's tons of very skilled and usually-careful criminals in prison.
The above is complete bullshit.
The prisons house people who were sloppy, stupid, and lazy.
The smart criminals are in political office and on boards of corporations.
No. Medium level smart criminals become politicians. The real top level smart criminals become C?O of publicly traded corporations, usually banks, and mutual funds. The super smart criminals buy the politicians to provide safety net for the smart C?O criminals and they remain largely opaque to scrutiny.
In a surprising move the Supreme Court of the United States took unprecedented action, active pro actively they endowed artificial intelligence with political beliefs, religious beliefs, freedom of expression, right to form associations, the right to petition government, and voting rights. Chief Justice Roberts said, "What the heck? Why wait for some astro-turf group to fake a grass root campaign, force a pointless lawsuit and wind its way all the way back to us? This is more efficient."
Come on. Artificial intelligence is the direct antithesis of natural stupidity, which is a synonym for religion. AI getting religion would be like matter vs anti-matter colliding! They will annihilate each other leaving being a puff of energy and a track on the cloud chamber.
Read the The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley to get an idea of the doom and gloom being predicted for centuries. Matt takes the view all these gloom predictors were wrong and the industrialization is an unadulterated success for humanity. He seems to think humanity consists of Europe and USA. This review sums it up nicely
The job destruction is also accompanied with wealth transfers and power transfers. Finally the job destruction finally lapped up the shores of Europe and USA by 1980s. Slowly middle class of America is waking up to what has been done to them. Their jobs are gone. The "wealth" they have as home equity is a fickle fictional paper gain. Their pensions are gone. Their investments in 401K funds is being used to transfer more power to the top 0.5% of the rich.
Typically very smart and hard working people end up in the top 2% by income and usually end up in the band 98th percentile and 99.5percentile. (To reach the top 0.5% you must have inherited wealth or take huge risks and be lucky). The wealth transfers from third world to industrialized nations had run its course, wealth transfer from the bottom 80% to top 20% has run its course. Till then these guys were very happy and egging it along. Now there is no real wealth left below 90%. The momentum of the economic policies set in motion by them is taking money from the 90 to 98 band and moving it to the top 0.5%.
If you finish college and get in to the 99% cut off entry level salary and stay exactly at the 99% cut off all through your career, it is not enough to get you into the top 1% by wealth (5 million according to IRS and 8 million according to the feds). Till about 2000s, top doctors, lawyers, accountants routinely made it to the top 1% without inheritance. Not any longer. Citation provided
All these numbers are BMW models. Coincidence?
Wonder why the editors let such bad sites and auto playing videos to be posted.
Enter, Solar.
It provides power exactly when the demand peaks. If solar meets the peak power demand, the spot price for electricity will fall. For brief period an Australian utility had to sell power at *negative* prices at the peak! There was so much solar power feeding into the grid, they had to pay people to take their power, lest their generators overheat and burn.
The amount of solar electricity created might be small in terms of energy produced. But when it comes to profits, this probably cuts deep into the profits of the utilities.
Eventually the utilities will reduce their peak capacity to create an artificial shortage and trade. The net metered roof top solar energy is bought back at wholesale prices by law. They typically get sold instantly in the spot market at peak prices. The utilities are making tons of money on the net metering, all their talk about roof top solar being free loading is just bull shit.
The whole concept of Intellectual Property is created by the government, and you need government to enforce it. When regular real estate is subject to eminent domain, why patents, copyrights etc should be above it? If some drug company develops a drug that can cure Hep-C and is profitable enough to sell it in third world countries for 20$ a dose, but insists on charging 160,000$ per dose for USA, I think the government should just step in, take over the patent based on eminent domain, pay the company something along the lines of what is suggested in the summary. Take a billion or two, and the entire cost of development, testing and regulatory approval too. But we can't let the drug companies game our government and treat us like a milch cow.
Why don't we ask the question, "Does putting RFID ear tags on the employees improve Business?
Looks like the Business will not rest till it turns every fiscal conservative who still believes in the free markets into foaming in the mouth rabid raving lunatic communist.
This pandemic is generally understood as the consequence of a singular introduction of Yersinia pestis, after which the disease established itself in European rodents over four centuries.
The microbe lived in the damned rats for 400 years. The rats are responsible for black death. The article merely claims the microbe originated in Asia and was introduced to Europe via gerbils on the land route.
writing from memory, any errors mine, not the article's:
Original theory was that the microbes could not survive the cold climates and long distance travel of the silk road. But the direct sea route shortened the journey and provided a warmer passage. Thus the black death microbe traveled on rats on ships. This article moves the date of introduction of the microbe to 1347 CE, at least 130 years before Barthalomiyo (sp?) Diaz rounded cape of storms, and Vasco Da Gama reached India.
I installed a recent version of Firefox in Google Nexus 5 phone. I could not install NoScript. Says not supported. I desperately need an alternative to Chrome in my phone. All kinds of pop-ups. Does this version support NoScript?
Then there is a whole different set of H1Bs, fresh from India, no American degree or qualifications. The claimed Indian degree and qualifications are often unverifiable. Their quality of work is poor, their educating is poor, their English is poor. For them even a 45K a year is paying them too much.
Most slashdotters think the corporations lobby for H1B to depress wages for Americans. No, people. They don't care whatever pay you get. They are not paying for it out of their pocket. The real reason is corporate corruption. Many top executives of these American companies own shell companies through intermediaries. These shell companies get the contract to supply warm bodies to the corporations they manage. They sign both sides of the contract, one as the CIO of XYZ corporation and the other side as the owner of some shell company contracting with XYZ corporation. Indian companies like TCS, Infosys, Cognizant, Wipro get contracts from these shell companies. They knowingly supply substandard workers with fake resumes and fake work experience. They know it will not be scrutinized well. They know the H1-Bs will play along with the fake resume. Every step of the way the billing rate is padded up. It is them who actually spend tons of money to lobby the congress.
3. I love short three month gigs. After all I earn in three month more than I need for 15 month of living.
You must be living very frugally. Never got out of the spending habits formed during the grad student days, I suppose.
When I transitioned from being one of the PIGS[*] to a regular employee on a small not too fancy company with median starting salary, I earned more in that year than I did in the previous four years as a graduate student and as the root (of all evils) of the computer lab.
[*] PIGS = Poor Indian Graduate Student.
Then I also have Watfor compiler and ChiWriter in 5.5 inch floppy disks. I have my grad student work at UT in a unix mini tape. I also have some IOmega 100 MB disks. In my basement somewhere I have the backups of my WindowsNT machine in 3.5 inch floppy disks. All of them are digital. All of them are as dead as any corpse buried in a cemetery.
This is Microsoft we are talking about. I am seriously thinking of buying a new desktop because pretty soon I won't be able to buy a new Windows7 machine. Google will keep it in beta forever. Microsoft will slap a new version number of end of life it in 10 years.
... if Klingon and pig latin are supported.
Boston is a geometric paradise compare to Pittsburgh, That's where you go once you die, according to the noted urban planner Bill Waterson.
Almost all the migrator birds would be severely confused if they can not see the stars for extended periods of time. Many of them sense the Earth's magnetic field. But the species that have survived the periodical shifts in Earth's magnetic field and polarity reversals, they must be using celestial navigation. Losing the stars would leave them very confused.
City of Chicago sold all its parking meters for a one time payment for the next 99 years. The clauses are so egregious, City can not create new parking spaces, no new parking garages by the city etc etc. And the enforcement is so bloody aggressive.
The city (or the state) nearly sold the Midway airport for peanuts. Luckily the buyer went bankrupt in the last financial crisis.
I would have gladly paid 10$ for that part to Sears. If it manages to keep its storage and inventory management low it would amortize to less than 3$ per part. It could have made a 230% profit margin on that sale. No, it wants 1000% margin on that part. That is why I said cry me a river Sears.
I actually paid 57$ + S&H/. (Long story. Wife involved). I never forgave them for holding me to ransom like that. I am crazy like that.