As for using boron and expecting nuclear things to happen, there is something similar that is already a thing. It's called boron-neutron capture therapy. It involves a chemotherapy medication that is not yet active. It incorporates boron in its structure, but is not actually active until the boron captures a neutron and transmutes into carbon. The idea is to inject the medication then aim a neutron beam at the tumor. The substance is transmuted at the beam and becomes active - but only there.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...
So transmuting boron really is a thing. Whether it captures a proton as easily as it captures a neutron is another question.
I recently read where the majority of the microplastics that we're finding every, including inside our tissues, in placentas, and such is coming from. Tires. Perhaps the car really is killing us, and the US is more in love with cars than almost anywhere. I wonder what these stats are like in Germany, possibly the only place more car-happy than the US?
In the old days it was something like two weeks per year of service, to a maximum of six months. The other aspect that affected where I worked was that the state required 90 days notice prior to layoffs of some size or greater. (Forget the threshold) So they'd lay people off immediately and they would be on the payroll but not working for 90 days. Then the severance kicked in.
I manged to survive the layoffs at IBM, then was sold to Global Foundries in 2015 with 5000 friends and a bunch of real estate.
In the old days when there was a decent severance package, volunteering for layoff was a good way to retire with a bonus. Other than a few specific times there wasn't a formal way to do so, but there was an informal path. Way back when I was on vacation over the layoff. When I came back someone I enjoyed talking with was gone. I found out he had been laid off and left with a smile on his face. (He was quite a bit older than me.)
Maybe Slashdot will go public someday and reward us low-UID users with shares! We'll be able to buy all the hot grits, Beowulf clusters, and neck beard care supplies we can imagine! Maybe then they'll also hire someone to add Unicode support, post-submit comment editing, and start checking article submissions for dupes. Okay, okay, I was just kidding with that last sentence.
I think the SourceForge acquisition was the closest riff to an IPO ever had. The numbers were never high enough or compelling enough for Slashdot to IPO. The D ice, B IZ X, and Stac k Exch a nge acquisitions seem to be the only financial action Slashdot will ever see.
Edit: The correct spellings of one or more of the entities above triggered the lameness filter -- I guess some topics shall not be discussed on
It'll be interesting to witness what happens to Reddit after IPO. I suspect this might be an IPO engineered for the investors to cash out as much as possible, and we'll see a return to private ownership and all outstanding shares bought by some entity within 3-5 years. Maybe as part of Springer or some other media conglomerate.
Cheers!
On Wednesday, Reddit said it plans to sell a chunk of its IPO shares to 75,000 of its most loyal users.
It's been a while. I wonder what the criteria will be. Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth VA Linux went public, Slashdot was part of the IPO frenzy, and some of us got the equivalent to ~$12k worth of VA Linux shares, free to trade after 6 months. The criteria back then was that our email had to appear on a Linux kernel or widely used tool commit for the distribution VA Linux used in their systems. It wasn't life changing money, but I remember it fondly because up until then all the payment or bonuses I ever received were for closed source, commercial or enterprise software development.
It'd be interesting to see what criteria Reddit uses for their IPO shares recipients. If they go by karma alone there'll be quite a few OnlyFans content creators who'll see the green. Hopefully it's some combination of karma, actual participation, account age, etc. in addition to whatever securities laws restrictions are in place (e.g. for VA Linux all recipients had to be US-based).
Cheers!
As a man in his late 60s, I've gotten the impression over the years, and my doctor has not denied this, that every man will die with prostate cancer. Notice I said "with", not "of". My interpretation is that the biological engineering of the prostate just isn't that good - they're failure prone. And let's face it, they're good enough. They practically always get us through our reproductive years. The "bad" cases of prostate cancer - like Frank Zappa and Daniel Fogleberg, hit in the late forties or early fifties. That's after normal reproduction, though still during child rearing years. Usually it's later than that, when the kids have flown the coop.
The other factor is if or when prostate cancer metastasizes. If it does, it's really nasty, one of the nastier cancers, and doesn't respond well to treatment. But catching it early and proper treatment generally keeps it at bay. It's a "maintainable" condition, which is probably why they're looking at re-classifying it.
Yes, my father had it. A friend of mine has it. My brother might have it. I had a scare almost a decade ago but am apparently OK. I absolutely get my routine check on it.
I wonder if the CxO is more readily replaced by an AI bot. The lower level people generally have to deal with other people. The CxOs do too, but far fewer people and they likely do it in more specialized jargon - the type of thing an AI could do well at. They also need access to an inhuman breadth and depth of knowledge - another thing an AI is good at.
There have been many quips about Amazon using algorithms to direct human workers. Maybe they haven't experimented enough yet with moving those algorithms up the chain yet.
> Then the Disease of Greed came along and damn near wiped us all out.
Optimistic, aren't you.
When I was in college in the latter half of the 1970's one of the local alternative rock radio stations was using "paraquat test kits" as the prizes in their radio contests. At the time they were saying that the US government was spraying paraquat on marijuana fields. Unethical growers would hurry up and harvest the fields, getting the tainted product to market before it shriveled up.
Someone felt that using this tainted product was a bad idea and came up with a test kit.
Real Programs don't use shared text. Otherwise, how can they use functions for scratch space after they are finished calling them?