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Comment Let's do an experiment: Kidney Failure Treatment (Score 2) 447

Those that believe the placebo effect or homeopathy works and have kidney disease should test their theory. Enter a medical experiment where they are given a choice of of this treatment or the medically approved treatment of dialysis followed by kidney transplant when a kidney is available or homeopathy and check the results. We all know pretty much what the results will be: death for the homeopathy treated patients and likely much longer life for the traditionally treated patients.

Comment Does Android 5.1 fix 5.0.2? (Score 1) 172

I have a Nexus 7 v 2012 and mistakenly updated to the various Android 5.x.x versions. What a mistake as many earlier posters have noted. I end up with interminable boot ups that vary from time to time as to what's happening, the device is slower than a turtle walking through mud and some apps completely fail to work. The problem with the "downgrade" to 4.4.4 is that it's complicated and as I understand it removes any and all apps and data that might be on the device. If Google wants my respect they will come up with an easy way of going back to KitKat 4.4.4 without removal of apps and data. Or come up with a version of 5 that removes all the problems generated by going from 4.4.4 to 5.x.x. Horror of horrors, I'm even thinking of taking a look at an iPad mini or and iPhone 6 +. Gasp!

Comment This material has been used on windows (Score 3, Informative) 87

For many years you can buy windows or window glass with this nano-particle titanium dioxide applied which made windows self cleaning. It sounds like the paint is just an extension of the earlier technology. Besides, which is harder to clean: your counter top or the outside of a half-dozen windows three stories up on your house? Sure, some windows are easy to clean because either the frames tllt inwards or are removable from inside, but not having to bother to do any cleaning sounds best to me

Comment Re:All the more reason... (Score 2) 248

I'm not sure crapware is now the problem. Crapware can generally be removed and for the unwashed masses one can get a Windows machine without crapware using Microsoft's Signature program.

The problem is hidden malware in firmware in devices like hard drives. No computer manufacturer can be immune to that if they buy parts that are infected when intercepted during shipping between the manufacturer and the computer assembler or end user by some three letter agency. The same for the finished computer. And what about malware hidden so deeply into computer parts where the firmware can't be rewritten? If Intel's or AMD's parts are corrupted in this way during manufacture, swapping out the part will never solve the problem.

Comment Re:Yes meanwhile.. (Score 1) 167

You hit the nail squarely on the head! My N 7 (2012) with Android Lollipop 5.0.0, 5.0.1, 5.0.2 has a long, crazy boot process, some apps are broken, notifications take forever to load (I disabled most of them), apps run slowly. I would hope 5.1 will be fix all these problems and allow me to run all my apps. I'm not hopeful.

Comment Driving I-80 though Nebrasa is like LA traffic now (Score 2) 481

The problem is the incredible amount of semi-trailer truck traffic. It's bumper-to-bumper. One gets behind one semi- passing another on a two lane highway east or west bound with the passing truck doing ~0.1 MPH faster than the passed truck at 65 MPH. It can take 10 minutes to accomplish this and traffic backs up behind this blockage. And passing through Omaha is an LA scenario.

Comment Re:Tsk. And they wonder where employee loyalty wen (Score 1) 331

They didn't need to do this to stay profitable.

Companies exist to produce profits, not to provide employment. If an employee is not providing net value, then it is better for the company, and the overall economy, for that employee to go somewhere else. In the long run, it is better for the employee as well.

Many employees are cost centers rather than profit centers. IT costs money. However, IT keeps the wheels turning and hopefully allows profit centers to be more efficient so as to increase profit per employee. By your reasoning, getting rid of IT would be a good thing, that is, until some outage prevented profit center employees from using their information infrastructure to do work and make money.

Comment Re:The ideal gas law is a limiting law (Score 1) 239

The footballs are not filled with water, but air. It's air pressure that's measured and the boiling point of air is very much below the ambient temperature of a football game.

Of course, one can have gaseous water at temperatures below the boiling temperature of water which is responsible for relative humidity in the air in our environment. To discuss this we need to think about the tendency for liquid water to evaporate (vapor pressure) as a function of temperature and the capacity of air to hold gaseous water (in relative terms) which involves a phenomenon different from the study pressure, temperature and volumes of pure gases in the absence of their liquid forms. If there were a some small volume of liquid water inside the footballs in equilibrium with its gas form, at the temperatures involved, say 50 deg F, the contribution to the gas pressure inside the football would be about 0.18 PSI. I looked up the vapor pressure of water to do the calculation. This is a negligible contribution to the gas pressure inside the football when it's ~13 PSI and might not even be noticeable using the gauges the refs used. Furthermore, gaseous water would likely follow the ideal gas law at these vapor pressures.

Comment The ideal gas law is a limiting law (Score 1) 239

Many commenters suggest the ideal gas law could be used to explain the temperature effect on the difference in pressure of the air in the footballs. Be careful about extrapolating its use to other circumstances. The ideal gas law works reasonable well for most gases at temperatures well above the boiling temperature of the gas and at relatively low pressures for small molecules. There's not enough room here to go through it in detail but a quick look in a college general chemistry text book or Wikipedia will fill the reader in. There are a number of modified ideal gas law equations that can do a pretty good job correcting for the influence of intermolecular interactions and molecular size on P vs T.

For the case at hand with gauge pressures of a couple of atmospheres and the pressure differences observed, the ideal gas law is probably good enough.

Comment Re:combination of things (Score 1) 239

MLB for example doesn't let the teams play with baseballs that they bring to the game,...

Partially correct. The home team provides the balls that both teams use. There was some kind of problem in Denver with the balls provided by the Rockies. Seems the balls were too dry and so the team installed a giant humidifier to dampen the balls to be like those in other cities. IIRC, given the high elevation with less dense air and dry balls they really accelerated off the bat when hit. I don't think it was called ballsgate or humiditygate, though.

Comment Remember the guy who hired a Chinese programmer? (Score 2) 271

There was the guy working for some company as a programmer who hired a programmer in China to do his work for him so that he could watch cat videos all day. IIRC, he paid the Chinese guy at the rate of $20k per year and the work was rated highly by the company's managers. Why hire an H1B person for $50k when you can hire someone outside the country for $20k that does good work and you don't have to go to all the trouble to get someone a visa, pay Social Security & Medicare taxes, pay moving expenses to the USA, help him or her set up all that's associated with settling in, etc., etc. We're talking 80% savings, not the much less 50%. Such a manager might might be considered a financial genius and end up Chief Financial Officer of the company.

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