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Comment True Viral Patent (Score 3, Interesting) 308

Monsanto knows their genetic patent is being spread by bees, and yet either nobody is correctly arguing this in court or nobody cares. If someone sued on that issue alone Monsanto's patents would be declared invalid long ago. All these farmers who have had bee by plantings of monsanto's seeds into their crops would be owed a lot of money.

Comment Might explain Gravity (Score 1) 154

I know we keep looking for smaller and smaller bits of an atom, but if the neutron exhibits this behavior then Gravity as a weak force could be explained. If all the neutrons in a object were phasing in and out of our universe then their gravity impact on the object would be limited to the total neutrons and the force they can exert on the object while they exist in our dimension. Other parts of atoms do have mass, but this is interesting.

Comment Leaves a lot of data out of the story (Score 1) 50

Sun like stars, what composition are they, their ages, binary systems etc.

I would be curious if they could say what their rotational speeds were compared to our Sun, if these super flare stars have high rotational speeds it could provide enough twisting to create these.

The hot planet theory would mean the mass of the planet had to be high enough and the distance close enough that the gravity center was inside the star to stir it up enough I would think. The idea that some teleconnection or alignment could cause these to flare is okay, but another possibility is that a rocky planet with a mass of jupiter could be inside the flare as well hence not seeing it, or it's speed and the timing of the flare means it's gone around by the time the flare explodes.

Comment Re:On the upside though (Score 1) 257

Not true, the sun gets about 1% brighter every million years so if we move away slowly then maybe that counteracts the increase in light output.

There's a theory out there that believes as the sun loses mass the planets move away slowly, so perhaps by the time the sun is a red giant, we would be far enough away to not get toasted.

Comment Why NYC (Score 1) 105

Other than suburbanites how on earth is Facebook going to appeal to those who might want to live elsewhere. I can get having the "Marketing" people there despite Zuckerberg's aversion to marketing in the early days. However technical staff and coders probably would like to live in an area that appeals to everything that NYC can not provide. Places like Boulder Colorado, Austin Texas, Seattle come to mind.

Comment Re:Part timers? (Score 3, Interesting) 1008

Lets not forget Apple may report into http://www.theworknumber.com/index.asp

Its basically a credit report about your work history, and unfortunately the employee can not see what's listed in there because they do not fall under the Fair Credit Reporting Act.

So it's entirely possible "Fired for Unionization" could be listed in there and you would not be able to do anything about it, and employers will not show you this information when they pull things up on you. So you could be a Sr Engineer and they list your title as Engineer, and you apply for another job elsewhere claiming your Sr Engineer and they will just call you a liar and move on to the next person.

Apple

Submission + - Apple King of Magazine Rack Mindshare (macchatter.com)

Bruha writes: If you look at the photo, you'll see that the majority of the magazines are Apple related and very few are Windows related, even Linux magazines outnumber Microsoft now.

Comment Not going to help jobs much (Score 1) 136

First any engineer they try to hire may just balk at having to live in such a small town. There are far bigger metro areas with good rates for electricity in the intermountain west that can provide 80% air cooling a year. Colorado Springs comes to mind where Walmart is considering building a Datacenter, and Verizon Wireless, Fedex, HP, and a few others already have facilities there as well, the cost of living is much cheaper compared to silicon valley or New York. I sure hope for their sake this small town is not far from Portland. Takes a special person to want to work in a town that small.

FWIW, data centers employ less than 100 people in most cases once it's built out, with small increases per 10000 sqft think 1-2 more people to cover the added workload. Considering the company involved, they will probably have a skeleton crew of facilities folks and a few engineers to handle the "Hands On" work. The rest will be taken care of remotely.

And in most cases these people just got sold out to facebook in the form of massive Tax breaks for facebook, that will not reduce the tax burden of the people who lived there. I think Colorado Springs is throwing millions in tax incentives to Walmart just to attract the business, not sure how a town of 10,000 could afford such large tax breaks, so hopefully it works out for them.

Space

The Spin of a Star Reveals Its Age 67

eldavojohn writes "Some soon-to-be-published research on gyrochronology has yielded a possible method for more accurately determining a star's age. While determining the age of stars in clusters has been done using the patterns of its color and brightness, singular stars are much more difficult. By comparing established age information from clusters and analyzing the spin of stars, the researchers have established a defined relationship between color (mass), spin and age giving them the beginning of a guide of 'stellar clocks.' This was accomplished after four painstaking years of collecting data from 71 single dwarf members of the open cluster NGC6811 and establishing a model using data from Kepler."

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