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Comment Re:Turns out agencies don't really work like that (Score 1) 145

The talent agencies are desperate for growth, they've already massively consolidated and recently started buying the sports management companies, so I'm sure if they think they can make money off the arrangement they'll try. The problem for programmers is that even really, really good ones only make 2-3x the league minimum for the major sports leagues so agents might not want to deal with the work for their 10% cut.

Comment Re:First Fascist! (Score 1) 39

Coincidentally, I saw this JE this morning right after seeing a report on CBS's morning news program that said that marijuana is by far the least dangerous of all recreational drugs. They found the most dangerous was alcohol, followed by heroin, followed by cocaine. I did a quick search, it doesn't look like they've posted it to their web site.

I've found an incredible amount of misinformation about marijuana. This article says "Those who might remember pot from the 70s - the marijuana grown and sold in Colorado today is up to 10 times stronger."

The difference isn't strength of the pot, it's how its potency is measured and how pot is and was sold. They take the pot, grind up the entire bag and test it.

Today, pot is grown indoors so it has no seeds, and only the buds are sold. In the seventies, they put the whole plant; stems, seeds, leaves and all. Leaves are far less potent than buds, stems have very little THC and seeds have none at all, and the seeds are heavy. I saw pot in the '70s that the seeds were more than half the weight of the bag. So grinding up the whole bag would indicate that it's 10 times stronger, when stoners always threw the stems and seeds away and usually saved the bud for the weekend.

The best pot I ever smoked was in Thailand in 1973-4.

Now, even if pot wasn't the safest of all recreational drugs, even if it were the deadliest, how does your neighbor getting stoned affect you or society at large?

There's a chapter in a book that was required reading in a college history class in the late '70s that shows how incredibly moronic prohibition is. Alcohol and Al Capone

Look at Mexico and Columbia. Prohibition is purely stupidly evil.

Comment Re:Well maybe future improvements (Score 1) 279

GaAs chips have a very high thermal tolerance, temperatures of 250C have been shown to have no impact on MTTF, this is ~250% better than Si. The bigger issue is what do you attach them to, most commonly available PCBs can't handle that, though solutions do exist since I've read about very high temperature GaAs chips used in jet engine monitoring and control.

Comment Re:Resource wars (Score 1) 279

Doubtful, Ga isn't that rare, we mine ~254t per year mostly as a byproduct of Al smelting, this is fairly small compared to ~54,000t for Si use in semiconductors, but is quite high given the fairly small market for it today. To give you an idea Lithium is slightly less common in the crust but annual production is ~30,000t.

Comment Re:This is the End, Beautiful Friend, the End. (Score 1) 279

It's definitely slowing down, Westmere EX was 2.6B in early 2011, Haswell EP 5.69B in late 2014 so roughly 42 months to double (Haswell die is ~20% bigger accounting for the 220% count instead of 200%) . A large part of that slowdown though might be economics, Westmere was surely started before the financial crisis and Haswell likely during or after so Intel might have slowed development (especially since on these large parts they don't have any meaningful competition except at the very high end from IBM and Oracle)

Comment Mostly Republicans trying to legalize. (Score 1) 398

This is only news to those who have had their head in the ground, listening to fox news and government shills.

I've noticed that it seems to be mostly Republicans who are putting up the legalization legislation trial balloons.

(Can't speak about Fox. I don't follow 'em all that much since, during the (especially the last) presidential campaigns, they proved the right-hand side of their claimed "fair and balanced" coverage consisted of flogging the Neocon faction and ignoring or slamming the others - especially the "Liberty" faction and Ron Paul.)

But I haven't checked Thomas.gov to see whether this is accurate, or just an artifact of the media only covering it when a Republican does it, on the "man bites dog IS news" principle.

Comment Re:The Summary Claims Effect is Cause (Score 1) 33

The Aurora Borealis are not "are an electromagnetic phenomena that can adversely affect ..."

(Putting on my grammar policeman cap, and explicitly not addressing Rob's point...)

I DO wish the author of TFA would correctly use the singular and plural
of "Phenomenon".
  - Phenomenon: One (class of ...)
  - Phenomena: More than one (class of ...)

The Aurora Borealis are a set of related phenomena, involving glows from ionization of various atmospheric elements at different altitudes, various of the Van Allen belts being pumped up with new particles and/or pushed down by magnetic field distortion from solar wind variations, upper-atmosphere currents, ground currents, and I don't know what all else. The author's apparently inconsistent use of the singular and plural makes it difficult to understand what he meant.

Comment Re:Lawyers rejoice!! (Score 3, Insightful) 114

The loss of time and effort to figure out whether this is going to cause a problem and then the time and effort to get rid of it.

That loss is obvious not much on a dollar per user basis, but if you add up all those users it's enough to incent Lenovo to do something so scurrilous. That's precisely the situation which class action lawsuits exist to redress, and according to the article that's the kind of lawsuit that has been filed.

Comment Re:Read the EULA... the lawsuit has no merit. (Score 5, Interesting) 114

The issue isn't whether EULAs are *potentially* enforceable. The question is whether *this* EULA is enforceable.

In general there is no contract unless their is some kind of exchange of "considerations". Typically the consideration is the privilege of using the copyright holder's software. But, if you can show that users don't want to use this software, and that it is installed for the benefit of a third party, there is no exchange of considerations between the end-user and the copyright holder, and therefore no valid contract.

Comment Re:Good grief... (Score 1) 681

CS people are better educated than the average person, but many of them are still surprisingly ignorant about scientific topics.

Including computer science.

I once sat in on an introductory CS lecture in which the associate professor teaching the course was explaining the requirements for lab assignments. First explained that the students were required to write down and turn in specifications and objectives for each program they wrote. I was very pleased and impressed; I thought this was a good habit to encourage.

Next the professor went on to illustrate things that should or should not be in the specifications. "For example," he said, "you should not specify that the program must halt. That's because it's impossible to tell whether any program will halt."

I could have cried.

Comment Re:disclosure (Score 2) 448

You're raising a red herring issue. It's not that all papers have to disclose their funding: it's that he was required to disclose any potential conflicts of interest, which in this case would have included his funding sources. In essense he committed a mild form of scientific fraud. That doesn't mean he was wrong, it does mean he was deceptive.

That's a pittance.

Which is pretty much what he's worth. He's not an astrophysicist. That doesn't mean he can't publish. Some scientists have illustrious careers without having a degree in their field. Hank Stommel comes to mind. But those guys publish important papers that draw funding from within the field. This guy's career is totally a product of having the "right" position.

That's not true of other climate change skeptical scientists, who manage to have a career without politically motivated patronage. But their work isn't so quotable, because they're tugging at the loose threads of the scientific consensus. Their research doesn't show that the scientific consensus is wrong, because they can't do that in scientific terms -- yet.

If you want to overthrow the scientific consensus it's an uphill battle. It's supposed to be. Otherwise you'd have to give advocates of perpetual motion and creationism equal status, which they haven't earned yet.

Comment Re:Shallow and ignorant (Score 1) 188

True, but to the degree Sony ties one product line to another it's clear that Sony itself is trying to yoke those divisions to each other for marketing purposes. And to the degree that's true, Sony would be better off spinning off those divisions.

Why? Because this kind of synergy is the kind of thing that seems to make compelling sense inside the company, but is obviously insane to anyone *outside* the company, especially consumers, who see the strategy for what it is: overly complicated and obviously restrictive.

It's different if you enjoy a monopoly in one area. If you could only buy a game console from Sony, then anyone who's a gamer would consider buying a Sony smartphone to play his games. But if you deduct all the gamers who don't have a Sony console, or who have more than one console, and compare what's left to the size of the smartphone market and Sony's share of *that*, it seems a bit farfetched to beleive that an exclusive yoking of Sony consoles to Sony phones is going to drive significant sales to Sony phones or to Sony consoles.

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