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Comment: Re:Med students (Score 2) 188

by tlambert (#43824347) Attached to: Med Students Unaware of Their Bias Against Obese Patients

Let me ponder this for a minute.

A health care professional can be expected to have a bias regarding healthy vs unhealthy life choices. Being fat indicates that a person has made one HELL of a lot of unhealthy choices. Like - every single day, he eats to much.

Alternately they have hypothyroidism, for example, as a result of Hashimotos. It could also be Prader-Willi syndrome, or Bardet-Biedl syndrome. There are other genetic factors and diseases which can also result in obesity. Candida Albicans infections of the gut have also been implicated. There are also medications which can result in obesity. Prednisone, which is often used to treat very severe allergies, and also as an anti-rejection drug following organ transplantation, or to treat autoimmune disorders, is one. Others include antidepressants, seizure medications, and certain high blood pressure drugs, such as atenolol and metoprolol (both beta blockers).

Comment: Re:Ask IBM why they left . . . ? (Score 1) 94

by tlambert (#43823115) Attached to: European Commission Launches $12 Billion Chip Support Campaign

I am pretty sure IBM did not leave due to any reason directly related to the location. Semiconductor fabs can have a relatively short lifetime, depending on the technology. The IBM fab had been in operation for decades, if I am not mistaken.

If you want a leading edge fab, it is quite possible that some technology changes (e.g. wafer size conversion) make it uneconomical to upgrade an existing fab. In that case you need to build a new shell. Locations for new fabs are often significantly influenced by incentive payments from the local government. For example the new globalfoundries fab in new york state got billions of incentive payments. IBM most likely decided to discontinue the site after moving the products to a more modern fab that was build somewhere where they got more money...

The German, French, and Irish foundries Are losing on feature size. X-Fab is limited to around 180nm features, and the most recent French STMicroelectronics plant can barely do 32nm for relatively small die sizes. Most design houses these days are fabless, and the feature size is a determining factor on cooling requirements and power consumption. Frankly, Intel makes better chips, and they are pretty much willing to fab for anyone these days, If you don't care because you're doing a slower ARM design, then TSMC, UMC, or Samsung is good enough.

Given their relative production volumes from the European fabs that are out there, this is more or less a subsidy for X-Fab. Here is a nearly identical article from June of last year:

http://www.euractiv.com/innovation-enterprise/eu-eyes-airbus-chips-amid-market-news-513171 ...basically, they call for chip fabs every year, and it mostly goes to Germany.

Comment: Re:Good reason for working local.... (Score 1) 260

by tlambert (#43811535) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Can Yahoo Actually Stage a Comeback?

That clearly explains the success of Linux kernel development with its centralized location and excellent eye to eye developer contract vias a vias the Microsoft NT kernel development team. Nope. Actually it doesn't.

It took me dragging 5 people in to get a time code change into the event system in Linux. Linux is to the point where it doesn't do anything revolutionary any more. I ended up writing a specific driver to deal with a generic USB issue in order to get the thing into the kernel. All the USB firmware for keyboards is ripped off from all the other firmware, so the cheap keyboards are all doing encoding of shift keys in band instead of using the 8 bits out of band. But I fixed exactly one because trying to fix them all got shot down. On the plus side, it works with Chromebooks and Android phones, so guess what? I don't care any more.

Comment: Re:Good reason for working local.... (Score 1) 260

by tlambert (#43791055) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Can Yahoo Actually Stage a Comeback?

I'm just amazed by the fervor of the Marissa apologists. Marissa did an obviously stupid thing which is sure to bite Yahoo on the ass. Everybody knows what the problem is at Yahoo with lazy, tenured senior engineers. Cancelling remote was just stupid, the real problem is letting the slackers get away with it. Now they will just slack in the office and Marissa will be perfectly happy. Meanwhile, anybody with talent will be thinking twice about hanging around at Yahoo waiting for the next stupid edict. She got booted from the executive suite at Google for doing stupid things too. If she plays her cards right she will be out of Yahoo before the shit hits the fan and on to her next victim smelling like a rose.

The people I know are pretty much geniuses,

Peter Wemm is a genius.

I am not a fan of Marissa; she has this anti-genius bias that will bite her in the mediocrity. I can definitely see why she has made the decisions she did, however. Normal nerd vs. genius nerd is a "slow and steady" approach. It will not serve her well, but it is understandable.

Comment: Good reason for working local.... (Score 1) 260

by tlambert (#43789311) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Can Yahoo Actually Stage a Comeback?

Good reason for working local....

You can not inculcate a corporate culture change with remote workers without at least a token presence at the ground zero. It just does not work to state that "the company has changed" without forced acknowledgement that it has changed.

Marissa did the right thing here, even though it's not clear her overall direction is "the right thing". Remote workers do not "buy it" and if they don't, everything breaks down. Not sure that her direction is right, but pointing "there" instead of "somewhere over there, I won't be there" is a net win.

Comment: Re:price tag is irrelavant (Score 1) 289

by tlambert (#43779485) Attached to: Latvian Police Raid Teacher's Home for Uploading $4.00 Textbook

Ownership (all ownership) is the right to deny use. This is as true of intellectual property ownership as it is of tangible item ownership. And it's not a bad thing as many will knee jerk to scream. Ownership is a right to treat that which we earn as extensions of our body. If we have a right to deny the use of our bodies, then, by extension, we have a right to deny use of that which we own.

It'd be GREAT if intellectual property would be treated as real property!

Then I could use a patent troll's patent, and if they didn't stop me within some relatively short period of time, I could claim Adverse Possession, at which point I could choose to put it in the public domain. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_possession for how this applies to real property. The point is, if the true owner of the property isn't using it (because trolls do not produce any useful goods or services), and if my use is exclusionary of the true owner (try entering an established market and competing with "free" without being excluded), it's mine.

Comment: Re:What about stuff that poor fit in to an traditi (Score 1) 141

by tlambert (#43776233) Attached to: What Professors Can Learn From "Hard Core" MOOC Students

be nice if you can get a credit or an badge that means something with not having to go collgle for 2-4+ years with big bill and lot's of theory.

Issuing credit/"badges" for technical fields makes no sense, if you lack the common vocabulary to be able to communicate with your peers about complex topics, or lack the theory necessary to be able to generalize a solution and apply it to an entirely new problem.

If you are talking instead about society valuing blue collar labor less than white collar labor, then the educational system or trade school system is not the place to fix what society does or does not value, or for something it values, how highly. It's like looking under a streetlight for your contact lens that you lost in the alley "because the light's better".

I personally do not value blue collar labor, such as road construction, since I believe the infrastructure problem can be solved once by laying down utility tunnels. There's no reason that AT&T needs to come by, rip up my street, and do a half-assed repaving job, then PG&E comes by and rips up the same street for gas lines, and then does a half-assed repaving job, and then the water district come along and rips up the same street for the water, and does a half-assed repaving job, and then the sewer people come along and rip up the same street and does a half-assed repaving job, and then Sprint comes in to lay a fiber optic line, and rips up the same street and does a half-assed repaving job.

And the people doing the repaving each time are the same people the city contracts with to do paving in the first place. These are the same people, who, when it was rumored that there might be budget cuts, guaranteed that they wouldn't be the ones cut by *starting and not finishing* all the scheduled projects on the books for the next two years so that the city would have to keep them on and not cut them so that they could repair all the damage they did from starting the jobs and not finishing them. Note that this was all on *rumored* cutbacks, not the real deal.

You want me to value them, then get them to act professionally; and yes, that includes turning out the lights when they are the last person to leave an office that's being shut down due to budget cutbacks. Anyone here who's ever worked for a failed startup, or a failed established company, can tell you whether or not they acted professionally. Most have.

Comment: Re:Shouldn't those kids die? (Score 4, Insightful) 221

Is it not nature that the unhealthy do not pass on their genes? We evolved too, not just the bacteria... except we stopped. Insensitive? no, realistic - stop living in a dreamworld you can't ever completely win against nature. It is one thing to take precautions by not swimming in your shit pool and quite another to wage an expensive a war against nature.

What about insulin for diabetics? What about glasses for myopic or presbiopic people, or publishing anything at all in Braile, along with the manufacture of white sticks? What about Erucic acid for Adrenoleukodystrophy? What about cyanocobalamin/hydroxocobalamin injections for pernicious anemia? What about iron supplements for women?

There are plenty of us who would be dead now, had we been born in the 1200's; insulin dependent diabetics (type I diabetes) were pretty much dead until the 1920's, and later than that, if they couldn't afford the private manufacturing costs for ongoing treatment - assuming they were even correctly diagnosed in time.

We've been "preventing" natural selection ever since we first started dabbling in medicine in prehistory, and earlier than that, if you include appointing "minders" to keep the tribes near-sighted oral history from walking off a cliff.

Would it be great if we could all be genetically perfect? Yeah. But I'm not willing to buy into the idea of some eugenically managed "naturalist" utopian ideal to get there.

Comment: Re:Easy (Score 1) 235

by tlambert (#43774199) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Wiring Home Furniture?

Technically, you only have to pull between the adjacent boxes on either end. If you always put a junction box where the cable enters the wall, and make your connections there, and it has a cover plate, you are talking about, st most, the distance between the junction box and the first outlet, or the distance between outlest, worth of cable replacement, since they are end-pointed each time they enter a junction or outlet box.

Doing the fitting through a hole cut with a keyhole saw is relatively easy, and you've got the junction and other outlet box open for the re-pull of the wire, so you have access, assuming grommeted boxed, to move the conduit horizontally in the wall to make the connection. Appleton, Thomas & Betts, and others all sell grometted PVC junction and outlet boxes that would permit this.

It's tough for me to get excited by dry-walling in an area which is using wood panelling, and so would be very expensive to repair. But even without that as an added cost, the color matching for spot painting, or the repainting of the whole wall, kind of offset the relative cheapness of the drywall work for painted walls.

I typically used 3/4 PVC conduit, which is rated for NM-B Romex, but then most of my work has been places like ski areas, which are in fact commercial (which answers the other posters comment about 24" not being necessary for non-fire walls in residential. But of course, if you have an oven on the other side of the wall, it *is* a fire wall.

If you have a single level house with attic access, you can always do this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27uUb2SSCOU

But the situation wasn't really defined that narrowly. If I'm in the center floor in a house with a second story and a finished basement, my way works better. If I'm in the center floor of a house with a second floor and an unfinished basement, I could push the Romex up without a conduit instead of dropping it down without a conduit, but if a future resident finisheshes the basement later, they are screwed. It's better to plan ahead for modifications.

PS: All that said, it's also generally a good idea for steel-stud construction to grommet an unused set of holes and run two lines of plastic twine through it, in case you need to lay Cat 6 or home theater, or other wiring at some future point, and you don't want to tear the crap out of your walls. For stick-built, you can drill holes and plate-protect them to do the same thing, but in commercial, I'd once again do conduit.

Comment: 3DVAR vs. 4DVAR vs. better models (Score 2) 161

by tlambert (#43773915) Attached to: NWS Announces Big Computer Upgrade

This upgrade in computing power is to move the US from 3DVAR to 4DVAR, however, it does nothing to improve the US weather models. This is interesting, in that 4DVAR can give worse results than 3DVAR, while using additional compute power. There was a nice paper written in this:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/store/10.1256/qj.05.85/asset/200513161304_ftp.pdf

"The first proviso is that on other measures of analysis quality the conclusions are less clear cut. For instance, Fig. 5 shows that using evolved covariances gives worse fits for synoptic 4D-Var than 3D-Var with FGAT. Despite the 4D-Var schemes giving better forecasts overall, their analyses are not consistently better. An explanation may be that the evolved covariances used in 4D-Var (see appendix) increase the background error and hence the impact of observations in modes growing in the time-window, and that this improves the analysis and hence the forecast if these modes continue to grow. This effect was discussed by The paut et al. (1996) who showed that the evolved covariances implicit in 4D-Var are very similar to the singular vectors representing the fastest growing modes. This effect is strongest for longer evolutions; most of The paut et al.’s results are for 24 hours rather than the 3 hours in this paper. For a 6-hour window they see some decaying modes, which they attribute to discrepancies between the 3D- Var covariances and the PF dynamics which is used to evolve them. There are also probably biases in the simple PF model, which may distort the evolved covariances. For these decaying or distorted structures 3D-Var has more freedom to fit the observations, so 4D-Var analyses can be worse."

Comment: Re:Easy (Score 2) 235

by tlambert (#43772369) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Wiring Home Furniture?

... run wires in conduit at a uniform height in every wall ...

OK, I'm confused. Is the conduit running horizontally through the wall? And then you reach through the new hole in the wall to tee into the conduit?

I'm not aware of anything UL listed / permitted by code that works that way.

No, you:

1: Cut the conduit to run it into the outlet box
2: Pull new Romex from the endpoint box, and use a portion of the wire, using the existing Romex for the pull.
3. This gives you enough wire on both sides to go into the outlet box. You DO NOT TEE.
4. As long as you are not putting boxes closer than 24" on either side of the wall (fire issue), this is fine.
5. This complies with 2011 NEC (National Electrical Code) requirements

So your assumption about T-ing things, at least without a junction box, is a broken assumption in the first place, so the rest of your condemnation is invalid, since it follows from that. (I was first licensed as an electrical contractor at age 15).

This is generally not a do-it-yourself, unless you have a licensed contractor involved, or are willing to have it inspected by a licensed contractor prior to sale of the house, should you do it yourself. Also, any do-it-yourself electrical or plumbing has to be listed on the disclosure for the property, by law, at least in California.

Comment: Re:Easy (Score 3, Insightful) 235

by tlambert (#43772337) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Wiring Home Furniture?

Running a conduit horizontally in a wall decreases the stability of the wall. Electricians are very wary of doing that.

Whereas drilling a hole and just running a 12 gauge Romex through it horizontally makes the wall more stable?

The ability to do horizontal runs is why there exist "wire protection plates" / "conduit protection plates. Obviously, you do not want a large number of horizontal holes in load bearing 2x4 walls, but then that is why you use 2x6 for them instead of 2x4, at least for stick-built houses. If you use metal studs, they typically have either punch-outs, or just have pre-punched holes (depending on brand) that line up horizontally.

Almost all plumbing off a vertical stand-pipe requires horizontal holes through the studs, particularly if you are going to a "free standing" or "pedestal" vanity, so that they water cut-offs and hookup pipes are not in the open, and they don't end up looking like hell. Anyone who doesn't hide this stuff in the wall is someone who is either flipping the property, or really doesn't give a damn because they plan on renting the property.

Comment: Voting for either party is like living at home (Score 1) 363

Voting for either party is like living at home...

The Republicans want to be your dad:

o "You're not going to get away with that crap with me! Go to your room!"
o "Military services would straighten you right out!"
o "If you want spending money, put down the remote control and get a damn job!"
o "No daughter of mine is getting a damn abortion!" ...

The Democrats want to be your mom:

o "Maybe if you gave that Kim Jong boy a chance, you'd find out he's no really a bully, and is fun to play with!"
o "Don't tell your dad I gave you this, but here's $20 for gas; you kids have a nice time!"
o "You hurt your knee? Come here, and let mommy kiss it better!"
o "OK honey, we've had 'the talk'; should we go to the doctor and get you some birth control?" ...

Either way, you're living at home, and you never grow up.

Meanwhile, the Green party is lowering buckets on a rope from the trees they are camped out in to prevent them being cut down, and the Libertarian party is living in the cardboard box near the dumpster because they think matching funds are a "gub'mint handout!" and refuse to take charity. Not to be confused with the Objectivists, who also won't take handouts, but it's not enough for them to not take handouts, they won't give them, and if someone does give them, they won't let you take them. To translate: your aunt with all the cats, your mom's alcoholic brother, and your dad's sister who's married to the banker but cheating with the pool boy because she's unhappy.

One big, happy family.

Well, O.K. I'll compromise with my principles because of EXISTENTIAL DESPAIR!

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