As to the other complains, that intern positions must be paid with minimum wage - that's so fucking stupid. If you are forced to pay minimum wage for an intern, then you won't be hiring an intern, will you?

Yes they will. If the intern provides value to the company then they are worth compensating. Period. If they provide no value then the intern shouldn't be there because they are costing the company money to have a staff member oversee them. They are still much cheaper than staff at the same hourly rate because there are typically no benefits provided. Furthermore interns are great for temporary projects because internships are typically understood to be temporary, there is no fuss about not rehiring them the next summer if the company doesn't have the money for it.

You'll be hiring the new University graduates, after all, they do have the degree, so then if you are forced to pay them, why take somebody who does not have a degree, when there are so many new idiots who do?

What field are you in that the university graduates are making the minimum wage which many of us think should be paid to currently unpaid interns? It should be obvious that the responsibilities for a staff and intern are quite different. Staff will be around much longer and they are better compensated so they are giving longer term projects and greater accountability for the results thereof.

I agree with your points about many people going to university for useless degrees. But I don't think encouraging unpaid internships is the way to do it. Interns get on-the-job training in a particular area, emphasis on *on-the-job*. They are doing a job so they should be paid, though at a lower rate than an experienced staff member. I think that expansion of the acceptance of professional degrees and training programs for specific work areas would be a better solution to giving people practical knowledge for a job rather than getting a four-year degree to become an office drone.

I'm an electrical engineering student, and as an undergrad in my city (admittedly one with a high cost of living) most undergraduate level engineering internships I was aware of paid something like $15/hr for new hires. At my internship after my sophomore year I was making more than that upon hire, and the company gave me annual performance reviews with bonuses and raises so I was making a pretty decent amount by the time I graduated and they hired me as staff.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is that engineering is awesome :)

But seriously I think all interns should be paid, because if the intern provides no value to the company then the company wouldn't waste their paid employees' time by bringing them on in the first place. And since they must be providing value to the company, they should be compensate with minimum wage, or more based on their value. But these companies are probably happy getting their slave labor, they don't want it to change any time soon.

No. Headphone cables have no effect on sound (as long as they are not torn or shorted).

To be fair, expensive cables usually have easier to use more durable connectors, and more flexible cabling with a more durable jacket. Features like that are certainly worth a few extra bucks.

But it's true that there is negligible effect on sound quality.

>Thanks, but no thanks, we don't want your GMO anymore, we saw what it does.
Feed billions of people?

If I could pay a 50% premium on my rice, wheat flour, oats, etc. in order to ensure that none of them were GMO, I probably would. GMO may or may not be harmful, but given the unethical conduct of large agribusiness I don't really trust them to be the ones saying if it's safe or not. The problem is that the Monsanto and farm lobbies have made sure that there are no labeling requirements for GMO foods, so consumers cannot easily make an informed choice about the source of their food.

The milk I buy (no hormones, all organic, etc) is about 20 cents cheaper per gallon than the milk at the chain store down the street and literally lasts 2 - 3x as long.

Most organic milk is ultra-pasteurized which, which involves heating to a higher temperature for a shorter time than a normal pasteurization which is done for non-organic milk. This is what gives organic milk the extremely long shelf-life, though some people argue that it decreases nutritional value. The plus side of organic milk is still that it requires that cows not get BGH and not get continuous antibiotics, plus they get organic feed though it's usually still grain rather than grass.

My guess is that within a year or two, there will be better open-source alternatives to Jacket, just like there are better open source alternatives to MATLAB alrady. I'll just wait, thank you very much.

I don't dispute that there are alternatives to Matlab, but "better" is still premature in my opinion. Over the past year I had an interest in removing my work's dependence on proprietary software, so I have researched the Matlab alternatives, and I have even been using Python for some of my work (instrument automation and simple data processing and plotting), but I would say that open source has a way to go before reaching Matlab's level. For a professional user the license costs are not terribly significant, for academic, personal, or consultants, the open alternatives might make more sense.

One of the usual problems with open source which is true here is fragmentation. Matlab has a wide range of nice add-ons available for purchase which integrate with Matlab and Simulink. Some of the features of these may be replicated in other products, but rarely are they replicated as well, and they certainly are not integrated into a single architecture. No, you have certain functions available in Python libraries, one of the scientific Python distributions, or Octave, or Scilab, and you must spend much more time finding each one, finding the documentation, and integrating it into your workflow.

The second usual problem of open source software is polish. Matlab is more polished and in my opinion has a much better UI than the open alternatives I've used. Yes it has some problems, but on the whole I think their interface is better, and the documentation is better. Open source programs like many Python libraries may be comprehensively documented, but the documentation is rarely as well organized. Of course the fragmentation comes up here again: some libraries may have excellent documentation, others very poor.

This does raise one of the benefits of open source: it's open. There was a Python library (mwavepy) which I wasn't understanding too well from the documentation alone, so I was able to dive into the source code. I even thought about contributing to the project, though I haven't gotten around to it.

So in summary, I like Matlab, and I like open source. But I think Matlab is simpler and easier to get the job done, and that is what professional users care about more than a couple $k in license costs.

With modern chip fabrication techniques they could potentially integrate a ferromagnetic material deposition into a stand chip process, and then possibly they could achieve densities and speeds of storage that are relevant in today's world.

But at the end of the day the target to beat is always silicon. Even if each bit of silicon non-volatile memory is less reliable, they can integrate vast numbers of bits in a given die area, and thus they have enough storage space that they can throw tons of error correction data into the storage. Industry's decision making process for a technology like this is basically "if it can be done in silicon, do it in silicon". So there needs to be some incredibly compelling benefit to magnetic core memory to make it more valuable than silicon in a given application.

1. By the time graphene is ready to be modulated at 500GHz we will almost certainly have the technology to modulate the graphene at 500GHz. It requires a transistor with unity gain at roughly 1000GHz to do that. State of the art university and military researchers are building both analog and (very simple) digital circuits in the 300+GHz region using transistors with unity gain frequencies at 1THz and above. They are using group III-V heterostructure devices such as InGaAs/InP heterojunction bipolar transistors for this, and people continue to push the envelope on scaling silicon transistors, though the group IV materials like silicon and silicon/germanium alloy are still well behind what III-V's can do and will probably never be as fast.

2. You demodulate the signal the same way current ultra high speed optical signals are demodulated: A really fast and expensive chip(s) de-multiplexes the wideband 500GHz signal to N signals each having 500GHz/N bandwidth, so that cheaper chips can handle the lower bandwidth signals and eventually send it to customers. If we can modulate it we can demodulate it.

It will definitely cause some increased multipath fading, but that's why new wireless routers often come with the 3 antennas. With the multi-antenna configuration at least one of the antennas will have a strong signal at the laptop (and reciprocally the laptop at the router) because multipath fading is position dependent.

Well the way I understand it, in DC circuits the resistance of the wire increases as the distance of it increases. In AC, this is not true.

That's completely incorrect. For both AC and DC the resistance is rho*L/A, where rho is the resistivity of the material in ohm-meters, L is length in meters, and A is cross-sectional area in meters^2. AC actually has it slightly worse off because there is the skin effect which causes current to bunch up on the outer edges of the conductor, but for most practical situations that would be encountered in building wiring the effect is negligible.

If you RTFA you will see that the problem occurred at elevated power levels, above what consumer level equipment normally outputs. Unlike the consumer electronics that you are in love with aviation equipment needs to be far more reliable because it is "mission critical", i.e. people's lives depend on the equipment performing correctly under a variety of circumstances. This is why they test it more stringently with elevated levels of interference which is higher than what is expected during operation.

Furthermore, as is evident from the summary alone, this has occurred during EMC testing of the aircraft, i.e. the part of the testing process which identifies problems exactly like this one so that they can be fixed before delivering the plane to customers. If you got your hands on alpha or beta versions of consumer electronics you would probably find it had bugs like that as well.

The Slashdot summary barely hypes this up, the post title is clearly exaggerated but the actual summary is pretty fair. And yet you jump up, swallow the hype whole, and comment without even reading the summary.

Light will travel 300 microns (about a quarter of a millimeter) in one picosecond. If it travels through a non-air medium such as fiber optic cable or ethernet cable then it will be slowed down even more. Even in a nanosecond light in air only travels about a foot in distance.

It is not physically possible for information to move an appreciable distance at a picosecond time scale, because the fastest speed that information can move is at the speed of light.

Station keeping is cheap. Just the fuel that a shuttle carries for getting back to Earth should be enough to keep it (and the ISS!) on-station for a few years.
And sure, a shuttle isn't an ideal orbital transfer vehicle. (It's got the basics - fuel, engines, habitable environment - but it's got a lot of useless stuff too.) But when it's practically free to put it in position (just leave it up there!) ... why not do it?

Since when is it practically free? Last time I checked a Shuttle launch costs around a half billion dollars, that's far away from free.

Your estimate of a "few years" of station keeping fuel is highly optimistic, considering that the ISS needs to be re-boosted every time a shuttle visits. Also consider that the Shuttle gets completely overhauled on the ground after every flight, do you expect it to run for a few years with only much trickier on-orbit maintenance? The liquid hydrogen and oxygen fuel will also not last that long even if none of it is burned.

There's a similar sounding arcade I've been to called Dave and Buster's which is basically a club/bar with tons of arcade machines, they're scattered in various places all over the US. Lots of fun, but I wish one was actually close to me :(