Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror

Comment Took a trip this last weekend (Score 1) 162

by DrEnter (#65470029) Attached to: Is America Finally Improving Its Electric Car Chargers?

I have a decent NACS to CCS adapter, but ended-up not needing it. Was actually surprised how many CCS super-chargers were available, and how quickly they charged. I'm in the southeast and was driving an Ioniq 6 (2024, so 800V but still with CCS) from Atlanta to rural, central Tennessee, and back. Needed to charge twice. Once at an Electrify America location in a Kroger parking lot. 4 chargers, each providing 350 kW. Charged from 50% to 100% in 20 minutes. Second time was near my destination, at a Buc-ee's in Crossville, TN. They had a bank of 12 Tesla NACS chargers I could use, but they also had a bank of 8 Mercedes CCS 400 kW chargers. Both had only one or two cars at them. I chose the Mercedes chargers. Went from 20% to 90% in 10 minutes. I was genuinely shocked at how fast they charged. Faster than anything else I've ever used. It's the closest I've ever seen to being on par with "gassing up". Next weekend I'm driving to Chicago and I am definitely looking for more of those Mercedes chargers along the route.

Comment It feels like we're producing (Score 1) 53

by DrEnter (#65196567) Attached to: Surge in UK University Students Using AI To Complete Work

... A generation of editors with no authors. A whole lot of students that are getting really good at correcting and re-voicing without developing any ability to be truly creative. These will be the same people complaining about "everything being the same" in the latest video game or TV series. If you don't build those muscles, you won't have them when you need them.

Comment The problem is poor pay for very few jobs (Score 3, Informative) 110

The biggest issue is pay. You'll put up with a lot if you love what you are working on and can make a career out of it. But making a career out of being a university professor is becoming impossible, and that is the ultimate goal for many (if not most) folks getting a Ph.D.

Case in point: My wife has a Ph.D. and was an assistant professor for several years. Just getting a tenure-track position required working as a temporary adjunct for almost a decade and only being paid a base rate per class. That base rate varies by school, but is always absurdly low. She would typically be paid $1800 - $2500 per class per term (a 5 month semester). So, if she was teaching a full load, of 5-6 classes, the most she would make is around $45k/year (2 full terms + a summer term). But then there's the complication that no single school would give her more than 3 classes per term, so she'd have to look for jobs from multiple schools simultaneously. Also, there are no automatic renewals, so every term you have to basically find as many new classes as you can and just hope you get the contracts. Some terms were great and she'd have a full load, but often she might only get 3-4 classes total. We knew MANY adjuncts living in their cars.
But if you score a permanent position in a department, things must get better, right? Well, that's easier said than done. These jobs are incredibly competitive, and there aren't a lot of openings. My wife is very well known in her field, she's written dozens of papers and published her first 3 books before she even tried to get a permanent position. Even then, with around 45 applications over 3 years, she only made the shortlist for 4 jobs (each with 5-10 other candidates). After 3+ years of searching, she managed to find a position, but the issues didn't end there. The assistant professor position only paid $55k. She'd make more if she got tenure, but getting tenure is a 10-15 year process, and it's much harder to get as universities prefer to just let professors leave than try to retain them (they can just throw more temporary adjuncts at classes for next to nothing). She was at a large state school, but even they had a handful of departments with only 3-4 tenured professors each (and generally 1-2 dozen assistant profs. or adjuncts at any one time).

Long story short, after struggling within the university system for over 15 years, my wife now teaches high school. The pay for a high school science teacher started at $80k, about 50% more than she made as an assistant professor at a large state university.

Submission + - Inverse Vaccine stops Autoimmune Diseases (biorxiv.org) 1

Submitted by laughingskeptic
laughingskeptic writes: An "inverse vaccine" has been created that takes advantage of how the liver naturally marks molecules from broken-down cells with “do not attack” flags to prevent autoimmune reactions to cells that die by natural processes. “In the past, we showed that we could use this approach to prevent autoimmunity,” Jeffrey Hubbell, UChicago's Eugene Bell Professor in Tissue Engineering and lead author of the new paper, said in the statement. “But what is so exciting about this work is that we have shown that we can treat diseases like multiple sclerosis after there is already ongoing inflammation, which is more useful in a real-world context.” News release: https://scitechdaily.com/new-v... Preprint linked in title.

Submission + - Reddit Communities Plan To Extend the Blackout Indefinitely (theverge.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Moderators of many Reddit communities are pledging to keep their subreddits private or restricted indefinitely. For the vast majority of subreddits, the blackout to protest Reddit’s expensive API pricing changes was expected to last from Monday until Wednesday. But in response to a Tuesday post on the r/ModCoord subreddit, users are chiming in to say that their subreddits will remain dark past that 48-hour window. “Reddit has budged microscopically,” u/SpicyThunder335, a moderator for r/ModCoord, wrote in the post. They say that despite an announcement that access to a popular data-archiving tool for moderators would be restored, “our core concerns still aren’t satisfied, and these concessions came prior to the blackout start date; Reddit has been silent since it began.” SpicyThunder335 also bolded a line from a Monday memo from CEO Steve Huffman obtained by The Verge — “like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well" — and said that “more is needed for Reddit to act.”

Ahead of the Tuesday post, more than 300 subreddits had committed to staying dark indefinitely, SpicyThunder335 said. The list included some hugely popular subreddits, like r/aww (more than 34 million subscribers), r/music (more than 32 million subscribers), and r/videos (more than 26 million subscribers). Even r/nba committed to an indefinite timeframe at arguably the most important time of the NBA season. But SpicyThunder335 invited moderators to share pledges to keep the protests going, and the commitments are rolling in. SpicyThunder335 notes that not everyone will be able to go dark indefinitely for valid reasons. “For example, r/stopDrinking represents a valuable resource for a communities in need, and the urgency of getting the news of the ongoing war out to r/Ukraine obviously outweighs any of these concerns,” SpicyThunder335 wrote. As an alternative, SpicyThunder335 recommended implementing a “weekly gesture of support on ‘Touch-Grass-Tuesdays,’” which would be left up to the discretion of individual communities. SpicyThunder335 also acknowledged that some subreddits would need to poll their users to make sure they’re on board. As of this writing, more than 8,400 subreddits have gone private or into a restricted mode. The blackouts caused Reddit to briefly crash on Monday.

Submission + - For reasons no one can fathom, McDonald's has released a new Game Boy Color game (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Hmmmmmm
Hmmmmmm writes: Fast food giant McDonald's has released a new retro-style game featuring Grimace, the purple milkshake blob. While it's clearly meant to be played in a browser on a phone or computer, it's also a fully working Game Boy Color game that you can download and play on the original hardware.

Grimace's Birthday was developed by Krool Toys, a Brooklyn-based independent game studio and "creative engineering team" with a history of creating playable Game Boy games as unique PR for music artists and brands. The game assumes you're playing in an emulator via a browser window—you can play that version of the game here—but we also got it running on an Analogue Pocket thanks to a Game Boy Color FPGA core and a downloadable ROM hosted on the Internet Archive.

The game is so period-authentic that there's even a screen telling original monochrome Game Boy owners that the game "requires a color device to play." Even on Game Boy hardware, it still makes references to people "playing on mobile devices."

Submission + - US Patent Office Proposes Rule To Make It Much Harder To Kill Bad Patents (techdirt.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: So, this is bad. Over the last few years, we’ve written plenty about the so-called “inter partes review” or "IPR” that came into being about a decade ago as part of the “America Invents Act,” which was the first major change to the patent system in decades. For much of the first decade of the 2000s, patent trolls were running wild and creating a massive tax on innovation. There were so many stories of people (mostly lawyers) getting vague and broad patents that they never had any intention of commercializing, then waiting for someone to come along and build something actually useful and innovative... and then shaking them down with the threat of patent litigation. The IPR process, while not perfect, was at least an important tool in pushing back on some of the worst of the worst patents. In its most basic form, the IPR process allows nearly anyone to challenge a bad patent and have the special Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) review the patent to determine if it should have been granted in the first place. Given that a bad patent can completely stifle innovation for decades this seems like the very least that the Patent Office should offer to try to get rid of innovation-killing bad patents.

However, patent trolls absolutely loathe the IPR process for fairly obvious reasons. It kills their terrible patents. The entire IPR process has been challenged over and over again and (thankfully) the Supreme Court said that it’s perfectly fine for the Patent Office to review granted patents to see if they made a mistake. But, of course, that never stops the patent trolls. They’ve complained to Congress. And, now, it seems that the Patent Office itself is trying to help them out. Recently, the USPTO announced a possible change to the IPR process that would basically lead to limiting who can actually challenge bad patents, and which patents could be challenged.

The wording of the proposed changes seems to be written in a manner to be as confusing as possible. But there are a few different elements to the proposal. One part would limit who can bring challenges to patents under the IPR system, utilizing the power of the director to do a “discretionary denial.” For example, it would say that “certain for-profit entities” are not allowed to bring challenges. Why? That’s not clear. [...] But the more worrisome change is this one: "Recognizing the important role the USPTO plays in encouraging and protecting innovation by individual inventors, startups, and under-resourced innovators who are working to bring their ideas to market, the Office is considering limiting the impact of AIA post-grant proceedings on such entities by denying institution when certain conditions are met." Basically, if a patent holder is designated as an “individual inventor, startup” or “under-resourced innovator” then their patents are protected from the IPR process. But, as anyone studying this space well knows, patent trolls often present themselves as all three of those things (even though it’s quite frequently not at all true). [...] And, again, none of this should matter. A bad patent is a bad patent. Why should the USPTO create different rules that protect bad patents? If the patent is legit, it will survive the IPR process.

Submission + - NYC Will Charge Drivers Going Downtown (slashdot.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: President Joe Biden’s administration is set to allow New York City to move forward with a landmark program that will toll vehicles entering Lower Manhattan, after a public review period ends Monday. The toll is formally known as the Central Business District Tolling Program — but it’s commonly called “congestion pricing.” In practice it works like any other toll, but because it specifically charges people to drive in the traffic-choked area below 60th street in Manhattan, it would be the first program of its kind in the United States. Proposals range from charging vehicles $9 to $23 during peak hours, and it’s set to go into effect next spring.

The plan had been delayed for years, but it cleared a milestone last month when the Federal Highway Administration signed off on the release of an environmental assessment. The public has until Monday to review the report, and the federal government is widely expected to approve it shortly after. From there, the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) can finalize toll rates, as well as discounts and exemptions for certain drivers.

While no other US city has yet implemented congestion pricing, Stockholm, London and Singapore have had it for years. These cities have reported benefits like decreased carbon dioxide pollution, higher average speeds, and congestion reduction. [...] The stakes of New York City’s program are high, and leaders in other cities are watching the results closely. If successful, congestion pricing could be a model for other US cities, which are trying to recover from the pandemic and face similar challenges of climate change and aging public infrastructure.

Submission + - Why Are Cells The Size They Are? Gravity May Be A Factor (acs.org) 1

Submitted by carmendrahl
carmendrahl writes: Eukaryotic cells, which are defined by having a nucleus, rarely grow larger than 10 m in diameter. Scientists know a few reasons why this is so. A new study suggests another reason--gravity. Studying egg cells from the frog Xenopus laevis, which reach as big as 1 mm across and are common research tools, Princeton researchers Marina Feric and Clifford Brangwynne noticed that the insides of the eggs' nuclei settled to the bottom when they disabled a mesh made from the cytoskeleton protein actin. They think the frog eggs evolved the mesh to counteract gravity, which according to their calculations becomes significant if cells get bigger than 10 m in diameter.

Submission + - Utility sets IT department on path to self-destruction (computerworld.com) 1

Submitted by dcblogs
dcblogs writes: Northeast Utilities has told IT employees that it is considering outsourcing IT work to India-based offshore firms, putting as many as 400 IT jobs at risk. The company is saying a final decision has not been made. But Conn. State Rep. and House Majority Leader Joe Aresimowicz, who is trying to prevent or limit the outsourcing move, says it may be a done deal. NU may be prompting its best IT employees to head to the exits. It also creates IT security risks from upset workers. The heads-up to employees in advance of a firm plan is "kind of mind mindbogglingly stupid," said David Lewis, who heads a Connecticut-based human resources consulting firm OperationsInc, especially "since this is IT of all places." The utility's move makes sense, however, if is it trying to encourage attrition to reduce severance costs.

Submission + - Universal Flu Vaccine 'Blueprint' Discovered (ibtimes.com)

Submitted by minty3
minty3 writes: Scientists say they used the pandemic as a “natural experiment” to discover how the body’s immune system builds resistance to the flu. The research, published in the journal Nature Medicine, showed how certain immune cells helped some avoid the severe illness.

Slashdot Top Deals

Type louder, please.

Close