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Comment Re:Here we go (Score 2) 129

I was sitting in a diversity training class at Ford in the late 1990’s when the presenters aired this same statement. Our manager, who was a Brit on loan from Jaguar, offered the following statement:

“So you’re saying that if I was looking for the best and most popular four door family sedan, I should look at a picture of the design teams from the Big Three, and the one that was most diverse would be the number one car?”

He was told that was correct.

He then said that it was a bit of a trick question, since the best selling sedan in America was the Toyota Camry, and the design team for that car was the least diverse group you could possibly imagine, consisting of Japanese males between 30 and 60.

After a long silence, the presenters finished their PowerPoint and left.

Comment Re:They should have to let them keep the money (Score 2) 28

Not in the US. Finders keepers hasn't been law here in a long time. It really started getting strict in the early ATM error when people started getting charged for trying to keep money from accidental dispenser errors. There were also some cases of trucks losing money on highways where people were prosecuted for picking it up. Found money is supposed to be turned in.

Comment Re: Increase reliability, stop subsidizing batteri (Score 1) 382

DC arguably has the best mass transit on the east coast outside of NYC, yet ridership is down.

Why? Well asides from telecommuting being much more prevelant, mass transit has gotten quite expensive, due to corruption, they started charging more for parking, due to lack of ridership, service got signifigantly cut back, and due to safety incidents people are scared of insufficent maintenance. People would prefer to drive in their own cars than ride on the train.

Comment Education (Score 1) 283

Some parents turn it on for their children from birth. Their theory is that the constant exposure to text matching the speech will provide early stimulation to the visual processing centers that will eventually be trained to read. For adults, turning on foreign subtitles can also help in learning a language.

Comment Re:Not the first analog/continuous computer (Score 1) 65

Exactly. Many of the other responders are so stuck in the digital world their bringing "switching" into every comment. This processor is massively parallel analog where the functions are expressed with optical components. Such computers calculate at the speed of light through the prisms and other components. The speed limitations are found in injecting the data, interpreting the answer, and the biggest one, adjusting the optical path to solve a new problem. They have been in use for very specialized real-time applications where fixed mathematical functions need to be solved at speeds surpassing current supercomputers for much longer than 25 years. Think things like advanced, highly compact radar processors. The change here seems to be in making it reprogrammable and perhaps bringing it out of the black world though maybe this is an independent development that wasn't surpressed.

Comment Re:North Carolina terror. (Score 1) 235

Some rural transformer is probably taken out by gun fire every day in the South. Seen them doing it. The only thing that I could imagine would make them think that this is more than some teenagers out cutting up is if they only hit some specific transformers that were guaranteed to take out an area for a while due to replacement time or something without hitting others at the same sites. I'm sure the electric companies in the region have a pretty large budget for replacing equipment hit by gunfire.

Comment Re:Smart Move (Score 1) 34

You're almost certainly right that the Chinese can get there on their own. They have more engineers than any other country in the world and the most of the top 100 universities. I believe we're being really stupid to harp about China buying the machines like we do. As long as they can buy them eventually, they'll probably be OK with being a couple of gens behind. But, if they have to make the investment by themselves unlike anyone else in the world, they'll probably do it right and use their mass to feed their own machine and move ahead of the rest of us.

Comment Re:Smart Move (Score 1) 34

They aren't stupid. They are the longest term thinkers in the world. Even if they could make the fab work, the industry advances so fast that in just a couple of years it is no longer state of the art. There is no way to invade Taiwan and get a long term pay off on chip production. In their best dreams, it would be a boost for a few years but destroy any further chances to keep up for many decades afterwards.

I'm not saying entirely that they wouldn't invade Taiwan - just not for that reason. Quite the opposite perhaps. If we disconnect them entirely and give them no chance to keep up, then we back them into a corner. They can't hope to survive with the rest of the world advancing and them not. At that point, the argument that invading Taiwan precisely to destroy most of the world's top chip production would come into play. Setting back an enemy who is actively trying to destroy you could be a worthwhile goal.

Comment Re:Smart Move (Score 3, Interesting) 34

It's not that it can't be run by the Chinese. It is that Taiwan can't make chips without machines that they buy from other countries that won't sell their best machines to China. If China invaded Taiwan, they'd gain absolutely no new chip making capacity. If the existing machines weren't destroyed during the invasion, they'd quickly die from inability to maintain them without the manufacturer's support. And invading Taiwan would not magically result in Europe starting to sell their best machines to China.

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