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Comment Expecting 18 year olds to write adult essays (Score 2) 128

I grew up working class and got zero help with my college applications, and it showed in my admission results as I was summarily rejected from all the top tier schools I applied to. This was decades ago now. Being an 18 year old, I remember writing edgy, perhaps even cringe-worthy, applications to try and stand out, when really admissions officers are looking for an unrealistically mature take on a prompt with a few dog whistles about my relationship with a social topic du jour. So yeah, I buy the premise that essays disadvantage people who can't afford to have their applications reviewed by experts.

Comment Re:We need solutions that work in the UK. (Score 2) 132

Not British, but I have a heat pump in a ~200m^2 one-story house with the only insulation being in the ceiling. It can move the temperature about 1C within 10 minutes when in its operating range (~0C-40C). This is with a normal American-made one. If you can get the Mitsubishi models, they're even better.

Comment What a juxtaposition on /. (Score 1) 138

This article: DOJ Indicates It's Considering Google Breakup Following Monopoly Ruling The one right above it: Google DeepMind Scientists Win Nobel Chemistry Prize for Work on Proteins Perhaps the latter was enabled by the transgressions in the former. Google Research truly is the new Bell Labs

Comment Working way harder at home; need a break (Score 1) 230

I'm a Silicon Valley resident working at one of the companies mentioned in the article. I own a large (by SV standards) house in a quiet suburb. In theory, I should be on board with this proposal, but the reality is since we've gone to work from home, my productivity has plummeted and so I'm working far more hours to make up for it. I'm working 12 hours a day during the week and then usually 6 each weekend day. All this because I don't have access to equipment in my lab, spontaneous interaction with my co-workers, etc.

People are working in crunch mode right now to compensate for the productivity shortfall, but that would stop if they knew this was a long-term arrangement.

Comment Re:How will people pay for food? Their mortgage? (Score 1) 418

Market forces don't make you install sprinklers and solar panels in every new house. Market forces don't artificially suppress property taxes so Boomers can pay a 0.05% tax rate yearly. Market forces don't keep parking lots instead of building housing because there was supposedly a native american burial mound there (https://www.berkeleyside.com/2018/04/24/its-developers-vs-native-americans-in-battle-over-berkeley-shellmound)

Comment Re:More ability and desire to spend (Score 1) 265

Sanders flipped his stance on illegal immigration to become more electable even though it's at odds with his intentions to protect the working class. That turned me off to him. Also, perhaps more germane to the interests of tech workers, he wants go gut space exploration because "there are a lot of problems to solve here on Earth first".
Patents

The Man Who Created the Pencil Eraser and How Patents Have Changed 234

fermion writes "This weeks 'Who Made That' column in The New York Times concerns the built in pencil eraser. In 1858 Hymen Lipman put a rubber plug into the wood shaft of a pencil. An investor then paid about 2 million in today's dollars for the patent. This investor might have become very rich had the supreme court not ruled that all Lipmen had done was put together two known technologies, so the patent was not valid. The question is where has this need for patents to be innovative gone? After all there is the Amazon one-click patent which, after revision, has been upheld. Microsoft Activesync technology patent seems to simply patent copying information from one place to another. In this modern day do patents promote innovation, or simply protect firms from competition?"

Comment deconvolution? (Score 1) 251

It doesn't sound that much harder of a problem to solve than what I learned in EE undergrad about deconvolution. Divide the Fourier transform of the blurred image by the fourier transform of the "motion kernel" as they call it to get the sharpened image. I routinely use a similar method in the lab to correct for visual aberrations in my diffraction spot imaging equipment, but there the problem is much easier as the motion function is exactly traced out by the diffraction spots.

Perhaps getting the "motion kernel" is harder than I suspect it to be in a real life scenario, though.

Comment I'll stick with Intel (Score 2) 129

I bought one of Intel's 3rd generation 80GB SSDs back in January and have had zero problems with it. No, it's not as fast as OCZ's drives, but it's reliable. Intel's failure rate is 0.6% while OCZ's is 3% (not sure if that's a per-year figure or something). Why an average user would buy primary storage with a 3% failure rate is beyond me.

(failure rate figure comes from http://www.anandtech.com/show/4202/the-intel-ssd-510-review/3 )

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