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Comment Re:Is that price right? (Score 1) 222

The battery's value comes from its short response on the time scale of milliseconds. Conventional power plants are mechanical systems, and because of that it would take orders of magnitude more time to start them up for backup power generation. For that reason, at all times, coal power plants generate a little bit more power than there's demand for. If some other power plant trips, the frequency drop is detected, and the surplus kinetic energy of the turbine is immediately transmitted to the grid to stabilize the supply. However, there's the cost. The power plant has to generate surplus power at all times just because it can't change its state fast enough in case of emergency. The battery technology, with its response times typical for chemical/solid state systems, slashes the cost of conventional power generation by making this surplus backup power unnecessary.

Comment Compilation flags & vectorization (Score 2) 114

The article is silent about vectorization, and Intel invests a lot in that lately. Do we know anything about the compilation flags of that copy of cinebench? If not, the assessment could be extremely unfair. A newer set of vectorization instructions corresponds to a longer vector size for arithmetic operations that can be carried out concurrently. For example, in HPC applications, enabling the highest available level of AVX can lead to 2x gains compared to code compiled for legacy systems.

Comment Re:This backlash is done by children (Score 1) 626

Can anybody explain why creating US jobs is at the absolute top of the agenda? (I'm not trolling.) With the unemployment rate at 4.8%, you won't get any lower. It's the absolute minimum not only according to Fed, but as a result of the universal laws of free market. For example, there's a contribution to the unemployment rate from those who switch from one job to another right at the moment of the measurement. So what's the problem? (My guess: the unemployment is low, but the jobs available for US citizens are shitty.) Note: I'm an EU citizen; I don't work nor stay in the US.

Comment Re:Good idea, bad name (Score 1) 167

The name "autopilot" isn't confusing at all if you think of it as an analogue of the autopilot in a commercial airplane. The airplane autopilot isn't fully autonomic either; for example, it can't take off on its own. Even at the cruising altitude it requires full attention of the pilots: http://www.cnbc.com/2015/03/26...

Submission + - Linux 3.10 officially released (paritynews.com)

hypnosec writes: Linux 3.10 kernel has been officially released on Sunday evening which makes the 3.10-rc7 the last release candidate of the latest kernel which yields the biggest changes in years. Linus Torvalds was thinking of releasing another rc but, went against the idea and went ahead with official Linux 3.10 commit as anticipated last week. Torvalds notes in the announcement that releases since Linux 3.9 haven’t been prone to problems and 3.10 is no different. However, he added that this release could have gone either but, there was no specific reason for another rc and break the normal pattern of "rc7 is the last rc before the release."
AI

Submission + - Why Ray Kurzweil's Google Project May be Doomed to Fail (technologyreview.com)

moon_unit2 writes: An AI researcher at MIT suggests that Ray Kurzweil's ambitious plan to build a super-smart personal assistant at Google may be fundamentally flawed. Kurzweil's idea, as put forward in his book How to Build a Mind, is to combine a simple model of the brain with enormous computing power and vast amounts of data, to construct a much more sophisticated AI. Boris Katz, who works oh machines designed to understand language, says this misses a key facet of human intelligence: that it is built on a lifetime of experiencing the world rather than simply processing raw information.

Comment Re:Chemical properties (Score 5, Interesting) 213

Actually, not outer but inner, or core, electrons move at relativistic velocities. Classically described, they are moving in orbits close to the nucleus, so when it has huge positive charge, electric field is strong enough to accelerate movement of negatively charged particles to relativistic speed. Outer electrons aren't affected as much because they feel as if the nucleus had smaller charge simply because it is screened by core electrons.

Comment Re:Hey chemists (Score 5, Informative) 213

Light elements, say, those you can find in first three rows of the periodic table, can be qualitatively described using hydrogen atom-like model. Basically, it says that properties of elements are periodic, when you go through the periodic table in a consecutive manner. But then you got heavier elements. The hydrogen atom-like approximation breaks down here, the properties are still periodic, but there are many exceptions from set of simple rules that were valid for lighter elements. In some cases even quantum-mechanical methods fail to describe heavier elements, for example gold wouldn't have gold color if not treated relativistically. One can expect that going towards extremely large Z well established techniques won't prove successful.
Spam

Fighting "Snowshoe" Spam 85

Today Spamhaus announced they are releasing a new list of IP addresses from which they've been receiving "snowshoe" spam — unsolicited email distributed across many IPs and domains in order to avoid triggering volume-based filters. "This spam is sent from many small IP ranges on many Internet Service Providers (ISPs), using many different domains, and the IPs and domains change rapidly, making it difficult for people and places to detect and block this spam. Most importantly, while each host/IP usually sends a modest volume of bulk email, collectively these anonymous IP ranges send a great deal of spam, and the quantities of this type of spam have been increasing rapidly over the past few months." A post at the Enemies List anti-spam blog wonders at the impact this will have on email service providers and their customers. The author references a conversation he had with an employee from one of these providers: "... I replied that I expected it to mean the more legitimate clients of the sneakier gray- and black-hat spammers would migrate to more legitimate ESPs — suggesting that it was, in the long run, a good thing, because ESPs with transparency and a reputation to protect will educate their new clients. His reply was essentially that this would be a problem for them in the short run, because it would swamp their new customer vetting processes and so on."

Comment Amazing graphene flake (Score 5, Interesting) 113

Graphene (which is a single sheet graphite in made of) displays somewhat analogous electronic properties. Its electrons travel with speed comparable to to speed of light and act as they've got no effective mass. In particular they can be described by modified Dirac equation, which is relativistic equation for a single particle. Thus, the story is not the only example of formal (mathematical) similarity between physical objects that seem to have absolutely nothing in common. it's the power of mathematical abstraction to see what's essentially similar when your senses say it can't be.

Comment Prone to UV light? (Score 3, Interesting) 32

I wonder what is a half-life of such a macromolecule. Not an expert in the field, but during my first biochemistry course I was taught that DNA is only kinetically stable (in contrast with thermodynamic stability), so there is a chance that when making its shape extremely fancy, it becomes useless ephemeral compound. There are also mutations caused by interaction with high-energetic photons (UV light) which constantly appear and are repaired in human cells, but may cause obstacles when there's no natural maintenance system as in cells. This may not be the case because mutations may occur extremely rarely in the timescale of nanomachines activity, but thats what I'm curious about.

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