It's hard to say without seeing the article in Nano-letters, but based on the diagram and a vague description, I'd guess that it works something like this:
A high energy electron hole pair is created by a photon, which then relaxes down to a lower energy state. But, instead of emitting a phonon (heat), it creates another electron hole pair, and you end up with two. I suppose this process could repeat itself, so that many different wavelengths would all produce energy with reasonable efficiency.
This is in all likelihood facilitated by the complex energy band structure of the (essentially) polycrystalline semiconductor.
I'm not so sure how directly applicable all of this is. I suspect that some theorist postulated that this could happen, but it was difficult to prove experimentally. It seems to me that the hard work of actually producing an workable device hasn't been done yet.
From what I can tell, this work is done in PbSe, which I don't think is a suitible for huge volume production.
I don't believe the theory because it's crack-pot craziness.
If he's proven right, sure I'll apologize, right here on slashdot, for whatever that's worth. I'd send him $100 but it sounds like he wont need it if he's right.
Look, it's _possible_ that the last 30 years of cosmology has been a blind alley, but it's just absurdly unlikely. I understand that there's a certain appeal to a theory that does away with dark energy, dark matter and inflation, but there's just too much evidence in support of it to throw it away.
My understanding about trademarks comes from u.S. law. Is there something about U.K. law that's different?
There _may_ be some dillution aspect to this, however, if Google doesn't mix and match brand names in search results, I really don't see a problem here.
The best analogy I can think of is in a store.
If I asked a shop keeper, do you carry brand X, and he responded, "No, but we do carry brand Y," that's is clearly not infringement.
If the shop keeper says, "Yes we do have brand X over here, but have you considered brand Y? Many people find it to be a better value." This is also _not_ trademark infringement, even if it's his financial interest to recommend brand Y (e.g. better margins or whatever).
I don't really see much of a distinction between the shop keeper analogy and Google search terms. The only thing is that they sell the rights to put ads up based on a word which the trademark owner claims to own. But since no reasonable person would be confused by this and believe that Google owned the trademark, it's hard to imagine how Google could be sued.
The type of security that you need to ensure a very interested US government from monitoring you is not affordable in this case.
PGP would make the government's job a great deal more difficult, but the physical security needed to prevent the feds from inserting some sort of eavesdropping device on either end of the communications channel is not affordable to your average terror suspect.
looks a bit too low for "practical" implementation yet.
At this point people are more interested in the physics rather than the practical applications.
This discovery is pretty important, because as TFA says, the exact mechanism that allows high temperature superconductivity to occur isn't widely agreed upon. Another system to study makes it much more likely that theorists will agree on exactly how this works.
Publicly releasing source code that uses the iPhone APIs as documented in the SDK and Developer Program could easily fall under the definition of "disclosing," "publishing," or "disseminating" Confidential Information,
Since the SDK is availible to people for who haven't signed an NDA, this seems like a rather unlikely interpretation of this.
If you're _really_ worried about this you can develop without becoming a registered developer and convince someone who is to sign your program. This definitely won't work for GPLV3 stuff, but other free licenses should be OK.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding something. Is there some set of information that you get when you're a registered developer?
My reading is that it doesn't really claim what TFA is claiming it does.
This patent seems to be patenting a process where many unrelated clients connect to a supposedly lightweight server and distributes workloads among those clients via a sideband channel. That's not my understanding of how Ajax works.
It seems to me that it suffers from the same issues that many distributed computing platforms suffer from which is that you get free CPU at the expense of a great deal of bandwidth so it's only useful for a very limited sets of workloads. In this case I can't really imagine what you'd use it for.
Do we need to raise the stakes any higher in the pursuit of basic science?
What budding young scientists need is support to do their research while they haven't produced results, not place a pot of gold at then end of the rainbow.
If one pursues the academic tract, you need to get into grad school, secure a good advisor, get put on good research, get a decent faculty position, get funding, attract decent grad students and then perform
The number of people who get this far in challenging fields tends to be very low, and a lots of bright, smart people don't make it.
The creation of prizes is very attractive for the grant givers, since it allows you to attact many more people than your funding would normally allow, but don't try to convince us that it's a real way of funding science.
Also, apart from the baths and showers with which the camps shall be furnished prisoners of war shall be provided with sufficient water and soap for their personal toilet and for washing their personal laundry; the necessary installations, facilities and time shall be granted them for that purpose.
You've noticed that many engineers are conservative.
Was it the cut of slacks that gave it away?
Whether American, Canadian or Islamic, they pointed out that a disproportionate share of engineers seem to have a mindset that makes them open to the quintessential right-wing features of "monism" (why argue where there is one best solution) and by "simplism" (if only people were rational, remedies would be simple)
I've also noticed these traits among some engineers. I thought it was because they were assholes.
Slashdot Mirror
Diamond computers.
Who cares if they work? People will buy them anyway.
They are about legal requirements.
Faking a fax signature isn't really that much harder than faking a real one.
Sending a fake signature over a fax isn't that much harder than faking a real one, but is no less criminal.
"Notarized" signatures are supposed to be more secure, though if you can produce a convincing fake ID, they probably aren't.
This issue was very thoughtfully covered in Strong Bad Email 47.
It's hard to say without seeing the article in Nano-letters, but based on the diagram and a vague description, I'd guess that it works something like this:
A high energy electron hole pair is created by a photon, which then relaxes down to a lower energy state. But, instead of emitting a phonon (heat), it creates another electron hole pair, and you end up with two. I suppose this process could repeat itself, so that many different wavelengths would all produce energy with reasonable efficiency.
This is in all likelihood facilitated by the complex energy band structure of the (essentially) polycrystalline semiconductor.
I'm not so sure how directly applicable all of this is. I suspect that some theorist postulated that this could happen, but it was difficult to prove experimentally. It seems to me that the hard work of actually producing an workable device hasn't been done yet.
From what I can tell, this work is done in PbSe, which I don't think is a suitible for huge volume production.
But I could be wrong in all this.
I don't care about Eric Lerner.
I don't believe the theory because it's crack-pot craziness.
If he's proven right, sure I'll apologize, right here on slashdot, for whatever that's worth. I'd send him $100 but it sounds like he wont need it if he's right.
Look, it's _possible_ that the last 30 years of cosmology has been a blind alley, but it's just absurdly unlikely. I understand that there's a certain appeal to a theory that does away with dark energy, dark matter and inflation, but there's just too much evidence in support of it to throw it away.
ITER may have a 0% chance of producing viable fusion power, but it will very likely help us understand plasma physics. That may be a bad investment.
However, the work described in this story has a 0% chance of working and a 0% chance of putting the Electric Universe crap to bed.
So it's a worse investment.
Perhaps I'm being a bit pedantic, but am I the only one that thought some of the questions were oddly worded?
Here's what I view as correct answers:
Q What is the name of the screw that costs $35.66?
A: None. The M28 screw costs $35.66 per 50.
Q There are 664 screws of which minor diameter tolerance?
A: None. The M18 Screw has a minor diameter tolerance of 8g, and there are 664 of those, but there are 1442 screws with a tolerance of 8g.
Q: There are 292 screws of what thread pitch?
A: None. There are 292 M16 screws which have a thread pitch of 2mm, but there are 527 screws with a thread pitch of 2mm.
My understanding about trademarks comes from u.S. law. Is there something about U.K. law that's different?
There _may_ be some dillution aspect to this, however, if Google doesn't mix and match brand names in search results, I really don't see a problem here.
The best analogy I can think of is in a store.
If I asked a shop keeper, do you carry brand X, and he responded, "No, but we do carry brand Y," that's is clearly not infringement.
If the shop keeper says, "Yes we do have brand X over here, but have you considered brand Y? Many people find it to be a better value." This is also _not_ trademark infringement, even if it's his financial interest to recommend brand Y (e.g. better margins or whatever).
I don't really see much of a distinction between the shop keeper analogy and Google search terms. The only thing is that they sell the rights to put ads up based on a word which the trademark owner claims to own. But since no reasonable person would be confused by this and believe that Google owned the trademark, it's hard to imagine how Google could be sued.
It's an interesting story but a very silly title.
The type of security that you need to ensure a very interested US government from monitoring you is not affordable in this case.
PGP would make the government's job a great deal more difficult, but the physical security needed to prevent the feds from inserting some sort of eavesdropping device on either end of the communications channel is not affordable to your average terror suspect.
looks a bit too low for "practical" implementation yet.
At this point people are more interested in the physics rather than the practical applications.
This discovery is pretty important, because as TFA says, the exact mechanism that allows high temperature superconductivity to occur isn't widely agreed upon. Another system to study makes it much more likely that theorists will agree on exactly how this works.
Publicly releasing source code that uses the iPhone APIs as documented in the SDK and Developer Program could easily fall under the definition of "disclosing," "publishing," or "disseminating" Confidential Information,
Since the SDK is availible to people for who haven't signed an NDA, this seems like a rather unlikely interpretation of this.
If you're _really_ worried about this you can develop without becoming a registered developer and convince someone who is to sign your program. This definitely won't work for GPLV3 stuff, but other free licenses should be OK.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding something. Is there some set of information that you get when you're a registered developer?
Each datapac in the ISE presents a gas-gauge-like monitor showing you how much performance is being used [...]
If you can use your gas gauge to measure how fast you're going, you're probably driving too fast.
It looks like they are trying to dump a useless patent on some foolish wanna-be patent troll.
Is this really the patent?
My reading is that it doesn't really claim what TFA is claiming it does.
This patent seems to be patenting a process where many unrelated clients connect to a supposedly lightweight server and distributes workloads among those clients via a sideband channel. That's not my understanding of how Ajax works.
It seems to me that it suffers from the same issues that many distributed computing platforms suffer from which is that you get free CPU at the expense of a great deal of bandwidth so it's only useful for a very limited sets of workloads. In this case I can't really imagine what you'd use it for.
1) Do you have a decent quality oxide for it?
2) Can you make good low resistance contacts?
3) Can it be doped?
Graphene probably fails 1 and 2 at this point. I'm not sure about 3.
2D (graphene) and 1D (carbon nanotube) semiconductor systems have a lot of trouble with surface effects ruining your ability to make decent devices.
to type "bin."
Do we need to raise the stakes any higher in the pursuit of basic science?
What budding young scientists need is support to do their research while they haven't produced results, not place a pot of gold at then end of the rainbow.
If one pursues the academic tract, you need to get into grad school, secure a good advisor, get put on good research, get a decent faculty position, get funding, attract decent grad students and then perform
The number of people who get this far in challenging fields tends to be very low, and a lots of bright, smart people don't make it.
The creation of prizes is very attractive for the grant givers, since it allows you to attact many more people than your funding would normally allow, but don't try to convince us that it's a real way of funding science.
article 29 of convention of Geneva, clause c:
Also, apart from the baths and showers with which the camps shall be furnished prisoners of war shall be provided with sufficient water and soap for their personal toilet and for washing their personal laundry; the necessary installations, facilities and time shall be granted them for that purpose.
ref: http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/lawofwar/geneva03.htm#art29
Stop running crappy stories like these:
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/20/0340238 http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/03/1644252
and uninformed editorializing like this:
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/20/0031238
Danish cartoons should be discussed in comments.
Phrases that are snarky commentary should not be tags.
Thanks!
How do we shut off tags?
Right under this story I see a tag of "whogivesafuck."
That's just not acceptable.
You've noticed that many engineers are conservative.
Was it the cut of slacks that gave it away?
Whether American, Canadian or Islamic, they pointed out that a disproportionate share of engineers seem to have a mindset that makes them open to the quintessential right-wing features of "monism" (why argue where there is one best solution) and by "simplism" (if only people were rational, remedies would be simple)
I've also noticed these traits among some engineers. I thought it was because they were assholes.
The guy at Best Buy is going to get a haircut, and a suit.
He will clench his teeth together as he tells you what phone you need.
Sounds great.
I've voted in two NH precincts (*) and they were both optical scans, though I didn't notice if they were Diebold. "Accuvote" rings a bell, though.
:)
They should leave a paper trail, though the ballot disappears into the machine when you scan it.
(*) not in the same election.