If someone in Congress is willing to stand up to corrupt publicly subsidized major league sports, what about doing something about corrupt publicly subsidized financial institutions that have no actual oversight?
Fed funds, the U.S. overnight inter-bank lending rate, opened 0.08 percent, within the Federal Reserve’s target of zero to 0.25 percent, ICAP Plc, the world’s largest inter-dealer broker, said in an e-mailed statement.
Fed funds traded from 0.06 percent to 0.3125 percent yesterday, according to data posted on the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s website. The fed effective, or a volume-weighted average of rates on trades arranged by major brokers, was 0.09 percent.
This this is on Oct. 2 2014: 0.09% is free money. Who gets this free money: the big banks, B of A, Citi, Chase. Also the top four investment firms which are also banks: #1 Goldman Sachs, #2 Morgan Stanley, #3 JPMorgan Chase, #4 Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Note the overlap, there is no meaningful difference between banks and brokerage firms.
But, the Fed’s problem – like Japan a decade ago – is as the International Monetary Fund puts it in its latest financial stability report, the economy is “bifurcated”. Many large American companies, particularly those with global operations, are highly profitable and liquid. Unsurprisingly, for them “bank lending conditions and capital market financing remain easy”, the IMF notes.
But many small and medium-sized companies – or the entities that typically create jobs inside America, not overseas – find it hard to raise funds. A survey conducted by the International Franchise Association in Washington, for example, notes that whereas in March half of its members expected credit conditions to improve soon, now less than a quarter expect any easing; even as Treasury yields fall.
The Wall Street Journal reports the SEC charged BofA with breaking securities laws pertaining to record-keeping and internal controls after the bank disclosed in April that it had discovered a nearly $4 billion accounting error.
So 7,650,000 divided by 4,000,000,000 = 0.019125 or 1.9125%. Note that this error existed for years, and it meant that BofA saved a huge amount of money by having $4 billion less in capital reserves then was required.
But to understand what the fine really means it should be compared to the market capitation (total worth on the stock market), which on Oct 2 2014 was $177 billion. So 7,650,000 divided by 117,000,000,000 = 4.32203e-05 =.0000432203 = 0.00432203%. Ohh, that must have really really hurt.
No one was held accountable. No one lost their job, was demoted, got a bad mark on their permanent record. The stock holders end up paying the fine. That's what it means to have no effective oversight.
So the NFL is in trouble and B of A gets a fine valued at 0.00432203% of their current net worth. That is why my brain hurts.
The international sub-atomic physics community is discussing where to build the next really big project. One leading candidate is Japan, because they seem to be interested in picking up a sizable chunk of the bill. (There are other politically inspired reasons, like the lack of this kind of facility anywhere in the eastern hemisphere.)
By analyzing over 500 GPS stations, the GFZ scientists Rongjiang Wang and Thomas Walter have found that horizontal displacements of up to five meters in an eastern direction occurred at the east coast of Japan. The cause lies in the earthquake zone, i.e. at the contact interface of the Pacific plate with Japan. Computer simulations of this surface show that an offset of up to 25 meters occurred during the earthquake. Calculations of the GFZ modeling group headed by Stephan Sobolev even yielded a displacement of up to 27 meters and a vertical movement of seven meters.
And then there is the permanent subsidence
which was up to 1.2 m (3.93 ft) in the Oshika Peninsula, Miyagi Prefecture.
So building new expensive technological infrastructure in earthquake country and ignoring known problems seems to be a common occurrence. And I'm sure it's a world wide blind spot with respect to a lot of other potential natural disasters as well.
Stop lying, I'm sick of it. Just admit what you are actually doing for a change.
You, and all the other "skeptics", are pretending to be engaged in a rational approach.That's not credible.
There will never be enough evidence to convince you. It's obvious from your past behavior. Every time a new piece of real world evidence shows up you have the same knee jerk reaction: ti's not enough, there's some other reason, it happened before, what about (irrelevant information here), etc.
So there is an extraordinarily large walrus event: it doesn't count. There are new high temperature records being set every year: the numbers are skewed. Vermont maple farmers are loosing their livelihood because the winters are not cold or long enough: it's just a long term cycle. Dozens (or even hundreds) of species in North America and Europe are moving their range further north every year: a common pattern isn't happening, each case is unique and unrelated.
Stop wearing the fig-leaf of "rational skeptic". You have made up your mind. No additional information will sway you. Short of a "personal extinction event", you are not going to change you position or your behavior.
Your lucky bastards. Why can't this happen in the US? If only we could get a crazy-right party that would split the Republicans, things could be so much better. I'm jealous of the UK right now.
Do you know what the word "hypothesis" means? I think not, based on your reply. Factually, I drew no conclusions. I never claimed to do any "studies" either. I quoted a very well known historical figure, who was obviously stating an opinion. When I agreed with him, saying that this had been going on a long time, I was agreeing with his opinion. Two opinions, one of them from a dead man.
I now think (one more opinion) that you are saying things that give credence to my hypothesis.
Why do you make this so easy for me?
Oh that's right, the subject is stupidity. Now it makes so much sense.
Then again I could just recall that John Stuart Mill was moved to remark to the House of Commons: “What I stated was, that the Conservative party was, by the law of its constitution, necessarily the stupidest party. Now, I do not retract this assertion; but I did not mean that Conservatives are generally stupid; I meant, that stupid persons are generally Conservative. I believe that to be so obvious and undeniable a fact that I hardly think any hon. Gentleman will question it.” (My emphasis).
Note that this has been true from the time of Mills, 1806 - 1873, so it's not a recent phenomenon.
I would hypothesize that there is a direct correlation between conservatism and stupidity; the more extreme the conservatism, the stupider the person.
You know why the appropriately named Anonymous Coward is whining about "one political party or another"? It's because he, she, or it is pathologically paranoid about any statement that might conflict with it's deep insecurity. Any statement that can be construed in any way as a disagreement must be attacked.
If the list seems biased to the right, it's because I decided to pick political groups that were started in the 21st century, and you have to go back to the 1980's to find anything left wing.
So who could it be? Starts with a D, ends with a C, has 10 letters including the vowels a,e,i, and o: D-m-cr-t-c Party. I'd like to buy a vowel, Pat.
Given all the "they deserve it", "it's not stealing, it's only copying", or comparisons to Civilization, who do you think they could sell it to? EA?
For anything coming out of the US Army, think China, Russia, India, Israel, the UK, France. It might be real military espionage, or straight commercial thievery. Both are bad.
In the military context, any inside information is a potential military advantage. I've had to look this up twice in the last week or so, so this time I'm not going to bother, but the Chinese hacked into BA on the F-35 project, and it cost a lot of time and money to recover. And that assumes that somehow you can recover from that kind of vast breach, which is not clear.
For the commercial military market, knowing about your competitors/vendors is a big economic win. It's a competitive advantage for bidding or knowing how to upgrade you product. Just because someone is an ally, that doesn't mean that they don't want to know all your secrets. Jonathon Pollard is serving a lift term (a nominal 30 years) for spying for Israel. It's alleged that some of the information he leaked ended up in the hands of the Soviet Union as well.
This isn't a bunch of fanboys getting into a game company network and getting artwork from a hotly anticipated game. It's billions of dollars and lives on the line. Grow up, whiny fanboys.
"This entire article is rumor and unsupported speculation". Remember, this is Slashdot. Without rumor and unsupported speculation it would be like the internet without cat videos.
But don't forget the importance of hostility, prejudice, flamebait, personal attacks, counter factual claims, obstinate stupidity, outright lies, and vendettas. Slashdot has a lot more to offer then simply overreacting to mindless rumors. There is a wealth of egocentric antisocial behavior on display. Slashdot thrives as a community of dysfunction where the verbal equivalent of apes flinging feces is the normal mode of communication.
Frankly I come here to observe the zoo like behavior. And I'm fully aware that while I'm looking at the animals, they are looking back at me.
For lots of people, the computer is the browser. That's what Chrombooks are for. I don't want that, but I already know that I'm not in anyone's big target demographic; I'm in the marginal group.
Sierra Nevada Corporation, aka SNC has a real nice web page with a whole lot of very pretty pictures.
They also have a very extensive Wikipedia entry for the Dream Chaser which goes into minute detail about every contract they have received and every milestone they have achieved. It is so detailed and gleaming that it was obviously crafted by someone in the pay of SNC.
However, it you read the whole thing you can find some very interesting information in he very last section listing their technology partners.
It turns out that Lockheed-Martin is responsible for "airframe construction and human rating of the spaceplane". SNC has designed a lifting body capsule, and hybrid rubber/NO rocket engine. Based on the partners list, it seems that they are acting as a systems integrator, and everything outside the design and rocket is not in house technology.
So if NASA is making the step to commercial human rated spaceflight, are they better off choosing companies who have already demonstrated orbital launch capabilities, or someone that does not even have the ability to build their own space capsule? When something goes wrong (and something will) imaging the finger pointing in the SNC scenario. This explains why NASA made the safe choice.
This suit, although filed by SNC, seems like an attempt by Lockheed-Martin to get a chunk of the billion dollar pie. What do they have to loose? Their name isn't on any of the legal paperwork, so they can pretend to be out of the loop. Meanwhile the congress-critters from Lockheed will be fighting it out with their counterparts from Boeing behind closed doors. This won't be decided in the courts, or in any public forum.
It's not about public policy or access to space, it's about corporate profit. If you want to know why NASA seems so screwed up, just follow the money.
Just a thought. If distributed individual and business installations are able to cut into electric utilities profit, maybe that same technology could benefit the utilities bottom line. Maybe instead of being an all or nothing winner take all big vs small capitalistic scrum, there could be a viable middle ground. Utilities could sponsor business/household solar and share in the rewards. Not everyone can or wants to install solar, so the utilities could be part of the solution.
I know that the idea of cooperation makes the Slashdot libertards brains hurt, but society rarely prospers when entrenched special interests dictate the rules so they gain more power and money. This can happen on the left (see the current mess in Argentina), but in the US the problem is on the right. All the major players (banks, big pharma, aerospace, telecom, entertainment/media) use regulation to create captive markets and guaranteed profit. No capitalism in sight.
So the challenge is to take a highly regulated critical infrastructure sector and make it transition to a different energy generation model that includes renewables like wind and solar, as well as local generation. Unfortunately, the current campaign contribution driven hyper partisan political landscape makes this highly unlikely. When you see an energy sector dancing to the tune of the Koch brothers, it's hard to be positive about the future.
This is significant progress, but "better" does not mean good enough. Consider the following:
"150 and 300 mm wafers reveals >95% monolayer uniformity". If I understand current process yield amounts, a single layer that is only 95% good is not sufficient for large scale manufacturing. You need lots of layers, and the yield goes down with the product of the percentages for each layer.
"26000 graphene field-effect transistors were realized". On 100mm or 300mm? Compared to current density for VLSI it's many orders of magnitude off.
"About 18% of devices show mobility of >3000 cm2/(V s), more than 3 times higher than prior results ". Wonderful, but prior art was only 6%. What are the values for the other 82%? Are they useful at all?
"polycrystalline graphene". Are their any currently deployed polycrystalline graphene transistor devices? I thought that to make graphene really shine it needs to be more uniform then polycrystalline, hence more a single crystal structure.
So if you think that university press releases are bullcrap, then wanna-be company press releases are significantly lower on the food chain. Cockroach crap? Flea crap?
Paulson, appointed to the Secretary of the Treasury by Bush in 2006, spent over 35 years at Goldman-Sachs starting in 1974 and ending up as chairman.
Can your say conflict of interest? I knew you could.
It has been pointed out that Paulson's plan could potentially have some conflicts of interest, since Paulson was a former CEO of Goldman Sachs, a firm that might benefit largely from the plan. Economic columnists called for more scrutiny of his actions. Questions remain about Paulson's interest, despite having no direct financial interest in Goldman, since he had sold his entire stake in the firm prior to becoming Treasury Secretary, pursuant to ethics law. The Goldman Sachs benefit from the AIG bailout was recently estimated as US$12.9 billion and GS was the largest recipient of the public funds from AIG. Creating the collateralized debt obligations (CDO's) forming the basis of the current crisis was an active part of Goldman Sach's business during Paulson's tenure as CEO. Opponents argued that Paulson remained a Wall Street insider who maintained close friendships with higher-ups of the bailout beneficiaries. If passed into law as originally written, the proposed bill would have given the United States Treasury Secretary unprecedented powers over the economic and financial life of the U.S. Section 8 of Paulson’s original plan stated: "Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency." Some time after the passage of a rewritten bill, the press reported that the Treasury was now proposing to use these funds ($700 billion) in ways other than what was originally intended in the bill.
Your are wrong, wrong, wrong. Wall Street is fundamentally dependent on the Federal Funds Rate which is set by the Federal Open Market Committee which is a part of the Federal Reserve System, AKA The FED.
To say this isn't "regulation" is pedantic nonsense. It is the single most important tool the FED has for regulating the economy. To say otherwise is like saying that the gas peddle on a car is not a "regulation", even though it is the basic control to increase the speed of the vehicle.
Red-Yellow-Green is bad human factors practice because of red-green color blindness. For people of western European decent, about 1 in 10 males are red-green color blind. Other populations have different statistics. Only 1% of Eskimo males are color blind. Approximately 2.9% of boys from Saudi Arabia and 3.7% from India were found to have deficient color vision.
Web designers almost never take this into account. For data display, red-yellow-green is common, as is the "spectrum" blue-cyan-green-yellow-red ramp. The spectrum is a very poor choice, because not only is it bad for color blind people, but it induces a color banding perception of the data that can obscure real data features.
If you have a choice, don't use the spectrum or RYG for anything.
You forgot a crucial point, this is Slashdot. When you said "Engineering isn't a contest" you violated the Way of Slashdot.
On Slashdot, it's all about people with deeply held irrational opinions who make unsupportable claims. Additionally, they express themselves in rants and slander, and rational discourse is considered a sign of weakness. If you want to find people who think, you're in the wrong place.
To make my sarcasm more understandable to you, I'm trying to point out that in the US, even national security is sacrificed to the profit motive. This is one of the reasons that US defense (and other critical infrastructure firms) keep being hacked by Chinese and Russian based groups. They don't spend enough money on security because "profit".
The US Chamber of Commerce, one of the biggest and most influential lobbying groups, has successfully shut down any legislation addressing requirements for cyber-security. President Obama did try and address the issue via executive order, but that is not as effective as actual legislation.
On 21 April 2009, media reports, citing Pentagon sources, said that during 2007 and 2008, spies downloaded several terabytes of data related to the F-35's design and electronics systems, potentially compromising the aircraft and aiding the development of defense systems against it. Lockheed Martin rejected suggestions that the project was compromised, stating it "does not believe any classified information had been stolen". Other sources suggested that the incident caused both hardware and software redesigns to be more resistant to cyber attack.
Given standard US business practice this will be outsourced to Taiwan (Taiwan Semiconductor) and the work will be performed in China.
Conversely it can be done in the US by 1H-B visa holders from India.
Or it could be done by IBM in Zurich or India. If IBM gets a piece of the action, it could be done anywhere. Remember, they no longer report employment by country, so no matter where they say the work was done, big chunks of it cold be done anywhere on the planet.
Remember that Zuckerberg and Microsoft are threatening to move to Canada because the US only produces second rate computer talent, so clearly there is no one in the US capable of doing the job right. (Look up the recent Slashdot post about this, I'm too lazy.)
I know that the money is actually going to universities, not corporations. I'm just pulling your leg. Even so, given the ties between academic institutions and big corporations, who knows where the data from this will end up, or who will have input into the process. Inquiring minds want to know...
This proposal is related to the loop quantum gravity view of physics, which is an alternative to string theory.
The authors propose a singularity is not created when a black hole collapse occurs. Instead, the suggest that the material falling into the gravity well forms a "Planck star". The mass does not disappear into a singularity, but remains as a form of matter compressed to the Planck scale. The Planck pressure (my term) stops the gravitational collapse, so no infinite mathematical feature is involved.
A Plank star has very similar characteristics to a conventional black hole. It has a Schwarzschild radius, so matter and energy are swallowed up in the same way. The difference is what happens inside the Schwarzschild radius and the long term fate of the star.
Two effects come into play: time dilation and Hawking radiation. Because of the immense gravity, time dilation makes events inside the Schwarzschild radius appear to take billions of years to the outside observer, although the happen rapidly in the frame of reference of the Planck star. As in-falling matter hits the Planck matter core, it bounces back. It does not simply collect at the core.
Additionally, Hawking radiation occurs. This means that energy can be released outside the Schwarzschild radius, which allows the star to loose mass. In this theory, about a third of the mass can escape via this mechanism. However, this process also takes a long period because of time dilation. (There is more complexity to this, but since I'm not certain how it works I'll not try and describe it.)
Eventually the radius of the expanding Plank star matter and the Schwarzschild radius intersect, and from the point of view of the external observer the formerly "black" hole explodes. This is different then the long term evolution of a classical black hole, which looses most of it's mass via Hawking radiation. The final evaporation of a classical black hole is not a big explosion since the final mass is relatively small, and no matter how big the black hole was, the final bang is the same size. For a Planck star, the size of the explosion depends on the mass inside the Schwarzschild radius.
This theory has some very nice properties. First, there is no infinitely dense matter. Classical black hole models have been trying to grapple with this issue for a long time. Also, since the final explosion can be massive, it could be the source of very high energy cosmic rays. Some have already suggested that gamma ray bursts may be the visible result. The theory predicts that the explosion can take about 14 billion years to occur to an external observer, so that fits in with the current age of the universe. Note that there are testable features relating to cosmic rays and other radiation coming from Plank stars, so observational verification is possible.
Rovelli and Vidotto wonder why this couldn't be the case with black holes as well—instead of a singularity at its center, there could be a Planck structure—a star—which would allow for general relativity to come back into play. If this were the case, then a black hole could slowly over time lose mass due to Hawking Radiation—as the black hole contracted, the Planck star inside would grow bigger as information was absorbed. Eventually, the star would meet the event horizon and the black hole would dematerialize in an instant as all the information it had ever sucked in was cast out into the universe.
This is potentially a big deal. If true it solves some troubling theoretical problems and man tie black holes and cosmic rays together. It would also present a huge challenge to string theory, because it gives credence to loop quantum gravity.
Slashdot Mirror
Combustible head. You're on Fire
First, the public subsidy.
This this is on Oct. 2 2014: 0.09% is free money. Who gets this free money: the big banks, B of A, Citi, Chase. Also the top four investment firms which are also banks: #1 Goldman Sachs, #2 Morgan Stanley, #3 JPMorgan Chase, #4 Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Note the overlap, there is no meaningful difference between banks and brokerage firms.
So what is the result? Why the Fed's Zero Interest Rate Policy Isn't Working.
And the lack of any effective oversight: Bank of America fined $7.65M over accounting blunder.
So 7,650,000 divided by 4,000,000,000 = 0.019125 or 1.9125%. Note that this error existed for years, and it meant that BofA saved a huge amount of money by having $4 billion less in capital reserves then was required.
But to understand what the fine really means it should be compared to the market capitation (total worth on the stock market), which on Oct 2 2014 was $177 billion. So 7,650,000 divided by 117,000,000,000 = 4.32203e-05 = .0000432203 = 0.00432203%. Ohh, that must have really really hurt.
No one was held accountable. No one lost their job, was demoted, got a bad mark on their permanent record. The stock holders end up paying the fine. That's what it means to have no effective oversight.
So the NFL is in trouble and B of A gets a fine valued at 0.00432203% of their current net worth. That is why my brain hurts.
You're an asshole. Your were born an asshole and you'll die an asshole. And the sooner you die the better off the rest of the world will be.
So how much ground displacement was there in 2011 during the Great East Japan Earthquake?
And then there is the permanent subsidence which was up to 1.2 m (3.93 ft) in the Oshika Peninsula, Miyagi Prefecture.
So building new expensive technological infrastructure in earthquake country and ignoring known problems seems to be a common occurrence. And I'm sure it's a world wide blind spot with respect to a lot of other potential natural disasters as well.
You, and all the other "skeptics", are pretending to be engaged in a rational approach.That's not credible.
There will never be enough evidence to convince you. It's obvious from your past behavior. Every time a new piece of real world evidence shows up you have the same knee jerk reaction: ti's not enough, there's some other reason, it happened before, what about (irrelevant information here), etc.
So there is an extraordinarily large walrus event: it doesn't count. There are new high temperature records being set every year: the numbers are skewed. Vermont maple farmers are loosing their livelihood because the winters are not cold or long enough: it's just a long term cycle. Dozens (or even hundreds) of species in North America and Europe are moving their range further north every year: a common pattern isn't happening, each case is unique and unrelated.
Stop wearing the fig-leaf of "rational skeptic". You have made up your mind. No additional information will sway you. Short of a "personal extinction event", you are not going to change you position or your behavior.
Your lucky bastards. Why can't this happen in the US? If only we could get a crazy-right party that would split the Republicans, things could be so much better. I'm jealous of the UK right now.
I now think (one more opinion) that you are saying things that give credence to my hypothesis.
Why do you make this so easy for me?
Oh that's right, the subject is stupidity. Now it makes so much sense.
Note that this has been true from the time of Mills, 1806 - 1873, so it's not a recent phenomenon.
I would hypothesize that there is a direct correlation between conservatism and stupidity; the more extreme the conservatism, the stupider the person.
And then there's the pretense of not naming a specific political group. Hmm, I wonder who they heck it is referring to? The Amerian Conservative Party (2008), American Freedom Party (2010), Justice Pary (2011), Objectivist Party (2008), Pirate Party (2008), or Unity Party of America (2004)?
If the list seems biased to the right, it's because I decided to pick political groups that were started in the 21st century, and you have to go back to the 1980's to find anything left wing.
So who could it be? Starts with a D, ends with a C, has 10 letters including the vowels a,e,i, and o: D-m-cr-t-c Party. I'd like to buy a vowel, Pat.
For anything coming out of the US Army, think China, Russia, India, Israel, the UK, France. It might be real military espionage, or straight commercial thievery. Both are bad.
In the military context, any inside information is a potential military advantage. I've had to look this up twice in the last week or so, so this time I'm not going to bother, but the Chinese hacked into BA on the F-35 project, and it cost a lot of time and money to recover. And that assumes that somehow you can recover from that kind of vast breach, which is not clear.
For the commercial military market, knowing about your competitors/vendors is a big economic win. It's a competitive advantage for bidding or knowing how to upgrade you product. Just because someone is an ally, that doesn't mean that they don't want to know all your secrets. Jonathon Pollard is serving a lift term (a nominal 30 years) for spying for Israel. It's alleged that some of the information he leaked ended up in the hands of the Soviet Union as well.
This isn't a bunch of fanboys getting into a game company network and getting artwork from a hotly anticipated game. It's billions of dollars and lives on the line. Grow up, whiny fanboys.
"warez". Are you 12 years old?
J Edgar Hoover is alive and well. Nothing has changed.
But don't forget the importance of hostility, prejudice, flamebait, personal attacks, counter factual claims, obstinate stupidity, outright lies, and vendettas. Slashdot has a lot more to offer then simply overreacting to mindless rumors. There is a wealth of egocentric antisocial behavior on display. Slashdot thrives as a community of dysfunction where the verbal equivalent of apes flinging feces is the normal mode of communication.
Frankly I come here to observe the zoo like behavior. And I'm fully aware that while I'm looking at the animals, they are looking back at me.
For lots of people, the computer is the browser. That's what Chrombooks are for. I don't want that, but I already know that I'm not in anyone's big target demographic; I'm in the marginal group.
Why do you read/post on Slashdot?
They also have a very extensive Wikipedia entry for the Dream Chaser which goes into minute detail about every contract they have received and every milestone they have achieved. It is so detailed and gleaming that it was obviously crafted by someone in the pay of SNC.
However, it you read the whole thing you can find some very interesting information in he very last section listing their technology partners.
It turns out that Lockheed-Martin is responsible for "airframe construction and human rating of the spaceplane". SNC has designed a lifting body capsule, and hybrid rubber/NO rocket engine. Based on the partners list, it seems that they are acting as a systems integrator, and everything outside the design and rocket is not in house technology.
So if NASA is making the step to commercial human rated spaceflight, are they better off choosing companies who have already demonstrated orbital launch capabilities, or someone that does not even have the ability to build their own space capsule? When something goes wrong (and something will) imaging the finger pointing in the SNC scenario. This explains why NASA made the safe choice.
This suit, although filed by SNC, seems like an attempt by Lockheed-Martin to get a chunk of the billion dollar pie. What do they have to loose? Their name isn't on any of the legal paperwork, so they can pretend to be out of the loop. Meanwhile the congress-critters from Lockheed will be fighting it out with their counterparts from Boeing behind closed doors. This won't be decided in the courts, or in any public forum.
It's not about public policy or access to space, it's about corporate profit. If you want to know why NASA seems so screwed up, just follow the money.
I know that the idea of cooperation makes the Slashdot libertards brains hurt, but society rarely prospers when entrenched special interests dictate the rules so they gain more power and money. This can happen on the left (see the current mess in Argentina), but in the US the problem is on the right. All the major players (banks, big pharma, aerospace, telecom, entertainment/media) use regulation to create captive markets and guaranteed profit. No capitalism in sight.
So the challenge is to take a highly regulated critical infrastructure sector and make it transition to a different energy generation model that includes renewables like wind and solar, as well as local generation. Unfortunately, the current campaign contribution driven hyper partisan political landscape makes this highly unlikely. When you see an energy sector dancing to the tune of the Koch brothers, it's hard to be positive about the future.
"150 and 300 mm wafers reveals >95% monolayer uniformity". If I understand current process yield amounts, a single layer that is only 95% good is not sufficient for large scale manufacturing. You need lots of layers, and the yield goes down with the product of the percentages for each layer.
"26000 graphene field-effect transistors were realized". On 100mm or 300mm? Compared to current density for VLSI it's many orders of magnitude off.
"About 18% of devices show mobility of >3000 cm2/(V s), more than 3 times higher than prior results ". Wonderful, but prior art was only 6%. What are the values for the other 82%? Are they useful at all?
"polycrystalline graphene". Are their any currently deployed polycrystalline graphene transistor devices? I thought that to make graphene really shine it needs to be more uniform then polycrystalline, hence more a single crystal structure.
So if you think that university press releases are bullcrap, then wanna-be company press releases are significantly lower on the food chain. Cockroach crap? Flea crap?
Can your say conflict of interest? I knew you could.
Although TIME Magazine had him as runner up for the Person of the Year in 2008 they also listed him as one of the "25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis"
To say this isn't "regulation" is pedantic nonsense. It is the single most important tool the FED has for regulating the economy. To say otherwise is like saying that the gas peddle on a car is not a "regulation", even though it is the basic control to increase the speed of the vehicle.
Web designers almost never take this into account. For data display, red-yellow-green is common, as is the "spectrum" blue-cyan-green-yellow-red ramp. The spectrum is a very poor choice, because not only is it bad for color blind people, but it induces a color banding perception of the data that can obscure real data features.
If you have a choice, don't use the spectrum or RYG for anything.
On Slashdot, it's all about people with deeply held irrational opinions who make unsupportable claims. Additionally, they express themselves in rants and slander, and rational discourse is considered a sign of weakness. If you want to find people who think, you're in the wrong place.
To make my sarcasm more understandable to you, I'm trying to point out that in the US, even national security is sacrificed to the profit motive. This is one of the reasons that US defense (and other critical infrastructure firms) keep being hacked by Chinese and Russian based groups. They don't spend enough money on security because "profit".
The US Chamber of Commerce, one of the biggest and most influential lobbying groups, has successfully shut down any legislation addressing requirements for cyber-security. President Obama did try and address the issue via executive order, but that is not as effective as actual legislation.
So here is a real example that I ran across when I was posting on a different Slashdot thread. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning_II#Program_cost_increases_and_delays
Now do you understand what I am talking about?
Conversely it can be done in the US by 1H-B visa holders from India.
Or it could be done by IBM in Zurich or India. If IBM gets a piece of the action, it could be done anywhere. Remember, they no longer report employment by country, so no matter where they say the work was done, big chunks of it cold be done anywhere on the planet.
Remember that Zuckerberg and Microsoft are threatening to move to Canada because the US only produces second rate computer talent, so clearly there is no one in the US capable of doing the job right. (Look up the recent Slashdot post about this, I'm too lazy.)
I know that the money is actually going to universities, not corporations. I'm just pulling your leg. Even so, given the ties between academic institutions and big corporations, who knows where the data from this will end up, or who will have input into the process. Inquiring minds want to know...
The authors propose a singularity is not created when a black hole collapse occurs. Instead, the suggest that the material falling into the gravity well forms a "Planck star". The mass does not disappear into a singularity, but remains as a form of matter compressed to the Planck scale. The Planck pressure (my term) stops the gravitational collapse, so no infinite mathematical feature is involved.
A Plank star has very similar characteristics to a conventional black hole. It has a Schwarzschild radius, so matter and energy are swallowed up in the same way. The difference is what happens inside the Schwarzschild radius and the long term fate of the star.
Two effects come into play: time dilation and Hawking radiation. Because of the immense gravity, time dilation makes events inside the Schwarzschild radius appear to take billions of years to the outside observer, although the happen rapidly in the frame of reference of the Planck star. As in-falling matter hits the Planck matter core, it bounces back. It does not simply collect at the core.
Additionally, Hawking radiation occurs. This means that energy can be released outside the Schwarzschild radius, which allows the star to loose mass. In this theory, about a third of the mass can escape via this mechanism. However, this process also takes a long period because of time dilation. (There is more complexity to this, but since I'm not certain how it works I'll not try and describe it.)
Eventually the radius of the expanding Plank star matter and the Schwarzschild radius intersect, and from the point of view of the external observer the formerly "black" hole explodes. This is different then the long term evolution of a classical black hole, which looses most of it's mass via Hawking radiation. The final evaporation of a classical black hole is not a big explosion since the final mass is relatively small, and no matter how big the black hole was, the final bang is the same size. For a Planck star, the size of the explosion depends on the mass inside the Schwarzschild radius.
This theory has some very nice properties. First, there is no infinitely dense matter. Classical black hole models have been trying to grapple with this issue for a long time. Also, since the final explosion can be massive, it could be the source of very high energy cosmic rays. Some have already suggested that gamma ray bursts may be the visible result. The theory predicts that the explosion can take about 14 billion years to occur to an external observer, so that fits in with the current age of the universe. Note that there are testable features relating to cosmic rays and other radiation coming from Plank stars, so observational verification is possible.
An important part of the theory is that it resolves the black hole information paradox. According to this article at Phys.org
This is potentially a big deal. If true it solves some troubling theoretical problems and man tie black holes and cosmic rays together. It would also present a huge challenge to string theory, because it gives credence to loop quantum gravity.