There are untapped rare earth deposits in Mongolia (a part of the former Soviet Union, not China).
According to a Y 2009 estimation by the US Geological Survey, Mongolia has 31M tons of Rare Earth reserves, or 16.77% of the total Global reserves, making it the 2nd biggest holder in the world after China.
Undersea deposits have also been recently found in the Pacific.
An area of one square kilometer (0.4 square miles) near one sample site in the central North Pacific could fulfill 20% of the world’s annual demand, estimated earth scientist Yasuhiro Kato, a member of the research team.
China has cornered the market because they produce these materials so cheaply. Cost and pollution are driving factors.
Although they are dubbed “rare,” these resources are not in fact all that scarce. A lot of countries have these elements. China’s reserves are just 40% of the total global reserves. The fact that they are rare in other places is because other countries are unwilling to extract them because of the high cost.
There are a number of reasons China controls the export of rare earth materials. Contrary to what most Western analysts claim, "political motivation" is not one of them. China's market dominance can instead be explained by the fact that the exploitation and processing of rare earth cause serious air, surface water and soil pollution. Over the past dozen years, the supply of rare earth has exceeded demand. The Chinese supplier had no control over its pricing, thus the price has been very low.
Rare earth minerals are going to be available. They're just going to cost more.
File a complaint and try and have the prosecutor disbarred. Use the judges rebuke as evidence. File against all the lawyers on the prosecution side and at least one level above them in the chain of command.
It is extremely unlikely that they will be disbarred. The best outcome would be some form of censure, which could have an effect on their carer. Even so, having to go through the process of defending themselves from professional criticism will be some payback for "four years of hell that a citizen goes through", to quote the ruling. I doubt that the bar will do anything at all. Sadly, complaining to the bar is likely the only payback the victim will get.
The real world cost is a loss to everyone but attorneys. They walk away fat and happy, no matter which side wins.
Meanwhile, the money spent on legal fees is not spent on the following: R&D, manufacturing, hiring, capital equipment purchase, advertising, stock dividends, salaries, stock value increases.
Ultimately, no matter which side prevails, the total wealth generated is less then it should be due to the patent system. Patents were intended to reward innovation. Now all they do is keep high priced litigators in luxury cars.
They also reward companies, not individuals. Even when innovation occurs, it can be crushed though the use of patent law. We use the wrong term in "patent trolls", when it should be "patent leaches". Leaches can kill, and the smaller the target the greater the chance it will be destroyed.
I'm working on software I hope to use for a start up, and I know I have to apply for provisional software patents. I don't want to waste the time, but if I don't someone else can make a patent application and take my work away from me. Even if I do apply, someone with a full time legal staff can plow me under, and my only hope would be to get some major financial backing. At that point I am not doing software, I'm doing patent work. Once again, innovation looses and lawyers win.
I wonder how this scales to a mass production environment. The article points out that they want to try design features that are not cost effective for traditional manufacturing technology.
Suppose that they create a design that uses some features that cannot be easily translated to normal manufacturing. Could they still move it to market using the prototype manufacturing technology, or would it just be too expensive?
The police make mistakes. Often. So if they put your name up, and it turns out that you are not guilty, or even the right person, what happens next?
A guy named Ramirez was falsely arrested in LA for the horrible beating of a Giants fan. The police were feeling the heat, so they went after Ramirez. The case almost immediately fell apart, but they kept saying it was the man in custody until they arrested the other two suspects.
In this case Ramirez is still in jail for a probation violation, which he is contesting. If you search for his name you will find all the details of the false arrest.
Now suppose that it's you, and you haven't done anything and don't have a criminal record. How do you fix that? Remember the Internet never forgets. Even if they take down the web page it will still hit on your name. Will they post a retraction? Maybe if you sue them. Outside of a trial it is very rare for someone to be declared "not guilty" in a legal sense.
They have no incentive to put up a retraction. It makes them look bad, so they will resist any responsibility. They would rather see an innocent person in jail then admit an error, so if you are just accused how much leverage do you think that you will have?
Just kiss your online presence goodbye. You will never get the interview with an online application process. That means you can't get hired at a national grocery store, for example, much less a tech job. You could be denied credit and not be told why. All these things can be overcome to some extent, but it could haunt you for the rest of your life.
Does it sound like such a good idea now? If you think you are immune your are being foolish. There is a lot of power here to hurt innocent people, and very little a victim can do to clear their name.
There are not too many hurricanes in Arizona. Even when hurricanes move inland from the Gulf of Mexico their resulting weather systems don't go that far west.
However, they do have haboob wind storms with wind speeds up to 30 mph and lots of flying sand. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haboob I guess these and thunderstorms are the most extreme weather that the structure would have to survive.
I'm certain that the people planning the project are well aware of the extreme weather conditions in Arizona. Why are you raising this queston? It implies that you have an insight that they have overlooked, which is extremely unlikely.
On Lipitor, I was talking about the anti-capitalistic practice of now allowing a bulk buyer to (the government) to get a better deal because of their large purchasing power. This is effectively corporations bribing the government to pay higher prices for the drugs. Comparimg the VA and Medicare Part D is an apples to apples comparison. I had just read about this so I put it in.
So you want a real world example. Here's one that actually killed people. People died because of Vioxx. It was a mass poisoning for profit. How come no one went to jail?
Death in drug trial has been described as a "trade secret." On Vioxx, Topol wrote: "Sadly, it is clear that Merck's commercial interest exceeded its concern about the drug's toxicity" (2). More and more concerns are raised by scholars and major journal editors about the type and the quality of published evidence, often biased towards efficacy of new products. The industry, funding over 80% of trials, sets up a research agenda guided more by marketing than by clinical considerations. Smart statistical and epidemiological tactics help obtain the desired results. Budget for marketing is by far greater than for research. Massive advertising to physicians and to the public gets increasingly sophisticated: ghost writing, professional guidelines, targeting of consumer groups and manipulating media for disease mongering. Pervasive lobbying and political ties limit the independence of regulatory bodies.
I happen to be really pissed about Vioxx because I took it, and there is a history of heart disease in my family. So Merck put my life at risk by withholding negative results. Drug companies pay the bills, and this is the result. If you think this is "cherry picking", I will personally get some Vioxx for you to take. I sure I can find a bunch of other unsafe drugs that are still on the market that you can take as well. Contact me after you take some potentially fatal drug that was put on the market for corporate profit. Until then why don't you shut the fuck up, asshole.
Who can initiate disbarment proceedings against the Cisco lawyers involved? Clearly this was planned and executed by attorneys. I would think that having to defend themselves against loosing their professional status might get their attention.
The judgment document from the Canadian court seems like it would contain all the information someone would need to get started.
Can anyone initiate a complaint? Cisco is in California, so that seems to be the logical place to see if this can be done. Any lawyers out there who have a clue about this?
The NIH and NSF managed to avoid major funding cuts in a year when most federal agencies got hit hard, and the DOE Office of Science, which was slated for a huge cut, also survived mostly intact.
Your examples suck. The NIH is effectively a government funded subsidiary of the drug companies. Taxpayers fund the research, the drug companies cherry pick the profitable results. The resulting commercial products are then sold back to government supported health care at obscene mark ups.
For example:
By the design of the program, the federal government is not permitted to negotiate prices of drugs with the drug companies, as federal agencies do in other programs. The Department of Veterans Affairs, which is allowed to negotiate drug prices and establish a formulary, pays 58% less for drugs, on average, than Medicare Part D. For example, Medicare pays $785 for a year's supply of Lipitor (atorvastatin), while the VA pays $520.
The DOE should be called the Department of Nuclear Weapons. It's a bureaucratic trick to make the defense budget look smaller.
Yet, according to Robert Alvarez, "Even with additional stimulus money, spending for bombs and cleanup will still exceed those for actual energy-related functions. Spending for the weapons complex is currently comparable to that during the height of the nuclear arms race in the 1950s. The big difference now — half of that money is spent dealing with the Cold War's environmental legacy."
I don't know about NSF, but if the general trend is as powerful their as it is everywhere else, serious research is not the most important goal. Everything get judged by how "practical" it is. If it doesn't have an obvious use, it has real trouble getting funded.
So in fact we have given up on basic science. This trend started with the cancellation of the Superconducting Supercollider. Now we are shutting down sub-atomic physics labs in the US. We now have no manned space capability. The Webb telescope looks to be dead. These are the tall tent poles of technology leadership. It's not just giving up on one of them, it's giving up on all of them. We don't care about the future.
This year the Chinese will put up the first module of their (non-international) space station. They clearly care about the future.
Does this take into account the user software profile? Somehow I doubt that trading NAND for DRAM will give you muct help when you are running a lot of CGI rendering or PhotoShop code. Maybe there would be a benefit if you are just running a browser, but even that sounds a bit off base to me.
Who do they expect to buy this study? It has a rotten order about it...
Why not go all the way and make individual police unrecognizable? That way they will never have to constrain their actions, because they can always say "it wasn't me, but some other masked officer." No badge number, no face, no accountability. That's what the cops really want.
The current situation in New Hampshire is only a difference of degree, no a difference of kind, from anonymous officers. If it the word of a uniformed cop against a civilian, and there is no other evidence, then the cop wins. It takes either a lot of witnesses, or a video to show that a cop is lying. If you let the cops stop video, you have no effective rights.
The subsidies are not about farmers, they're about agribusiness. The farmers are just a front for the corrupt big corporations like Monsanto, Archer Daniel Midlands, and Cargil.
Adding corn ethanol to gasoline or using palm oil for biodiesel makes the fuel burn more cleanly, stretches oil supplies, and perhaps most attractive to some politicians, provides a nice boost to big agribusiness.
For another example, subsidized corn produces artificially cheep high fructose corn syrup. This is used in almost all soft drinks in the USA, which is why you can buy a gigantic soda for such a low cost. Even so, soft drinks are one of the most highly marked up food items, which is why the sized are so large. This ends up being an indirect subsidy to the fast food industry as well.
No where else in the world do they use corn syrup for soft drinks. It does not taste as good as cane sugar. In Southern California many places now stock Mexican produced soda, like Coca Cola, because they want a better taste. Although recently I have found imported Mexican brands that also use US supplied corn syrup. (I read the labels because I want to avoid high fructose corn syrup.) This is what NAFTA was really for.
All this extra sweet corn syrup is a major contributor to the obesity epidemic in the US. It is most likely worse then cane sugar for health, although the lobbyists and TV propaganda commercials denying any problems are now in full swing.
So it's not about reliable food supplies, it's about entrenched special interests that literally don't care how much damage they do. And all the subsidies mean that we are paying them to harm us.
Harvard Business School alumni include Stan O’Neal and John Thain, the last two heads of Merrill Lynch, plus Andy Hornby, former chief executive of HBOS, who graduated top of his class. And then of course, there’s George W Bush, Hank Paulson, the former US Treasury secretary, and Christopher Cox, the former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), a remarkable trinity who more than fulfilled the mission of their alma mater: “To educate leaders who make a difference in the world.”
It just wasn’t the difference the school had hoped for.
...
In the late 1990s, their faculties rushed to write paeans to Enron, the firm of the future, the new economic paradigm. The admiration was mutual: Enron was stuffed with Harvard Business School alumni, from Jeff Skilling, the chief executive, down. When Enron, rotten to the core, collapsed, the old case studies were thrust in a closet and removed from the syllabus, and new ones were promptly written about the ethical and accounting issues posed by Enron’s misadventures.
...
Is there a pattern here? Go back to the 1980s, and you find that Harvard MBAs played a big enough role in the insider trading scandals that washed through Wall Street for a former chairman of the SEC to consider it a good move to donate millions of dollars for the teaching of ethics at the school.
Time after time, and scandal after scandal, it seems that a school that graduates just 900 students a year finds itself in the thick of it. Yet there is remarkably little contrition.
To be fair, it's not just Harvard. Rajanatnam, the Galleon hedge fund founder, went to the Warton MBA program. He was just convicted on insider trading.
The sad truth is that this was all sparked by the critical and financial success of Pirates of the Caribbean. The Disneyland ride had no plot and no characters. All it had was a bunch of cartoon like stereotypes.
So starting with nothing they came up with a witty plot and some great acting, and they had a legitimate hit. Johnny Depp as Jack Sparrow is an inspired character and he and Geoffrey Rush make the movie. Keira Knightley is no slouch either. It is a classic, and will be appreciated by generations of movie goers.
This success brought the 'Dark Side' of the Hollywood machine into play. Producers realized that they could look for movie concepts where there was no plot to begin with. From their point of view all they need is a recognizable concept/title. Think Alvin and the Chipmunks, Marmaduke, etc. So we are now facing the dreadful reality of the Space Invaders move. In 3D.
If you have access to the algorithms that manage how trades are done, you can potentially manipulate trades to make illegal profit.
1. Steal code
2. Write trading code that cheats the system
3. Profit
Typical Slashdot joke. Except we know what step two is, and a foreign government may be both directly and indirectly supporting the manipulation. The real world isn't quite so funny;.
By the year 2050, perhaps earlier, the term Republican will go out of use. When the term it used, it will be an insult.
This will be caused by the impact of Global Warming. When there are large migrations due to climate changes, and much international strife, the fact that we ignored the warning signs will look incredibly stupid.
People will be looking for someone to blame. All the footage of Republicans denying a problem exists will be found, and they will become the symbol of our stupid policies. Even though many share the blame, they will be so identified with bad judgment that the party will have to change it's name due to the bad connotation.
Personally, I think this language change will be greatly deserved.
So you think the government is useless. Then why don't you get the hell out of here. I suggest you go someplace where there is no functioning government, like the tribal areas in Pakistan, or Somalia, or Mexico where the drug lords rule. Any place in the world that you would want to live has a reasonably functioning government. Anyplace the doesn't is a stinking pit where life and liberty are always at risk, and forget about the pursuit of happiness. Your wouldn't last a week.
I am sick and tired of smug asshats like you who want and expect all the benefits of governance, and then bitch about how the government is useless. Get off my roads. Stop using my government regulated power and communications. Don't go to my closely regulated medical care or my pharmaceuticals. Turn off my government GPS. Don't call the police or fire or paramedics or drink my clean water or breath my clean air . Since you don't want them, and I do, they're not yours, but mine.
And don't give me your crap about how you paid for it. You don't appreciate what you have got, and I know from your attitude that you don't want to take any responsibility for maintaining civilization. You are happy to fiddle while Rome burns, as long as it's not on your block and the cable is still working and you have cold beer.
I don't even know why I bother to rant at you morons anymore. I would do just as much good yelling at a tree.
The single board computer has an IBM RAD750 costing over $200,000. It does have amazing specs:
The CPU itself can withstand 2,000 to 10,000 gray and temperature ranges between –55 C and 125 C and requires 5 watts of power. The standard RAD750 single-board system (CPU and motherboard) can withstand 1,000 gray and temperature ranges between –55 C and 70 C and requires 10 watts of power.
The RAD750 system has a price that is comparable to the RAD6000 which is US$200,000 per board.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.business-mongolia.com/mongolia/2011/04/20/first-mongolian-rare-earth-sold-to-south-korea/
Undersea deposits have also been recently found in the Pacific.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2011/07/05/researchers-find-rare-earths-in-pacific-ocean-mud/
China has cornered the market because they produce these materials so cheaply. Cost and pollution are driving factors.
Rare earth minerals are going to be available. They're just going to cost more.
Can I get universal collision insurance coverage for that? I need my universe to get to work, and without it I'm stuck.
1) Windows
2) Linux
How likely are either of these?
Just asking.
It is extremely unlikely that they will be disbarred. The best outcome would be some form of censure, which could have an effect on their carer. Even so, having to go through the process of defending themselves from professional criticism will be some payback for "four years of hell that a citizen goes through", to quote the ruling. I doubt that the bar will do anything at all. Sadly, complaining to the bar is likely the only payback the victim will get.
Meanwhile, the money spent on legal fees is not spent on the following: R&D, manufacturing, hiring, capital equipment purchase, advertising, stock dividends, salaries, stock value increases.
Ultimately, no matter which side prevails, the total wealth generated is less then it should be due to the patent system. Patents were intended to reward innovation. Now all they do is keep high priced litigators in luxury cars.
They also reward companies, not individuals. Even when innovation occurs, it can be crushed though the use of patent law. We use the wrong term in "patent trolls", when it should be "patent leaches". Leaches can kill, and the smaller the target the greater the chance it will be destroyed.
I'm working on software I hope to use for a start up, and I know I have to apply for provisional software patents. I don't want to waste the time, but if I don't someone else can make a patent application and take my work away from me. Even if I do apply, someone with a full time legal staff can plow me under, and my only hope would be to get some major financial backing. At that point I am not doing software, I'm doing patent work. Once again, innovation looses and lawyers win.
Suppose that they create a design that uses some features that cannot be easily translated to normal manufacturing. Could they still move it to market using the prototype manufacturing technology, or would it just be too expensive?
A guy named Ramirez was falsely arrested in LA for the horrible beating of a Giants fan. The police were feeling the heat, so they went after Ramirez. The case almost immediately fell apart, but they kept saying it was the man in custody until they arrested the other two suspects.
In this case Ramirez is still in jail for a probation violation, which he is contesting. If you search for his name you will find all the details of the false arrest.
Now suppose that it's you, and you haven't done anything and don't have a criminal record. How do you fix that? Remember the Internet never forgets. Even if they take down the web page it will still hit on your name. Will they post a retraction? Maybe if you sue them. Outside of a trial it is very rare for someone to be declared "not guilty" in a legal sense.
They have no incentive to put up a retraction. It makes them look bad, so they will resist any responsibility. They would rather see an innocent person in jail then admit an error, so if you are just accused how much leverage do you think that you will have?
Just kiss your online presence goodbye. You will never get the interview with an online application process. That means you can't get hired at a national grocery store, for example, much less a tech job. You could be denied credit and not be told why. All these things can be overcome to some extent, but it could haunt you for the rest of your life.
Does it sound like such a good idea now? If you think you are immune your are being foolish. There is a lot of power here to hurt innocent people, and very little a victim can do to clear their name.
This is why people hate them.
Hieroglyphic CAPTCHA: "It's so blurry I can't tell if that's an owl or a crocodile!"
This is old news.
Tornados are also extremely rare in that part of the US. Here is a map of tornado occurrence: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tornado_Alley.gif
However, they do have haboob wind storms with wind speeds up to 30 mph and lots of flying sand. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haboob I guess these and thunderstorms are the most extreme weather that the structure would have to survive.
I'm certain that the people planning the project are well aware of the extreme weather conditions in Arizona. Why are you raising this queston? It implies that you have an insight that they have overlooked, which is extremely unlikely.
What is that in terms of Library of Congress units?
So you want a real world example. Here's one that actually killed people. People died because of Vioxx. It was a mass poisoning for profit. How come no one went to jail?
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18982834
I happen to be really pissed about Vioxx because I took it, and there is a history of heart disease in my family. So Merck put my life at risk by withholding negative results. Drug companies pay the bills, and this is the result. If you think this is "cherry picking", I will personally get some Vioxx for you to take. I sure I can find a bunch of other unsafe drugs that are still on the market that you can take as well. Contact me after you take some potentially fatal drug that was put on the market for corporate profit. Until then why don't you shut the fuck up, asshole.
Can anyone initiate a complaint? Cisco is in California, so that seems to be the logical place to see if this can be done. Any lawyers out there who have a clue about this?
Your examples suck. The NIH is effectively a government funded subsidiary of the drug companies. Taxpayers fund the research, the drug companies cherry pick the profitable results. The resulting commercial products are then sold back to government supported health care at obscene mark ups.
For example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicare_Part_D#Criticisms
The DOE should be called the Department of Nuclear Weapons. It's a bureaucratic trick to make the defense budget look smaller.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_DOE#Budget
I don't know about NSF, but if the general trend is as powerful their as it is everywhere else, serious research is not the most important goal. Everything get judged by how "practical" it is. If it doesn't have an obvious use, it has real trouble getting funded.
So in fact we have given up on basic science. This trend started with the cancellation of the Superconducting Supercollider. Now we are shutting down sub-atomic physics labs in the US. We now have no manned space capability. The Webb telescope looks to be dead. These are the tall tent poles of technology leadership. It's not just giving up on one of them, it's giving up on all of them. We don't care about the future.
This year the Chinese will put up the first module of their (non-international) space station. They clearly care about the future.
Who do they expect to buy this study? It has a rotten order about it...
The current situation in New Hampshire is only a difference of degree, no a difference of kind, from anonymous officers. If it the word of a uniformed cop against a civilian, and there is no other evidence, then the cop wins. It takes either a lot of witnesses, or a video to show that a cop is lying. If you let the cops stop video, you have no effective rights.
The subsidies are not about farmers, they're about agribusiness. The farmers are just a front for the corrupt big corporations like Monsanto, Archer Daniel Midlands, and Cargil.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agribusiness
For another example, subsidized corn produces artificially cheep high fructose corn syrup. This is used in almost all soft drinks in the USA, which is why you can buy a gigantic soda for such a low cost. Even so, soft drinks are one of the most highly marked up food items, which is why the sized are so large. This ends up being an indirect subsidy to the fast food industry as well.
No where else in the world do they use corn syrup for soft drinks. It does not taste as good as cane sugar. In Southern California many places now stock Mexican produced soda, like Coca Cola, because they want a better taste. Although recently I have found imported Mexican brands that also use US supplied corn syrup. (I read the labels because I want to avoid high fructose corn syrup.) This is what NAFTA was really for.
All this extra sweet corn syrup is a major contributor to the obesity epidemic in the US. It is most likely worse then cane sugar for health, although the lobbyists and TV propaganda commercials denying any problems are now in full swing.
So it's not about reliable food supplies, it's about entrenched special interests that literally don't care how much damage they do. And all the subsidies mean that we are paying them to harm us.
To be fair, it's not just Harvard. Rajanatnam, the Galleon hedge fund founder, went to the Warton MBA program. He was just convicted on insider trading.
So starting with nothing they came up with a witty plot and some great acting, and they had a legitimate hit. Johnny Depp as Jack Sparrow is an inspired character and he and Geoffrey Rush make the movie. Keira Knightley is no slouch either. It is a classic, and will be appreciated by generations of movie goers.
This success brought the 'Dark Side' of the Hollywood machine into play. Producers realized that they could look for movie concepts where there was no plot to begin with. From their point of view all they need is a recognizable concept/title. Think Alvin and the Chipmunks, Marmaduke, etc. So we are now facing the dreadful reality of the Space Invaders move. In 3D.
1. Steal code
2. Write trading code that cheats the system
3. Profit
Typical Slashdot joke. Except we know what step two is, and a foreign government may be both directly and indirectly supporting the manipulation. The real world isn't quite so funny;.
This will be caused by the impact of Global Warming. When there are large migrations due to climate changes, and much international strife, the fact that we ignored the warning signs will look incredibly stupid.
People will be looking for someone to blame. All the footage of Republicans denying a problem exists will be found, and they will become the symbol of our stupid policies. Even though many share the blame, they will be so identified with bad judgment that the party will have to change it's name due to the bad connotation.
Personally, I think this language change will be greatly deserved.
I am sick and tired of smug asshats like you who want and expect all the benefits of governance, and then bitch about how the government is useless. Get off my roads. Stop using my government regulated power and communications. Don't go to my closely regulated medical care or my pharmaceuticals. Turn off my government GPS. Don't call the police or fire or paramedics or drink my clean water or breath my clean air . Since you don't want them, and I do, they're not yours, but mine.
And don't give me your crap about how you paid for it. You don't appreciate what you have got, and I know from your attitude that you don't want to take any responsibility for maintaining civilization. You are happy to fiddle while Rome burns, as long as it's not on your block and the cable is still working and you have cold beer.
I don't even know why I bother to rant at you morons anymore. I would do just as much good yelling at a tree.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAD750
Not exactly something you pick up at Fry's or NewEgg.