I'd kill for a 5% stake in AIG right now. With the government backing an 85 billion dollar loan to AIG, most of their business still being successful (including a 20-50 billion dollar airline business), there's a good chance that the government is going to make a profit on this transaction. If I had 5% of that pie, I could retire an immeasurably wealthy man once this all blows over!
Indeed. It's one of the few sectors where rapidly rising oil costs and plummeting property values has little effect. As a result, the sector is one of the strongest in the market today. And not just because people must have the latest and greatest software and gadgetry. (Consumers actually have less money for that.) Instead, technology is seen as a possible solution to the problems plaguing other industries.
Real world example: UPS developed software to route their trucks through fewer left turns. This rerouting reduces fuel costs and thus produces tremendous savings for the company.
Sure, a sky scraper isn't going to lose all it's value, but it could be worth less than you paid for it
I somewhat doubt Lehman is making a profit on their data centers, either. What they are doing is liquidating the assets that have value.
The landlord, thinking ahead carried insurance to protect against the eventuality that one of their major tenants would vacate. Their insurance company: AIG.
As amusing as it is, that's exactly why AIG is in trouble. Each tier saw the risk coming and tried to pass the risk upstream. The problem is that the risk was not isolated. With all these upstream pushes, the risk ended up concentrated in the largest companies in the market. It's no coincidence that AIG is one of the largest insurance underwriters in the world.
And let's not forget the multi-gigawatt generators, the fail-over system, the trained staff, the fire suppression systems, the network infrastructure, the secured access, etc., etc., etc.
The actual servers in the racks are the LEAST valuable part of a good data center. They're also the highest depreciating.
What assets retain value in the midst of a financial panic? Data centers.
You know what else retains value in the midst of a financial panic? Skyscrapers.
Anytime you have physical assets, you have value. Especially if those physical assets are in continuing demand. (Which data centers are in particular, because the Technology sector is doing quite well right now.)
The only difference is that companies rarely own their own spaces anymore. They sold them off to realty companies long ago, because they didn't want to be in the real-estate business. This sort of sell/lease arrangement is almost certain to become common with data centers in the future. CoLos are already the standard of the industry, and are going to take over increasing amounts of large corporate business in the future.
Except that it wasn't retracted, and just about every major organization (CIA, FBI, UK, Al Jazeera, etc.) confirmed it was him despite his more rugged appearance. The idea that the video was later retracted or debunked is spouted by the same crowd that believes the Towers were rigged to fall and the moon landings were done on a sound stage.
The site is not yet popular. A popular site has to worry less about poor posts from particular users, but rather an overall community developing that takes a dim view on new users. The PROBLEM with this sort of clique is that the type of people who band together into cliques are usually the least knowledgeable. So they will end up working in concert to drive off those who know things rather than promote those who do.
Oversight is a key issue with ANY community. If there is no oversight here, the community will spiral out of control.
At the high end of this reputation spectrum there is little difference between users with high reputation and moderators. That is very much intentional. We don't run Stack Overflow. The community does.
I have one word for Stack Overflow: Cliques
Teenagers with too much time on their hands will kill this thing in a week unless they adjust their scheme.
At a production rate of ~10^26 atoms/day for antiprotons for research, it would take waaaaaaay too long to make a worthwile antimatter device.
The military doesn't need to. Antimatter can be used to enhance fission reactions, thus making for smaller and lighter weapons. This also results in a cleaner fission burn, which means less fallout from fusion weapons.
I'm shocked that it took this many posts for a reasonable response to pop up. Yowza. Slashdot is losing its touch.
Meanwhile, if you scan through the paper itself (arXiv link is downthread), they discuss spectra and absorption bands that are roughly similar to other stellar events in overall energy profile; a lot of it was in the visible spectrum.
You're right, it appears that the energy peaked in the infrared spectrum. Which is not at all consistent with antimatter annihilation.
My next best guess would be a failed star birth. If there was enough hydrogen collecting to ignite, but nothing that lit it from where we could see, the star would appear to simply come into existence. Of course, that raises all kinds of questions about how a star could ignite without sufficient fuel to sustain it. Unless the trigger was some other event. e.g. If we poured enough energy into Jupiter (say, terrawatt lasers), would it be possible to briefly ignite the gas giant?
Hmm... it's tough to come up with ideas without venturing out into the land of "maybes". Which is all idle speculation unless one is willing to test the theory in some manner. (Either crunch the numbers or run an experiment to determine the viability of such concepts.)
Exactly! NASA obviously needs to do a better job of keeping the lense clean.:-P
Joking aside (at least I HOPE I'm joking!), I have to wonder if this wasn't a large matter/antimatter event. Given that the "object" was described as suddenly appearing, increasing in brightness, then falling off until it disappeared.
Current physics, to my understanding, postulate that the universe had to have consisted of 50/50 matter and antimatter at the beginning. One of the current puzzles the LHC is trying to solve is, what happened to all the antimatter?
Since this is open space, it stands to reason that clouds of matter and antimatter may still be floating around, undisturbed. If the two attracted each other over a cosmically long period, we may be seeing the resulting fireworks.
The militant Islamic group decided "we should destroy towers in America" because "we are a free people... and we want to regain the freedom of our nation," said bin Laden, dressed in yellow and white robes and videotaped against a plain brown background.
"As I watched the destroyed towers in Lebanon, it occurred to me punish the unjust the same way (and) to destroy towers in America so it could taste some of what we are tasting and to stop killing our children and women.
"We had no difficulty in dealing with Bush and his administration because they resemble the regimes in our countries, half of which are ruled by the military and the other half by the sons of kings... They have a lot of pride, arrogance, greed and thievery.
"He (Bush) adopted despotism and the crushing of freedoms from Arab rulers and called it the Patriot Act under the guise of combating terrorism.....
"We had agreed with the (the Sept. 11) overall commander Mohammed Atta, may God rest his soul, to carry out all operations in 20 minutes before Bush and his administration take notice."
Riddle me this... How is a tacit admission "metaphorical"?
According to Bin Laden's fatwa (a religious opinions that I can only recount as a third-hand source, I'm afraid), attacking civilian and military targets would force the US to rethink the value of keeping military assets in the middle east. With that in mind, it served his goals not to be known as the culprit. If he was known, he would be a target. If there was no culprit, there could be no target. Which means that the American people would be forced to blame their government for ineptitude instead.
At least, that's how I read it. Funny thing, though. Bin Laden had absolutely zero religious standing to be issuing a fatwa. Yet he ignored the religious leaders and attempted to issue one anyway. With that in mind, commodoresloat is probably right in his analysis. Bin Laden thought that he had the standing to call upon the Muslim nations for mutual defense. Cue shock and surprise when they didn't fall in line.
What are you talking about? What evidence? Bin Laden initially claiming that he didn't do it? You do know that he later claimed responsibility, right?
Re-releasing statements that we all heard on television back in 2001 does not change anything. It merely presents a clear retrospective of the events. Obviously, the documents prior to 2001 are of greater interest. Especially the fatwas (religious opinions) where he called for attacks on US civilians and military targets in an attempt to force the US to remove its resources from the Gulf region.
Look at Clinton's speech of August 20 1998 in response to the Kenya and Tanzania bombings. Bush's first major speech after 9/11 was nine days later (9/20/01) and all of the main points are virtually taken verbatim from the Clinton speech. Obviously the US response was different in 2001 because the stakes were much higher
So your thought is that Bin Laden felt he hadn't raised the stakes high enough yet? That's a fair argument.
he believed that Muslims around the world would rally to al Qaeda's defense in Afghanistan the way they had in response to the Soviet invasion.
I think this is a good point. Several times in history, the Muslim world has answered the call for common defense. (Or offense, as the case may be.) Bin Laden may very well have thought he had the power necessary to call for a united Muslim defense against America. Of course, he should have known better. Being from Saudi Arabia himself (and a rather rich family; everything over there is Binladin produced), he should have known that the US and his home country had a fairly strong pact. Pakistan had its own problems, Iran was not yet as focused as it became post-Iraq, and Iraq was the redheaded stepchild of the region. Afghanistan had yet to recover from the damage done to their herds and trees after the Soviets, and the Taliban weren't helping matters.
Not exactly the greatest setup for a common defense.
I would have been worried if Turkey landed on Bin Laden's side, but they have been working for a long time to be seen as a independent, democratic nation worthy of joining the European Union. It's doubtful that they would have come to Afghanistan's aid, even if other countries did.
I don't see anything particularly damning there. Bad men do bad things, then pretend they didn't in an attempt to avoid the consequences. Why is that surprising?
I remember Bin Laden denying the attacks. I even remember quite a few people holding up the defense that Bin Laden couldn't have done it because "Muslim is a religion of peace". (Not that the two really go hand in hand, but it was the reaction of the time.) What is interesting here is something I missed when I heard the reports back in 2001. The key reason why Bin Laden denied his involvement:
"I have held talks with His Eminence Amir ol-Momenin [Taleban leader Mola Mohammad Omar Mojahed], who does not allow such acts to be carried out from Afghanistan's territory." --Osama Bin Laden
Bin Laden had a pretty cushy safe-haven there. He figured as long as he didn't piss off the Taliban leaders, they'd give him safe haven. And he figured the U.S. would not attack a sovereign nation. Which may have been true under Clinton, but he probably miscalculated how much the political climate was going to change once those towers fell.
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TFA actually refers to various forms of engines, including a Brayton cycle, closed loop, gas turbine. Which is actually a pretty good choice for this sort of work. A constant combustion, rotating engine is going to be relatively low maintenance and is not going to shift between mechanical extremes. Unlike the other generator being tested which uses a piston engine.
Piston engines are very reliable for generator usage if for no more reason than they've had a great deal of engineering and development behind them for the last 100 years. However, they are more prone to seizing up than the competing Brayton cycle engine.
I'm pretty sure you could send a finite amount of water and just keep using it in a closed system.
Hydrogen is actually the most efficient working fluid. Unfortunately, it has a nasty habit of leaking out of sealed containers and weakening metal through chemical bonds. Thus the next best choice is Helium. Something which I understand is quite abundant on the moon*.:-)
* Not that you'd actually mine it there. At least not for a long while.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd kill for a 5% stake in AIG right now. With the government backing an 85 billion dollar loan to AIG, most of their business still being successful (including a 20-50 billion dollar airline business), there's a good chance that the government is going to make a profit on this transaction. If I had 5% of that pie, I could retire an immeasurably wealthy man once this all blows over!
Sorry, wrong building. This is the one in the deal.
From TFA:
Throw that in and you have $1.5 billion, no problem.
Indeed. It's one of the few sectors where rapidly rising oil costs and plummeting property values has little effect. As a result, the sector is one of the strongest in the market today. And not just because people must have the latest and greatest software and gadgetry. (Consumers actually have less money for that.) Instead, technology is seen as a possible solution to the problems plaguing other industries.
Real world example: UPS developed software to route their trucks through fewer left turns. This rerouting reduces fuel costs and thus produces tremendous savings for the company.
I somewhat doubt Lehman is making a profit on their data centers, either. What they are doing is liquidating the assets that have value.
As amusing as it is, that's exactly why AIG is in trouble. Each tier saw the risk coming and tried to pass the risk upstream. The problem is that the risk was not isolated. With all these upstream pushes, the risk ended up concentrated in the largest companies in the market. It's no coincidence that AIG is one of the largest insurance underwriters in the world.
Err... s/gigawatt/megawatt/g. My bad. :-P
(Though multi-gigawatt powerplants are not uncommon. Especially of the nuclear variety.)
And let's not forget the multi-gigawatt generators, the fail-over system, the trained staff, the fire suppression systems, the network infrastructure, the secured access, etc., etc., etc.
The actual servers in the racks are the LEAST valuable part of a good data center. They're also the highest depreciating.
You know what else retains value in the midst of a financial panic? Skyscrapers.
Anytime you have physical assets, you have value. Especially if those physical assets are in continuing demand. (Which data centers are in particular, because the Technology sector is doing quite well right now.)
The only difference is that companies rarely own their own spaces anymore. They sold them off to realty companies long ago, because they didn't want to be in the real-estate business. This sort of sell/lease arrangement is almost certain to become common with data centers in the future. CoLos are already the standard of the industry, and are going to take over increasing amounts of large corporate business in the future.
Except that it wasn't retracted, and just about every major organization (CIA, FBI, UK, Al Jazeera, etc.) confirmed it was him despite his more rugged appearance. The idea that the video was later retracted or debunked is spouted by the same crowd that believes the Towers were rigged to fall and the moon landings were done on a sound stage.
The site is not yet popular. A popular site has to worry less about poor posts from particular users, but rather an overall community developing that takes a dim view on new users. The PROBLEM with this sort of clique is that the type of people who band together into cliques are usually the least knowledgeable. So they will end up working in concert to drive off those who know things rather than promote those who do.
Oversight is a key issue with ANY community. If there is no oversight here, the community will spiral out of control.
I have one word for Stack Overflow: Cliques
Teenagers with too much time on their hands will kill this thing in a week unless they adjust their scheme.
The military doesn't need to. Antimatter can be used to enhance fission reactions, thus making for smaller and lighter weapons. This also results in a cleaner fission burn, which means less fallout from fusion weapons.
I'm shocked that it took this many posts for a reasonable response to pop up. Yowza. Slashdot is losing its touch.
You're right, it appears that the energy peaked in the infrared spectrum. Which is not at all consistent with antimatter annihilation.
My next best guess would be a failed star birth. If there was enough hydrogen collecting to ignite, but nothing that lit it from where we could see, the star would appear to simply come into existence. Of course, that raises all kinds of questions about how a star could ignite without sufficient fuel to sustain it. Unless the trigger was some other event. e.g. If we poured enough energy into Jupiter (say, terrawatt lasers), would it be possible to briefly ignite the gas giant?
Hmm... it's tough to come up with ideas without venturing out into the land of "maybes". Which is all idle speculation unless one is willing to test the theory in some manner. (Either crunch the numbers or run an experiment to determine the viability of such concepts.)
If there was a fly on the lens of the Hubble, then we've got bigger problems than unknown objects 11 million light years away!
(Insert "I for one..." meme.)
Exactly! NASA obviously needs to do a better job of keeping the lense clean. :-P
Joking aside (at least I HOPE I'm joking!), I have to wonder if this wasn't a large matter/antimatter event. Given that the "object" was described as suddenly appearing, increasing in brightness, then falling off until it disappeared.
Current physics, to my understanding, postulate that the universe had to have consisted of 50/50 matter and antimatter at the beginning. One of the current puzzles the LHC is trying to solve is, what happened to all the antimatter?
Since this is open space, it stands to reason that clouds of matter and antimatter may still be floating around, undisturbed. If the two attracted each other over a cosmically long period, we may be seeing the resulting fireworks.
That's my best guess, anyway.
Let's actually quote the article, shall we?
Even better, let's quote the full text, shall we?
Riddle me this... How is a tacit admission "metaphorical"?
That's more or less what I just said. Just not in so many words.
According to Bin Laden's fatwa (a religious opinions that I can only recount as a third-hand source, I'm afraid), attacking civilian and military targets would force the US to rethink the value of keeping military assets in the middle east. With that in mind, it served his goals not to be known as the culprit. If he was known, he would be a target. If there was no culprit, there could be no target. Which means that the American people would be forced to blame their government for ineptitude instead.
At least, that's how I read it. Funny thing, though. Bin Laden had absolutely zero religious standing to be issuing a fatwa. Yet he ignored the religious leaders and attempted to issue one anyway. With that in mind, commodoresloat is probably right in his analysis. Bin Laden thought that he had the standing to call upon the Muslim nations for mutual defense. Cue shock and surprise when they didn't fall in line.
What are you talking about? What evidence? Bin Laden initially claiming that he didn't do it? You do know that he later claimed responsibility, right?
Re-releasing statements that we all heard on television back in 2001 does not change anything. It merely presents a clear retrospective of the events. Obviously, the documents prior to 2001 are of greater interest. Especially the fatwas (religious opinions) where he called for attacks on US civilians and military targets in an attempt to force the US to remove its resources from the Gulf region.
So your thought is that Bin Laden felt he hadn't raised the stakes high enough yet? That's a fair argument.
I think this is a good point. Several times in history, the Muslim world has answered the call for common defense. (Or offense, as the case may be.) Bin Laden may very well have thought he had the power necessary to call for a united Muslim defense against America. Of course, he should have known better. Being from Saudi Arabia himself (and a rather rich family; everything over there is Binladin produced), he should have known that the US and his home country had a fairly strong pact. Pakistan had its own problems, Iran was not yet as focused as it became post-Iraq, and Iraq was the redheaded stepchild of the region. Afghanistan had yet to recover from the damage done to their herds and trees after the Soviets, and the Taliban weren't helping matters.
Not exactly the greatest setup for a common defense.
I would have been worried if Turkey landed on Bin Laden's side, but they have been working for a long time to be seen as a independent, democratic nation worthy of joining the European Union. It's doubtful that they would have come to Afghanistan's aid, even if other countries did.
I don't see anything particularly damning there. Bad men do bad things, then pretend they didn't in an attempt to avoid the consequences. Why is that surprising?
As I mentioned in my post, that comment does more to explain his denial than it does to provide evidence of his innocence. And don't forget that he later claimed the attacks as his own. After his cushy little safe haven was broken up, of course.
I remember Bin Laden denying the attacks. I even remember quite a few people holding up the defense that Bin Laden couldn't have done it because "Muslim is a religion of peace". (Not that the two really go hand in hand, but it was the reaction of the time.) What is interesting here is something I missed when I heard the reports back in 2001. The key reason why Bin Laden denied his involvement:
Bin Laden had a pretty cushy safe-haven there. He figured as long as he didn't piss off the Taliban leaders, they'd give him safe haven. And he figured the U.S. would not attack a sovereign nation. Which may have been true under Clinton, but he probably miscalculated how much the political climate was going to change once those towers fell.
Do I win?
TFA actually refers to various forms of engines, including a Brayton cycle, closed loop, gas turbine. Which is actually a pretty good choice for this sort of work. A constant combustion, rotating engine is going to be relatively low maintenance and is not going to shift between mechanical extremes. Unlike the other generator being tested which uses a piston engine.
Piston engines are very reliable for generator usage if for no more reason than they've had a great deal of engineering and development behind them for the last 100 years. However, they are more prone to seizing up than the competing Brayton cycle engine.
Hydrogen is actually the most efficient working fluid. Unfortunately, it has a nasty habit of leaking out of sealed containers and weakening metal through chemical bonds. Thus the next best choice is Helium. Something which I understand is quite abundant on the moon*. :-)
* Not that you'd actually mine it there. At least not for a long while.