DNA is only really evidence of a persons presence during some huge window of time (even w/o contamination)... Thus, for many crimes, DNA is merely circumstantial evidence, but somehow hollywood (professional expert witnesses), have convinced many lay-people that DNA=guilty. DNA as a general rule doesn't say who did what crime or if that person was even present when the crime was committed.
I seem to remember reading about traces of certain plastic showing up in people's blood after many years of use. Anyone got more details on this?
Imagine if plastic flatware, cups, etc. is the "lead mugs" of the next few generations? In 2250 they'll look back on us and wonder what the hell we were thinking...
You probably remember reading about BPA. BPA is used in the plastic lining inside of cans, poly-carbonate water bottles, thermal printers used for the receipts you get at a typical store. Although BPA both accumulates and is eliminated from the body pretty quickly, some people are worried about long term exposure as it is pretty much in everything these days so we never really get rid of all of it from our bodies because of constant re-exposure...
Perhaps you should re-watch It's a Wonderful Life...
In the story, the fractional money that presumably was to back the building and loan was lost (or stolen depending on your point of view) and the building and loan was bailed out by the shareholders. The way they avoided the run-on-the-bank was by sweet talking by George Bailey.
So because there was simply not enough money in this building and loan company to meet the fractional reserve requirements, was this a Ponzi scheme? To a bank examiner, It's as easily plausible that Uncle Billy just put the money in his pocket (or personal piggy bank) instead of having literally lost the money.
I suppose FTP owners could contemplate suicide, pray for a miracle, do some sweet talking and get some donations from their players and survive this crisis and maybe we can make a movie out this situation too, or maybe not;^P
SS is basically like a typical standard financial product: a fixed annuity with insurance premiums.
You pay the "premiums" which is part funding the annuity and part funding an insurance policy. If you get disabled or die, you (or your heirs) get the insurance payout, if you get to retirement, you get the annuity value. This is why you don't get back more than you pay in (adjusted for inflation).
The things that makes this different than a typical fixed annuity, is that instead of a bank, it's the government. Instead of investing in things that might generate a return greater than the inflation rate, it just invests in US treasury bonds. This is pretty much a guarantee of a low rate of return.
The real problem with SS isn't that its a fixed annuity + insurance product. The real problem with SS is that it isn't totally funded as the promised benefits cannot be paid out with the projected future premium stream. If this event were to happen with a "real" standard financial product, the issuer would stop selling that product, figure out a new annuity product that would "work" and start selling it instead. Maybe this new product would have a higher retirement age based on new annuity tables, lower benefits, or whatever.
The problem with SS is that the US government (or by extension, the "people") refuse to close the current product and create a new product that has real annuity-like properties (as opposed to looking more like a pyramid scheme, not a ponzi scheme).
Politics is preventing discontinuing the current product and creating a new more viable product, but in reality if SS was a product sold by a company, I'll be the Feds would eventually shut it down as it is looking more and more like a pyramid scheme.
AFAIK, in Pend Oreille electric rates are $24.50 (flat) + 4.5cents/kWh which for 1000kWh would be $69.50. The same 1000kWh in Spokane (Avista) would be $71.79.
Of course the price of obtainly electrical energy varies per locale (near a dam vs nuclear vs coal or natural gas power plant) and thus market based pricing generally doesn't follow a linear relationship like pend-oreille . Usually the first few kWh's are cheaper than when using significantly more than your baseline usage to offset the cost of maintaining the capacity to provide more than base-load power on demand (which is harder for a larger utility). If your utility is getting power from a dam, you get the price of the electricity from the dam, if you are a bigger utility, you can't just rely on a dam, but need more power plants (which are probably more expensive than hydro) and need to factor that into pricing.
Perhaps you are simply looking at the marginal cost of a kWh and saying it's 3-4x more? What makes you think Pend-Oreille rates reflect the marginal cost? It seems as if the final bills are nearly the same for 1000kWh/month...
Personally, I would like to see the government start to build, operate and maintain these types of plants. Sell the energy at cost. Include take down as part of the cost. Remove bonus incentive, C*O Pay, and board member approval will drop the cost to operate substantially. It will also make it safer, since there isn't an incentive to cut corners.
I don't really think this actually works in practice. The government will nearly always hire contracting companies to perform large scale infrastructure work often including a general contracting company (which is exactly what the typical Electric Company would do as they also usually don't have the experience to build nuclear power plants either). Generally the government doesn't even fully get involved in the financing (since they generally have to issue Bonds to do this which isn't the most efficient way to finance high-capital investments) and often must issue Equity to attract capital at low rates or maybe even offer loan guarantees or other tax advantaged incentives. This is the way it works in almost every country from USA, to France, to China, to Saudi Arabia...
Although the govt officials generally do NOT get bonuses or C*O level pay, the contracting companies tend to still operate that way and replacing board approval with civil service board approval isn't likely to improve any general accountability level in the employees or higher-ups (although perhaps cost slightly less).
As to the operational cost, often Electric companies sub-contract the operation of nuclear power plants and Electric companies are usually restricted on a cost+ basis (must only pass-on the actual cost of energy generation w/o markup to customers, only can charge for service provider related business operations).
Since the actual energy generation cost is factored out, it could be argued that governments might be better at providing service to customers, but experience has not necessarily shown this to be universally true either...
In short, I doubt having the govt do nuclear would be any better (and could be significantly worse). Just look at the US Post office attempt to get the govt to agree to let it stop Saturday delivery to save money and survive. In a non-govt company, this would probably have been done long ago, but with this quasi-govt company, you have to convince 535+2 elected officials who need to get re-elected...
My guess is that they have a better plan up their sleeve.
Presumably they're thinking Congress will do something before the 1 year wait is over.
Yea, congress is going to effectively increase taxes in an election year. Sure thing.
Maybe amazon will lobby congress to force other companies to do the same thing they just agreed to do or force non-complying companies to send a "use-tax" summaries to the appropriate state govt so they can enforce their own use-tax laws upon their citizens (not our fault, blame your state government officials for collecting the tax). Now Amazon will have a 1 year head start implementing the changes in their back-end servers and gain a (limited) competitive advantage, where they were setup for a big fall anyhow thus snatching victory from the jaws of defeat...
Of course the efficiency of the photocatalyst in using electromagnetic radiation to perform electrolysis is only 1/2 of the problem.
The other problem is how to prevent corrosion of the catalytic surface that allows the catalyst to work long enough so that it can be used in a practical system. The DOE is basically funding research in this area and their goal for a practical material is 10,000 hours (a little over a year). Right now the best stuff is only about 5% of this goal. As a comparison, the platinum catalyst in a typical car's catalytic converter can last 5-10 years.
I think many folks are hopeful that computational exploration can help to determine how and why certain configurations degrade and suggest improvements that will allow better designs that have reasonably efficiency and resist corrosion, but today that is still hopeful thinking...
I think you are mistaken on the economics of TV shows. The viewership (and the resultant ad-rates for the first airing), are only a small part of the equation. There's the aspect of the actual startup cost of the show too.
That's why there are all the reality shows out there today. Reality shows have lower production costs (but also have lower-re-run value) so although they make less money over time, they make more profit up front. "The Love Boat" (and similar series that feature washed-up actors/actresses), were also reasonably cheap to produce like soap-operas.
I'll be willing to bet that the shows like Firefly had reasonably high production costs and relatively lower viewership for the first airings.
So when Fox could air a different program in the same slot and get about the same amount of add revenue and pay a different production company less money, what do you think they will do?
Sure, they could take a piece of the action and invest in the show now and hope that it does better, but the production company is betting the other way (that they will make most of their money in syndication after the TV network takes some of the up-front risk). Unfortunately, most TV execs are very loathe to take any risks at all as much of the money in syndication is not made by them (but by the production company), but their job depends on the current revenue. Although production companies are designed to "lose" money initially, they don't necessarily want to charge too much less (gotta pay those actors, writers, and directors). So unless a TV show can generate a reasonable profit (revenue-costs) out of the gate, the networks won't give the production company enough time to make enough episodes to be profitable in syndication and the whole thing just dies out.
As someone who knows next to nothing about encryption, here's a question. If this ever becomes a problem, can't one VERY easily increase the bit count from 256 to 512 or more for an exponentially stronger encryption?
And more generally, I've heard these algorithms are very complicated. Rather than having this enormous complexity, can't you use a simpler, more elegant math algorithm, and again, just increase the bit count say from 256 to 512bit or more? Or does math not support that?
In this age of terabytes, does it really matter if we all save a few bits?
Cipher design is pretty complicated, but with a little bit of hand-waving, it might be able to explain the problem.
The task of creating a cipher (encryption algorithm) is basically the same problem as creating set of algorithms for shuffling a deck of cards a certain way. The deck of cards starts in order and the data you want to encrypt is where the deck is "cut". Then you shuffle the cards using some instructions (set by the key) and then you figure out where in the deck that card ended up. You decrypt by just doing the steps in reverse (effectively unshuffling the cards).
Now the trick of making an encryption algorithm is to have a set of algorithm where every possible key describes scrambling instructions that results in a completely different shuffle such that they aren't really related in any easy to crack way. The problem is that we don't really know how to do that effectively (this random permutation construction problem is related to one of the open problems of group theory).
If you describe your set of shuffling algorithm with very simple math, it is generally actually easier to attack mathematically. It takes lots of scrambling instructions to make up for the simple math (which makes your encryption complicated by length). With more complicated math it makes it harder to attack mathematically (in the case of AES and other modern ciphers, substitution tables are used to implement the complicated math).
So given we don't know how to simply construct sets of these random shuffling algorithms, how would we know that the design we came up with there is a "weakness" where for a sub-set of keys a certain sub-set of plaintext values map to some sub-set of cipher-text values (a sub-group/ideal or some other group-theoretic structure that can be easily analyzed and defeated). That's a big problem which nobody has an answer for yet, but if the sets are small enough that humans can analyze them, it's easier to see if they *might* have some weakness. If it's a huge set, no human could probably analyze them.
Actually if you really look at the guts of AES and other modern ciphers, they are actually constructed with very elegant math which is iterated (over several rounds). As an example, AES is a very straight forward iterations of two different SP (Substitution/Permutation) networks (one for the key schedule and another for the data). AES-128 runs this iteration 10 times, and AES-256 runs this iteration 14 times. The key and the data enter different SP networks and after each S and P stage the data stage is xored with the output of the corresponding key stage before heading into the next data S and P stage.
The AES permutation stages are basically just row shifts and small column "multiplications" (in a Galois field). This is a very simple "shuffle" of the data across the 128-bit data width. The AES substitution tables are sets of 8bit to 8bit tables which were constructed mathematically (to avoid any fears that they were created with back-doors which was a concern with the original DES substitution tables). This is basically a complicated 256 card random deck shuffle. All the operations can be implemented fairly easily on things as simple as a 8-bit microprocessor (8-bit lookup tables is the most complicated thing, the rest are just shifts and xors).
W/o the substitution table, all the shuffling would be really easy to invert mathematically. The set of AES substitution
The first semiconductor transistors were large enough to handle a single one with your hand. What makes you assume that the nanodiamond transistors cannot get smaller?
There are unfortuantly some additional physics problems that need to be address for miniturization of this technology.
One issue is the free-space electron transport. With silicon technology, the "channel" is doped silicon which carried the electrons (like a wire). The channel sort of acts like a waveguide for the electrons as the travel between the source and the drain (assuming common mos technology). In "free-space" transport between the cathode and anode (vacuum tube and the proposed nano-diamond transistor), you need to keep some sort of physical separation (in an all-free-space design) or some sort of electrical isolation betweeen devices (shielding).
The second issue is the structure. In the proposed diamond design, the diamond "circuitry" is patterned so that it is essentially carved to have structures above the silicon dioxide surface (as opposed to standard patterning which is either directly on the surface ion implated into the substrate). This nano-tech like structure will of course need to scale to get better. If they can take anything from the current silicon technology, shrinking in 2D (patterning) is much easier than shrinking in 3D (needed for reduced gate thickness needed to improve gate channel efficiency). In advanced silicon technology, 3D scaling has be all but abandoned in favor of techniques like tri-gate/fin-fet...
Note that I'm not saying these advances aren't possible, but they do not leverage any current manufacturing techniques, so it's likely that this stuff will be in the lab for a while whilst current technology will advance. When it does become feasible, it may or may not be competitive. This is not unlike ferro-magnetic ram might replace dram someday, or how solid state memories will replace rotating disk memory someday... Maybe someday, but it's equally possible that day may also never come or be so far out that other new technologies may gain a foothold (e.g., how RRAM might actual displace FRAM as the DRAM successor)...
As a silly example, if you invested the same amount of "area" in some farady-cage-like shielding of present day CML (current-mode-logic) technology electronics, would this nano-diamond technology be much better? I dunno, but these new-fangled technologies need to beat these kind of tweaks of current day technology to win. But of course we have to both try to do new things and try to improve old things and see which one comes out on top. However to assume that the appropriate technological and manufacturing advances will necessarily come to pass to make a general approach viable would be a mistake as a heap load of abandoned technologies will certainly attest to...
Since when did this international campusing became the vogue?
U. California Los Angels at Shanghai anyone?
Universities have been setting up international campuses and research centers for quite a while now... Unfortunatly the UC system is broke (as it depends on the State of California for funding) so you won't be seeing a UC-S campus anytime soon, but NYU (a private university) is taking the plunge in china...
And I know several Brits, working with them both here and over there. They would encourage me to remind you also that the Scots and the Irish are special cases also.
If you include the Irish, you should have defintly included the Welsh as a special case. And it probably would have been better to special case the Anglo-Irish (and/or maybe the Ulster-Irish) rather than not make the distinction as most other Irish (esp those that don't live in northern ireland) probably don't think of themselves as Brits (even as a special case)...
I seem to remember the old norton crash-guard/anti-freeze utility that was somewhat useful in getting around problems like infinite loops in old Windows programs.
I'm pretty sure the way this worked takes advantage of the fact that windows programs are essentially structured as message-processing co-routines plugged into a infinite scheduling loop (the windows loop). Although mostly, messages are posted, sometimes these messages can go re-entrant and if poorly coded cause an infinite loop. Anti-freeze could be then "sprayed" on the app which would then try to insert or delete messages in the program's processing loop to help it exit the re-entrant part loop and go back to the main scheduling loop. Often this would work well enough to enter the "Save" menu processing part of the program to avoid losing work. It also attempted to handle traps effectively (things that often happen when a program runs past the end of an array if it's in an infinite loop) by suspending the main flow of the program and inserting another message and thread to try an allow for limited operation (like "Save" menu processing).
Unfortunatly, this technology wouldn't be that effective in todays environment (basically, it probably could be classified as malware/spyware so the defenses against malware/spyware woud probably prevent it from working), but it seems like bulding this into an application code development infrastructure seems like it might be a good idea...
This is most likely marketing speak for some sort of micropolygons or REYES algorithm (basically atoms ~ micropolygon, flat-panels" ~ tessalated tri-strips)
Fashion design is actually a field that uses copyright heavily.
Although IANAL, the way I understand it is the basic test is that although most fashion design fails the intrinsic utilitarian test for copyright, if the designer included pictoral, graphic, or sculptural features, those elements of the design are available for copyright protection.
As a specific example, although you can mostly copy the general size and shape of a pair of glasses, if the designer embeds a sculpture on the design or a designer specific pattern which serves no functional purpose (e.g, like oakley has an embedded O sculpted in their frame designs, or gucci which has a G), that design for that pair of glasses can be copyrighted.
That's why you see designers spray their logos or other design elements all over their items these days. It's to ward off the "exact" duplicate knockoffs. Since it is not possible to copyright design elements that are actually intrinsically useful, they deliberatly put in stuff that is not functional into their designs.
As for the recipies, although you can't copyright the recipe for coca cola, you can't sell you soda in a bottle shaped like the classic coca cola bottle, because that bottle is copyrighted as it includes design elements that are not necessary for its function as a bottle.
Number theory was known as the most useless of all branches of mathematics, yet now you couldn't pay your bills online without the public key cryptography it has made possible. By your standard of what should be investigated, we would still be banging big rocks together. Now we are banging tiny, tiny atoms together. That's progress.
Public key cryptography for paying your bills online might not be the best example. Nearly all data encryption today is symmetric instead of PKC (other than session key). Session keys could have been created/distributed w/o PKC, but it's more problematic (might require tokens like RSA-secure ID or pads to validate identities instead of RNG+certificates), but PKC seems like a convenient way to do it for now (until we discover that factoring or discrete log problems aren't as secure as we think they are or we eventually lose faith in certificate authorities which seem to be the weak link these days, but I digress). People seem to think it's the crypto that they are trusting, but it's really the infrastructure they are trusting, just like it has been in past banking schemes dating back to the early tally marks on cave walls and collections of special rocks...
Now, the use of group theory in the development of error correcting codes to make fast, error free digital transmission affordable... That might be actually something that makes paying bills online possible...
They haven't discovered a new fundamental particle. All they've done is to arrange some quarks into an arrangement we've already known about. This is an engineering accomplishment
Well if your definition of "engineering" includes crashing 500 trillion particles together and finding 25 particular combination of quarks in the resulting rubble... I would probably call this a research discovery (similar to discovering a needle in a haystack)...
On the other hand, if they figured out a repeatable process to crash say a billion particles together and almost always get a yield of at least 25 of a particular combination, the development of that repeatable processes might qualify as "engineering" vs "discovery"...
Or instead, you might consider going classic and find an older "pre-owned" digital watch or maybe a more recent watch that is still widely available like the Timex T2N3129J...
Although mr AC described the generic anti-microbial action of the chemical on the bacteria, the breakthrough is really how you can "spray" the anti-microbial chemical to stick on-to things w/o blending the anti-microbial chemicals into the materials during the manufacturing process.
Basically this is the anti-microbial polymer technique described by the wiki that I pointed to in my original posting. You embed your anti-microbial chemical (in this case polyethylenimines or PEI) into a N-alkyl polymer, mix in some sunblock (that's the benzophenone which is basically sunblock for plastics, which isn't the same as the human usable type of organic chemical sunblock which is called avobenzone) and it creates something that sticks to your clothes when you spray it on and has the anti-microbial chemical embeded into it.
And since nobody probably will click on that link either, here's a convenient summary
Antimicrobial copolymers of hydrophobic N-alkyl and benzophenone containing polyethylenimines were synthesized from commercially available linear poly(2-ethyl-2-oxazoline), and covalently attached to surfaces of synthetic polymers, cotton, and modified silicon oxide using mild photo-cross-linking. Specifically, these polymers were applied to polypropylene, poly(vinyl chloride), polyethylene, cotton, and alkyl-coated oxide surfaces using solution casting or spray coating and then covalently cross-linked rendering permanent, nonleaching antimicrobial surfaces. The photochemical grafting of pendant benzophenones allows immobilization to any surface that contains a C–H bond. Incubating the modified materials with either Staphylococcus aureus or Escherichia coli demonstrated that the modified surfaces had substantial antimicrobial capacity against both Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria (>98% microbial death).
For folks not in the "know", the basic anti-microbial technique is described in this wiki page.
Intellectual property has no built-in scarcity. In fact, IP laws actually create artificial scarcity where none exists.
Actually, I like to think of it as IP laws create value where none exists. Of course those of us who get paid for intellectual or creative pursuits owe our livelihood to IP laws. Without some form of IP laws (like there were in the past), there's no multiplicitive factor in your work output and we'd be creating real scarcity in other ways.
I can't speak too much on the creative side, but as an alternate example, in many industries, professional licensing is used to create artificial scarcity. In electrical "Engineering", you technically have to have a PE (professional engineering) license to call youself an engineer and to offer consulting engineering services to other people. However to get the actual license, in addition to passing the PE test administered by a board (which isn't too much different in scope compared other professional tests like the BAR or CPA or medical Boards), you must have graduated from an accredited school (or do a 6 year apprentiship working for a PE).
FWIW, I tried this route, but eventually gave it up because my undergrad school wasn't accredited (and it wasn't a fly-by-night school either, it was Caltech) and I couldn't find any company that I could work for a PE (since nobody has a PE in eletrical engineering in this industry outside of government contractors, and when I graduated long ago, jobs in that area were very scarce). So I just went down the computer industry route where they didn't care about PE licensing.
In the medical field, they just artificially limit the number of seats in accredited medical schools to create scarcity. In law, they basically didn't do this and you get a glut of lawyers.
So I guess the question is are IP laws that create scarcity better than licensing laws that create scarcity? I don't know, but I suspect the industry would look much different today if we had gone down the licensing path instead. Would organizations create artifical scarcity of computers and only gild member have access to programming?
On the otherhand, if we had gone down the path of no scarcity, I suspect all this offshoring that people complain about today, would most certainly have happened long ago as off shore companies would just copy stuff and ship it to the US. In fact if I recall correctly, Samuel Slater basically stole the plans for the spinning wheel from textile factories in Britian and bascially set up shop in the "colonies" and allowed it to basically undercut the British industry.
Slashdot Mirror
DNA is only really evidence of a persons presence during some huge window of time (even w/o contamination)...
Thus, for many crimes, DNA is merely circumstantial evidence, but somehow hollywood (professional expert witnesses), have convinced many lay-people that DNA=guilty. DNA as a general rule doesn't say who did what crime or if that person was even present when the crime was committed.
I seem to remember reading about traces of certain plastic showing up in people's blood after many years of use. Anyone got more details on this?
Imagine if plastic flatware, cups, etc. is the "lead mugs" of the next few generations? In 2250 they'll look back on us and wonder what the hell we were thinking...
You probably remember reading about BPA. BPA is used in the plastic lining inside of cans, poly-carbonate water bottles, thermal printers used for the receipts you get at a typical store. Although BPA both accumulates and is eliminated from the body pretty quickly, some people are worried about long term exposure as it is pretty much in everything these days so we never really get rid of all of it from our bodies because of constant re-exposure...
Perhaps you should re-watch It's a Wonderful Life...
In the story, the fractional money that presumably was to back the building and loan was lost (or stolen depending on your point of view) and the building and loan was bailed out by the shareholders. The way they avoided the run-on-the-bank was by sweet talking by George Bailey.
So because there was simply not enough money in this building and loan company to meet the fractional reserve requirements, was this a Ponzi scheme? To a bank examiner, It's as easily plausible that Uncle Billy just put the money in his pocket (or personal piggy bank) instead of having literally lost the money.
I suppose FTP owners could contemplate suicide, pray for a miracle, do some sweet talking and get some donations from their players and survive this crisis and maybe we can make a movie out this situation too, or maybe not ;^P
SS is basically like a typical standard financial product: a fixed annuity with insurance premiums.
You pay the "premiums" which is part funding the annuity and part funding an insurance policy. If you get disabled or die, you (or your heirs) get the insurance payout, if you get to retirement, you get the annuity value. This is why you don't get back more than you pay in (adjusted for inflation).
The things that makes this different than a typical fixed annuity, is that instead of a bank, it's the government. Instead of investing in things that might generate a return greater than the inflation rate, it just invests in US treasury bonds. This is pretty much a guarantee of a low rate of return.
The real problem with SS isn't that its a fixed annuity + insurance product. The real problem with SS is that it isn't totally funded as the promised benefits cannot be paid out with the projected future premium stream. If this event were to happen with a "real" standard financial product, the issuer would stop selling that product, figure out a new annuity product that would "work" and start selling it instead. Maybe this new product would have a higher retirement age based on new annuity tables, lower benefits, or whatever.
The problem with SS is that the US government (or by extension, the "people") refuse to close the current product and create a new product that has real annuity-like properties (as opposed to looking more like a pyramid scheme, not a ponzi scheme).
Politics is preventing discontinuing the current product and creating a new more viable product, but in reality if SS was a product sold by a company, I'll be the Feds would eventually shut it down as it is looking more and more like a pyramid scheme.
AFAIK, in Pend Oreille electric rates are $24.50 (flat) + 4.5cents/kWh which for 1000kWh would be
$69.50. The same 1000kWh in Spokane (Avista) would be $71.79.
http://173.236.244.134/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Electric-Rates.pdf
http://www.avistautilities.com/services/energypricing/Documents/Rates_One%20Sheet_3%2010_FINAL.pdf
Of course the price of obtainly electrical energy varies per locale (near a dam vs nuclear vs coal or natural gas power plant) and thus market based pricing generally doesn't follow a linear relationship like pend-oreille . Usually the first few kWh's are cheaper than when using significantly more than your baseline usage to offset the cost of maintaining the capacity to provide more than base-load power on demand (which is harder for a larger utility). If your utility is getting power from a dam, you get the price of the electricity from the dam, if you are a bigger utility, you can't just rely on a dam, but need more power plants (which are probably more expensive than hydro) and need to factor that into pricing.
Perhaps you are simply looking at the marginal cost of a kWh and saying it's 3-4x more? What makes you think Pend-Oreille rates reflect the marginal cost? It seems as if the final bills are nearly the same for 1000kWh/month...
Personally, I would like to see the government start to build, operate and maintain these types of plants. Sell the energy at cost. Include take down as part of the cost. Remove bonus incentive, C*O Pay, and board member approval will drop the cost to operate substantially. It will also make it safer, since there isn't an incentive to cut corners.
I don't really think this actually works in practice. The government will nearly always hire contracting companies to perform large scale infrastructure work often including a general contracting company (which is exactly what the typical Electric Company would do as they also usually don't have the experience to build nuclear power plants either). Generally the government doesn't even fully get involved in the financing (since they generally have to issue Bonds to do this which isn't the most efficient way to finance high-capital investments) and often must issue Equity to attract capital at low rates or maybe even offer loan guarantees or other tax advantaged incentives. This is the way it works in almost every country from USA, to France, to China, to Saudi Arabia...
Although the govt officials generally do NOT get bonuses or C*O level pay, the contracting companies tend to still operate that way and replacing board approval with civil service board approval isn't likely to improve any general accountability level in the employees or higher-ups (although perhaps cost slightly less).
As to the operational cost, often Electric companies sub-contract the operation of nuclear power plants and Electric companies are usually restricted on a cost+ basis (must only pass-on the actual cost of energy generation w/o markup to customers, only can charge for service provider related business operations).
Since the actual energy generation cost is factored out, it could be argued that governments might be better at providing service to customers, but experience has not necessarily shown this to be universally true either...
In short, I doubt having the govt do nuclear would be any better (and could be significantly worse). Just look at the US Post office attempt to get the govt to agree to let it stop Saturday delivery to save money and survive. In a non-govt company, this would probably have been done long ago, but with this quasi-govt company, you have to convince 535+2 elected officials who need to get re-elected...
My guess is that they have a better plan up their sleeve.
Presumably they're thinking Congress will do something before the 1 year wait is over.
Yea, congress is going to effectively increase taxes in an election year. Sure thing.
Maybe amazon will lobby congress to force other companies to do the same thing they just agreed to do or force non-complying companies to send a "use-tax" summaries to the appropriate state govt so they can enforce their own use-tax laws upon their citizens (not our fault, blame your state government officials for collecting the tax). Now Amazon will have a 1 year head start implementing the changes in their back-end servers and gain a (limited) competitive advantage, where they were setup for a big fall anyhow thus snatching victory from the jaws of defeat...
Of course the efficiency of the photocatalyst in using electromagnetic radiation to perform electrolysis is only 1/2 of the problem.
The other problem is how to prevent corrosion of the catalytic surface that allows the catalyst to work long enough so that it can be used in a practical system. The DOE is basically funding research in this area and their goal for a practical material is 10,000 hours (a little over a year). Right now the best stuff is only about 5% of this goal. As a comparison, the platinum catalyst in a typical car's catalytic converter can last 5-10 years.
I think many folks are hopeful that computational exploration can help to determine how and why certain configurations degrade and suggest improvements that will allow better designs that have reasonably efficiency and resist corrosion, but today that is still hopeful thinking...
I think you are mistaken on the economics of TV shows. The viewership (and the resultant ad-rates for the first airing), are only a small part of the equation. There's the aspect of the actual startup cost of the show too.
That's why there are all the reality shows out there today. Reality shows have lower production costs (but also have lower-re-run value) so although they make less money over time, they make more profit up front. "The Love Boat" (and similar series that feature washed-up actors/actresses), were also reasonably cheap to produce like soap-operas.
I'll be willing to bet that the shows like Firefly had reasonably high production costs and relatively lower viewership for the first airings.
So when Fox could air a different program in the same slot and get about the same amount of add revenue and pay a different production company less money, what do you think they will do?
Sure, they could take a piece of the action and invest in the show now and hope that it does better, but the production company is betting the other way (that they will make most of their money in syndication after the TV network takes some of the up-front risk). Unfortunately, most TV execs are very loathe to take any risks at all as much of the money in syndication is not made by them (but by the production company), but their job depends on the current revenue. Although production companies are designed to "lose" money initially, they don't necessarily want to charge too much less (gotta pay those actors, writers, and directors). So unless a TV show can generate a reasonable profit (revenue-costs) out of the gate, the networks won't give the production company enough time to make enough episodes to be profitable in syndication and the whole thing just dies out.
As someone who knows next to nothing about encryption, here's a question. If this ever becomes a problem, can't one VERY easily increase the bit count from 256 to 512 or more for an exponentially stronger encryption?
And more generally, I've heard these algorithms are very complicated. Rather than having this enormous complexity, can't you use a simpler, more elegant math algorithm, and again, just increase the bit count say from 256 to 512bit or more? Or does math not support that?
In this age of terabytes, does it really matter if we all save a few bits?
Cipher design is pretty complicated, but with a little bit of hand-waving, it might be able to explain the problem.
The task of creating a cipher (encryption algorithm) is basically the same problem as creating set of algorithms for shuffling a deck of cards a certain way. The deck of cards starts in order and the data you want to encrypt is where the deck is "cut". Then you shuffle the cards using some instructions (set by the key) and then you figure out where in the deck that card ended up. You decrypt by just doing the steps in reverse (effectively unshuffling the cards).
Now the trick of making an encryption algorithm is to have a set of algorithm where every possible key describes scrambling instructions that results in a completely different shuffle such that they aren't really related in any easy to crack way. The problem is that we don't really know how to do that effectively (this random permutation construction problem is related to one of the open problems of group theory).
If you describe your set of shuffling algorithm with very simple math, it is generally actually easier to attack mathematically. It takes lots of scrambling instructions to make up for the simple math (which makes your encryption complicated by length). With more complicated math it makes it harder to attack mathematically (in the case of AES and other modern ciphers, substitution tables are used to implement the complicated math).
So given we don't know how to simply construct sets of these random shuffling algorithms, how would we know that the design we came up with there is a "weakness" where for a sub-set of keys a certain sub-set of plaintext values map to some sub-set of cipher-text values (a sub-group/ideal or some other group-theoretic structure that can be easily analyzed and defeated). That's a big problem which nobody has an answer for yet, but if the sets are small enough that humans can analyze them, it's easier to see if they *might* have some weakness. If it's a huge set, no human could probably analyze them.
Actually if you really look at the guts of AES and other modern ciphers, they are actually constructed with very elegant math which is iterated (over several rounds). As an example, AES is a very straight forward iterations of two different SP (Substitution/Permutation) networks (one for the key schedule and another for the data). AES-128 runs this iteration 10 times, and AES-256 runs this iteration 14 times. The key and the data enter different SP networks and after each S and P stage the data stage is xored with the output of the corresponding key stage before heading into the next data S and P stage.
The AES permutation stages are basically just row shifts and small column "multiplications" (in a Galois field). This is a very simple "shuffle" of the data across the 128-bit data width. The AES substitution tables are sets of 8bit to 8bit tables which were constructed mathematically (to avoid any fears that they were created with back-doors which was a concern with the original DES substitution tables). This is basically a complicated 256 card random deck shuffle. All the operations can be implemented fairly easily on things as simple as a 8-bit microprocessor (8-bit lookup tables is the most complicated thing, the rest are just shifts and xors).
W/o the substitution table, all the shuffling would be really easy to invert mathematically. The set of AES substitution
The first semiconductor transistors were large enough to handle a single one with your hand. What makes you assume that the nanodiamond transistors cannot get smaller?
There are unfortuantly some additional physics problems that need to be address for miniturization of this technology.
One issue is the free-space electron transport. With silicon technology, the "channel" is doped silicon which carried the electrons (like a wire). The channel sort of acts like a waveguide for the electrons as the travel between the source and the drain (assuming common mos technology). In "free-space" transport between the cathode and anode (vacuum tube and the proposed nano-diamond transistor), you need to keep some sort of physical separation (in an all-free-space design) or some sort of electrical isolation betweeen devices (shielding).
The second issue is the structure. In the proposed diamond design, the diamond "circuitry" is patterned so that it is essentially carved to have structures above the silicon dioxide surface (as opposed to standard patterning which is either directly on the surface ion implated into the substrate). This nano-tech like structure will of course need to scale to get better. If they can take anything from the current silicon technology, shrinking in 2D (patterning) is much easier than shrinking in 3D (needed for reduced gate thickness needed to improve gate channel efficiency). In advanced silicon technology, 3D scaling has be all but abandoned in favor of techniques like tri-gate/fin-fet...
Note that I'm not saying these advances aren't possible, but they do not leverage any current manufacturing techniques, so it's likely that this stuff will be in the lab for a while whilst current technology will advance. When it does become feasible, it may or may not be competitive. This is not unlike ferro-magnetic ram might replace dram someday, or how solid state memories will replace rotating disk memory someday... Maybe someday, but it's equally possible that day may also never come or be so far out that other new technologies may gain a foothold (e.g., how RRAM might actual displace FRAM as the DRAM successor)...
As a silly example, if you invested the same amount of "area" in some farady-cage-like shielding of present day CML (current-mode-logic) technology electronics, would this nano-diamond technology be much better? I dunno, but these new-fangled technologies need to beat these kind of tweaks of current day technology to win. But of course we have to both try to do new things and try to improve old things and see which one comes out on top. However to assume that the appropriate technological and manufacturing advances will necessarily come to pass to make a general approach viable would be a mistake as a heap load of abandoned technologies will certainly attest to...
Since when did this international campusing became the vogue?
U. California Los Angels at Shanghai anyone?
Universities have been setting up international campuses and research centers for quite a while now... Unfortunatly the UC system is broke (as it depends on the State of California for funding) so you won't be seeing a UC-S campus anytime soon, but NYU (a private university) is taking the plunge in china...
And I know several Brits, working with them both here and over there. They would encourage me to remind you also that the Scots and the Irish are special cases also.
If you include the Irish, you should have defintly included the Welsh as a special case. And it probably would have been better to special case the Anglo-Irish (and/or maybe the Ulster-Irish) rather than not make the distinction as most other Irish (esp those that don't live in northern ireland) probably don't think of themselves as Brits (even as a special case)...
I seem to remember the old norton crash-guard/anti-freeze utility that was somewhat useful in getting around problems like infinite loops in old Windows programs.
I'm pretty sure the way this worked takes advantage of the fact that windows programs are essentially structured as message-processing co-routines plugged into a infinite scheduling loop (the windows loop). Although mostly, messages are posted, sometimes these messages can go re-entrant and if poorly coded cause an infinite loop. Anti-freeze could be then "sprayed" on the app which would then try to insert or delete messages in the program's processing loop to help it exit the re-entrant part loop and go back to the main scheduling loop. Often this would work well enough to enter the "Save" menu processing part of the program to avoid losing work. It also attempted to handle traps effectively (things that often happen when a program runs past the end of an array if it's in an infinite loop) by suspending the main flow of the program and inserting another message and thread to try an allow for limited operation (like "Save" menu processing).
Unfortunatly, this technology wouldn't be that effective in todays environment (basically, it probably could be classified as malware/spyware so the defenses against malware/spyware woud probably prevent it from working), but it seems like bulding this into an application code development infrastructure seems like it might be a good idea...
This is most likely marketing speak for some sort of micropolygons or REYES algorithm
(basically atoms ~ micropolygon, flat-panels" ~ tessalated tri-strips)
Fashion design is actually a field that uses copyright heavily.
Although IANAL, the way I understand it is the basic test is that although most fashion design fails the intrinsic utilitarian test for copyright, if the designer included pictoral, graphic, or sculptural features, those elements of the design are available for copyright protection.
As a specific example, although you can mostly copy the general size and shape of a pair of glasses, if the designer embeds a sculpture on the design or a designer specific pattern which serves no functional purpose (e.g, like oakley has an embedded O sculpted in their frame designs, or gucci which has a G), that design for that pair of glasses can be copyrighted.
That's why you see designers spray their logos or other design elements all over their items these days. It's to ward off the "exact" duplicate knockoffs. Since it is not possible to copyright design elements that are actually intrinsically useful, they deliberatly put in stuff that is not functional into their designs.
As for the recipies, although you can't copyright the recipe for coca cola, you can't sell you soda in a bottle shaped like the classic coca cola bottle, because that bottle is copyrighted as it includes design elements that are not necessary for its function as a bottle.
Number theory was known as the most useless of all branches of mathematics, yet now you couldn't pay your bills online without the public key cryptography it has made possible. By your standard of what should be investigated, we would still be banging big rocks together. Now we are banging tiny, tiny atoms together. That's progress.
Public key cryptography for paying your bills online might not be the best example. Nearly all data encryption today is symmetric instead of PKC (other than session key). Session keys could have been created/distributed w/o PKC, but it's more problematic (might require tokens like RSA-secure ID or pads to validate identities instead of RNG+certificates), but PKC seems like a convenient way to do it for now (until we discover that factoring or discrete log problems aren't as secure as we think they are or we eventually lose faith in certificate authorities which seem to be the weak link these days, but I digress). People seem to think it's the crypto that they are trusting, but it's really the infrastructure they are trusting, just like it has been in past banking schemes dating back to the early tally marks on cave walls and collections of special rocks...
Now, the use of group theory in the development of error correcting codes to make fast, error free digital transmission affordable... That might be actually something that makes paying bills online possible...
They haven't discovered a new fundamental particle. All they've done is to arrange some quarks into an arrangement we've already known about. This is an engineering accomplishment
Well if your definition of "engineering" includes crashing 500 trillion particles together and finding 25 particular combination of quarks in the resulting rubble... I would probably call this a research discovery (similar to discovering a needle in a haystack)...
On the other hand, if they figured out a repeatable process to crash say a billion particles together and almost always get a yield of at least 25 of a particular combination, the development of that repeatable processes might qualify as "engineering" vs "discovery"...
FWIW, In the normalized planck units of measurements that most physicists use, the constant "c" is actually 1, so E does equal m...
Now why mass is a form of energy will take more of a discussion than this simplistic unit measurement trick, but here is a basic pointer...
FWIW, you can always go "high-end" in the digital watches for bling. For example: http://www.thetimecomputer.com/ or http://www.ventura.ch/
Or instead, you might consider going classic and find an older "pre-owned" digital watch or maybe a more recent watch that is still widely available like the Timex T2N3129J...
Although mr AC described the generic anti-microbial action of the chemical on the bacteria, the breakthrough is really how you can "spray" the anti-microbial chemical to stick on-to things w/o blending the anti-microbial chemicals into the materials during the manufacturing process.
Basically this is the anti-microbial polymer technique described by the wiki that I pointed to in my original posting. You embed your anti-microbial chemical (in this case polyethylenimines or PEI) into a N-alkyl polymer, mix in some sunblock (that's the benzophenone which is basically sunblock for plastics, which isn't the same as the human usable type of organic chemical sunblock which is called avobenzone) and it creates something that sticks to your clothes when you spray it on and has the anti-microbial chemical embeded into it.
And since nobody probably will click on that link either, here's a convenient summary
Antimicrobial copolymers of hydrophobic N-alkyl and benzophenone containing polyethylenimines were synthesized from commercially available linear poly(2-ethyl-2-oxazoline), and covalently attached to surfaces of synthetic polymers, cotton, and modified silicon oxide using mild photo-cross-linking. Specifically, these polymers were applied to polypropylene, poly(vinyl chloride), polyethylene, cotton, and alkyl-coated oxide surfaces using solution casting or spray coating and then covalently cross-linked rendering permanent, nonleaching antimicrobial surfaces. The photochemical grafting of pendant benzophenones allows immobilization to any surface that contains a C–H bond. Incubating the modified materials with either Staphylococcus aureus or Escherichia coli demonstrated that the modified surfaces had substantial antimicrobial capacity against both Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria (>98% microbial death).
For folks not in the "know", the basic anti-microbial technique is described in this wiki page.
Or you can just do this...
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1140683&cid=26985821
Intellectual property has no built-in scarcity. In fact, IP laws actually create artificial scarcity where none exists.
Actually, I like to think of it as IP laws create value where none exists. Of course those of us who get paid for intellectual or creative pursuits owe our livelihood to IP laws. Without some form of IP laws (like there were in the past), there's no multiplicitive factor in your work output and we'd be creating real scarcity in other ways.
I can't speak too much on the creative side, but as an alternate example, in many industries, professional licensing is used to create artificial scarcity. In electrical "Engineering", you technically have to have a PE (professional engineering) license to call youself an engineer and to offer consulting engineering services to other people. However to get the actual license, in addition to passing the PE test administered by a board (which isn't too much different in scope compared other professional tests like the BAR or CPA or medical Boards), you must have graduated from an accredited school (or do a 6 year apprentiship working for a PE).
FWIW, I tried this route, but eventually gave it up because my undergrad school wasn't accredited (and it wasn't a fly-by-night school either, it was Caltech) and I couldn't find any company that I could work for a PE (since nobody has a PE in eletrical engineering in this industry outside of government contractors, and when I graduated long ago, jobs in that area were very scarce). So I just went down the computer industry route where they didn't care about PE licensing.
In the medical field, they just artificially limit the number of seats in accredited medical schools to create scarcity. In law, they basically didn't do this and you get a glut of lawyers.
So I guess the question is are IP laws that create scarcity better than licensing laws that create scarcity? I don't know, but I suspect the industry would look much different today if we had gone down the licensing path instead. Would organizations create artifical scarcity of computers and only gild member have access to programming?
On the otherhand, if we had gone down the path of no scarcity, I suspect all this offshoring that people complain about today, would most certainly have happened long ago as off shore companies would just copy stuff and ship it to the US. In fact if I recall correctly, Samuel Slater basically stole the plans for the spinning wheel from textile factories in Britian and bascially set up shop in the "colonies" and allowed it to basically undercut the British industry.
Actually Bitcoin is probably closer to tire scrip than baseball cards...