I'm not even sure what the stock market *does*. I don't think many people do. Including the people who run it.
You can make that statement with nearly every human endeavour. Nearly everything (computer, cars, etc), rely on so many layers of abstraction that nobody really knows what is going on...
The superficial reason for the stock market is to employ middlefolk who match those wanting capital with those who have capital (kind of like a grocery store matches those wanting food with those that harvest food). Of course the grocery store mostly functions to restrict the type of food available so that most folks don't have to think and just buy what is available and choose among the most shiny, and get on with their life...
You might imagine that kind of setup is rife for manipulation by the middlefolk... However, in reality nobody knows how it really works or can actually control it. Even the middlefolk.
Don't forget gross margin is not real profit. Net profit margin is.
That's a bit like saying salary is not really salary because it doesn't account for utility bills, rents, maintenance, etc. If businesses are to be taxed only on what's left after paying the bills, individuals should be afforded the same luxury and vice versa.
FWIW, for businesses, most taxes are paid on the NET (e.g., income tax, SE tax), but some are paid on the GROSS (e.g., excise/sales tax, business tax/licenses). For individuals where most taxes are paid on the GROSS (income tax and SS tax), but taxes on passive gains (such as investments) are paid on the NET.
One theory is the expenses of a business are like an investment that the business is making in itself to generate revenue. If a business itemizes $2M in "existance" bills to sell $2.1M worth of stuff, they don't pay taxes on $2.1M, only $100K. Most individuals can only subtract the approved expenses for "existance" (basically the standard deduction of $6K or some itemized list of mortgage interest and state taxes and various other minuta)...
Maybe it isn't fair that the government says you probably only should have $6K in bills/expenses to exist, but that's the way it is. That's why many folks try to run a business on the side...
Simply put, electrons (and holes, if you're looking at the other way) can only move so quickly through a given material.
It's a bit more complicated than that if you are looking for an "ultimate" limit.
Electron mobility is important when considering the charge drift-velocity limited performance of a transistor (e.g., in a typical sub-micron device of today), but for nano-scale transistors, ballistic charge transport is predicted to be an important factor in charge transfer. Basically instead of operating in an ohmic region where charge motion is modeled by a drift equations and limited by channel scattering effects, in ballistic transport, the charge (or holes) move pretty much unimpeded from source to drain (or vice versa) because of the local field configuration or local quantum potential reasons. Since the ballistic transport is more limited by geometry than the channel composition, it's not clear that the ultimate limit is much different except that you can have higher current levels in graphene for "wires" connecting these switching components (because the wires probably don't need to be connected by "ohmic" contacts to the transistors).
In any case, this paper doesn't really take this angle, but instead posits a modified type of switching element based on connecting and biasing a graphene transitor into a region where the Negative Differential Resistance effect happens (higher voltage, lower current) so that you don't have to rely on an intrinsic band-gap in the material to have a sharp on/off switching. As long as the NDR effect is high enough and you bias everything appropriatly, the on-off current ratio can be significant allowing a practical device to be manufatured The two interesting thing about the paper, are...
1. They theorize that the graphene NDR effect can be used in the nano-scale ballistic regime (even though their experimental device wasn't small enough and only operated in the drift regime) meaning it's not doomed to be out-scaled by silicon... 2. The device configuration that is required to use NDR is also suited for some non-binary computation schemes (e.g., fuzzy or multi-level primitives) mean it has some intrisnic efficiency over traditional transistors for some types of problems...
FWIW, There are other non-graphene materials that make use of NDR effects. Probably the most common example is Gunn diode which is used to make high-speed oscillators (GaN versions can oscillate in the Terahertz range) for various low-power radar transmitters. Of course oscillating isn't really switching, but the principles are very similar. For a while, there was some research on SOI (silicon on insulator) devices which used NDR-capable FETs, but I don't think these used they same type of device topology proposed here...
This is classic top down thinking that leads to sub-optimal solutions...
1. Assume that a certain technology direction that you read about on the internet is the best to go. 2. Bully all people that suggest research decide the best solution, because they are wasting time and the clock is ticking. 3. Then force your best engineers to ignore all other options and attempt to make it work whatever the cost.
Although you may assume that thorium technology is magic technology that solves all problems but is "suppressed" by the powers that be, you can make the same argument about cold fusion.
Does this sound like a thought process that a pointy haired boss would follow? Perhaps if your manager had a thought process like that you might be the first to call them on it, but of course in an internet forum, this type of manager-think is de-rigueur...
A tax for people that work outside where they live?
I think San Francisco, NYC and Chicago all have city payroll taxes in order to capture taxes from those folks that live outside the city and commute to jobs. Theoretically, they do this in order to compensate for the fact that such workers earn the money inside the city, yet spend most of the money outside the city, preventing the city from capturing that tax revenue with sales and property tax, yet the city provides infrastructure that benefits those workers. Of course in practice it's just a money grab because they can.
Obamacare is a compromise forced by unions and large corporations that want to maintain their tax deductible "cushy" medical plans whilst the rest of the populous get forced into a command-economy style health care industry.
If Obamacare was actually single payer, or socialist, the cushy medical plans couldn't really exist (because the infrastructure that would have supported them meaning the insurance companies and the pay-for-service medical providers would have evaporated) and there would have been no support for it. Regardless if the that is what Obama wanted, his support base wanted to be able to keep their plans, so this is what came out of the backroom deal.
If you want some evidence of this, I suggest you start with the sad fact that congress needed to hastily pass a law to allow their staffers to get a federal subsidy to help pay for getting their insurance through Obamacare since they feared "brain-drain" of people fleeing public service to get better health coverage from the private sector. No, the people in charge of Obamacare don't want the same coverage for everyone, they just want to change the way healthcare is funded for the masses, not the elite.
Tiered coverage often doesn't work with single payer very well, because of economies of scale limit the availability of competition for supplemental insurance resulting in a very have and have-not price points. As an example of this, you can start by looking into the fact that in the US medicare supplemental insurance needs to be subsidized by the government to keep providers in the market. If that seems like an inherently unfair use of government resources to give health benefits to some people over other people, well, you are probably looking at a preview of Obamacare in a few years if they want to keep private insurers in the market as costs rise, but premiums are capped due to political pressure.
On the other hand, if you are a cynic, you probably think that this design was an intentional long-term policy to drive out all insurers so that the system has to convert to single payer. If you want to see some evidence of this, look at what Obamacare is doing to Medicare Advantage programs (alternate Medicare-like insurance provided by private insurers).
The ARPANET was not started to create a Command and Control System that would survive a nuclear attack, as many now claim. To build such a system was, clearly, a major military need, but it was not ARPA's mission to do this; in fact, we would have been severely criticized had we tried. Rather, the ARPANET came out of our frustration that there were only a limited number of large, powerful research computers in the country, and that many research investigators, who should have access to them, were geographically separated from them.
Of course the military wasn't to be left out of any hi-tech toys so they later created their own MILNET (in '83) that used the same ARPANET technology, but was totally under their control. In this case (as is often the case) the egg came first, then the chicken was adopted by the military.
There are also uses of random numbers outside cryptography.I came across this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mersenne_twister [wikipedia.org] which is good for some uses, but bad for cryptography.
Pet peeve of mine, but people often casually use MT as an example of a "golden" PRNG when it is really the first (1997) "popular example" for generating extremely long period uniform distributions using a generalized LFSR-like technique. Unfortunatly with simplicity come certain flaws. The biggest flaw is that it takes many iterations for a seeded initial state to get to a state that is really random. For user that aren't simulating huge universe-sized things (or need an extremely large non repeating, but uniform distribution PRNG), this isn't really the best tradeoff. If you have to throw away the first million numbers to sample a few thousand, that isn't the best efficiency ratio.
Fortunatly, most things get improved over time. For example, the "WELL" PRNG (2004) claims to have a faster state randomization time and is probably suited more to the needs of people wanting a default off-the-shelf PRNG for medium sized simulation purposes (e.g, the average scientist that doesn't spend time researching the properties of PRNGs for their simulations). Sadly, WELL isn't more popular since it is a better default PRNG for nearly all uses.
If your needs are more cryptographic based, DRBGs (deterministic random bit generators) are designed to resist identification of the current state (I've heard that it only takes observing 624 iterations to identify MT19937's state vector) and to reasonably stretch any existing true-random sources. NIST has some reasonably good standardized examples of these EXCEPT for Dual_EC_DRBG which paranoid folks should probably avoid...
FWIW, pure sugar is not technically acidic (meaning it has no ionizable excess of H+ in solution). However, the way we metabolize sugar (citric acid cycle, fatty acid storage) creates acids in our bodies. The alkaline diet fad that has been making the rounds has somehow created this misleading impression about sugar.
NVIDIA will have no warranty obligation with respect to the following: (a) Warranted Product hardware that has no defects in materials or workmanship, (b) software, games or applications, (c) cosmetic damage; (d) normal wear and tear; (e) expendable or consumable parts; (f) defects or damage to the Warranted Product arising from or related to: (1) any modifications, alterations, tampering, repair, or servicing by any party other than NVIDIA or its authorized representatives; (2) handling, transit, storage, installation, testing, maintenance, or use not in accordance with the Warranted Product documentation; (3) abuse, negligence, neglect, accidents, or misuse; (4) third party software or viruses
Depending on how you interpret the highlighted part...
1. Nobody is required to offer a warranty on any product. 2. If there is a warranty, it must be either a full warranty or a limited warranty (as per MMWA it must be conspicuously stated if it is a full or limited waranty) 3. Almost nobody offers a full warranty on their products, only a limited warranty so most of the MMWA provisions applicable to a full waranty or implied waranty are moot. 4. According to MWA, a company can pretty much limit the warranty any way they want if it is a limited waranty.
Shield (as with most actual products in the universe) only offers a limited warranty and conspicuously states this.
Normal middle class folks sometimes have income from passive investments that throw off a random amount AMT taxable income every year (say like limited partnerships, bonds, etc) which is included in their personal income tax return and may trigger AMT (because sometimes these get preferential tax treatment in the non-AMT case, it create a large discrepency between AMT income and normal income). Since you have to pay the higher of the two taxes, you don't get much benefit from the preferential tax treatment. This is the passive income trap of AMT.
If you are rich, you don't do things like that. You generally don't want any annual income from passive investments, you gravitate towards investments that are held by a holding company (or you create one yourself), that doesn't pay you anything annually (e.g, a passive investment w/ no income). The income received by the holding company (instead of you) is taxed at corporate rates where the comparable bracket has a lower marginal rate (34%) than the highest personal tax rate (39%) instead of your own high personal tax rate and you don't have to pay any of the surtaxes (e.g., medicare, self-employment tax, etc). You can also choose to locate your holding company in a low-tax geography vs where your residence is. As an additional strategy, you also attempt to minimize your personal income (e.g., say you're a CEO and you get $1/year) to attempt to keep your marginal tax rate down and avoid AMT if there is any spill-over. This is a passive investment avoidance technique you can do if you are rich (say less than a billionaire, but more than a multi-millionare).***
So now you saved on those pesky taxes. You're rich, but all the money is held by the holding company, what do you do to fund your lavish lifestyle? You borrow money for your lavish lifestyle using your investment in the holding company as collateral. The interest rate you can get on the money you borrow is much smaller than the amount you saved by having the income taxed at the corporate rate rather than the higher individual tax rate, so you win the game.
This loophole is something too expensive/complicated for normal middle class folks to do (how can an ordinary middle class joe convince a company to pay you $1/year but give you lots of stock, or afford set up a holding company and pay accountants to move the money around, or convince a bank to let you borrow a little bit of spending money at a nearly zero interest rate based on your "massive" amount of collateral holdings).
For those that care, and are still reading, most people just try to avoid passive income/investments all together and try to stick to long term capital investments. These have a favorable tax rate (~20%), relative to any income tax rate and have the advantage that there's no tax unless you buy and sell (avoiding the annual compounding drain of whittling away). For these investment, the companies themselves have to pay the taxes on annual income and you are implicitly relying on them to hide the money from uncle sam to obtain an equivalent amount of tax efficiency, but if you are the type that likes to-the-metal type of investments in non-public captial intensive businesses, like real-estate and construction, many of these only exist as passive investment structures (or you must invest with them through a holding company that takes a large investment managment cut).
***By the time you get to billionare status, this trick doesn't work very well (you'd have to open hundreds of holding companies to keep the corporate tax rate from inching up to be the same as the personal income tax rate), but you probably care less at that point because you can easily move your money off shore... If you still care, other "tricks" open to you like small business startup credits, enterprise zones exemptions and if you cared enough, you could just blatently lobby for a personal tax break.
Sure. The whole point of Bitcoin is to establish something that makes it harder for them to "find out".
Hardly, bitcoin is an experimental currency that is designed to be beyond the power of a governmental entity to manipulate by inflation (e.g., printing more of it). Of course nobody know what happens to an inherently deflationary currency which is why it's experimental.
Of course people that want to avoid paying tax attempt to co-opt anything they can to further their aim. For example Russian folks had a penchant to deposit their money in cypriot banks (until their country went BK) where US folks tended to favor the Swiss and the Caymans... Although some people start their own church, other folks just co-opt ones that already exist...
I don't think you understand AMT except at the talking points level.
Basically AMT just eliminates certain tax deductions and taxes certain types of income (which are normally deferred tax) in exchange for a bigger standard deduction and a flatter progressive tax rate. You pay whichever liability is higher. To protect the middle class, there is a lower limit income level which you become exempt from AMT. For 2013, that number is $52K for single folks, $81K for married folks. I think most normal (non-high-tech salary earning) folks would agree that is pretty near the median (not mean) income.
For some high-tech workers, who tend to have some types of highly variable deferred income component (e.g., stock options), AMT can hit them hard. For normal middle class folks, it tends to only hit folks that have largish investment portfolios (with passive income) or have high value deductions relative to their W2 income.
For the typical W2 wage slave, that earns more than the exemption amount, it doesn't really hit them at all (and if it does, it's only a very little bit).
Of course rich folks have many ways to avoid paying taxes, the primary one is to avoid having any salary at all since income from passive investments is taxed at a lower rate than being paid a salary.
FWIW, There is the general security concept of "fail-safe". If the stuff is encrypted on the file store, stupid things like backup programs which often have administrator privileges by default won't become easy backdoors...
Why elliptic curves when we can go back to good old fashioned original RSA that uses prime number factoring as the problem? No patent nonsense to worry about there.
Sometimes the past needs to remain in the past...
Although prime factoring is considered a hard problem, the sparse distribution of prime numbers (~x/ln(x)) makes RSA increasingly inefficient in that superlinearly large moduli (to match large primes) need to be used to increase security linearly.
Lest nostalgia continue to be your guide, the original RSA was also found to be broken and needed to be patched to avoid the insecurity
1. Messages corresponding to small input values could be simply inverted ignoring the modulus operation (just doing numerical root estimation to invert the exponentiation). The larger the modulus, the more "insecure" messages there are.
2. Encryption is deterministic so is subject to dictionary attacks.
When people say they are using RSA today, they are usually using RSA-OAEP (optimal asymmetric encryption padding) which patches these two specific vunerablities of RSA.
FYI, the original RSA was patented (although later RSA labs decided to not enforce the patent and let it expire). This patent nonsense around RSA was a big issue in its day...
Or judge it by the amazing quantity of good science it's done...
Many people mistake science and technology. *** Sure it was an amazing technical feat of engineering to land something on another planet, but that's not science. Of course there was science too, but that's not what tickles the crowd (yes we're pretty sure there was water on mars is the basic theory we are testing with MSL).
Just like the hoover dam (or the 3 gorges dam) or the various bridges or tall buildings are marvels of technology, and we can choose to spend our money on all sorts of wonders to tickle the mind, but the science aspect of most of that stuff is mostly data gathering and the bulk of the technology is really just applied engineering.
As cost overruns happened and much of the cost of the program can be attributed to keeping quite a few warm bodies fed whilst the engineering aspects of the actuators and the landing system experienced redesign and testing (the grey and dull engineering stuff).
*** I've been a judge at quite a few science fairs and often what passes for science is really just technology demos...
What makes science is theory and experiment and data gathering and analysis.
When technology is passed off as science, it's usually lacking in theory, data gathering and analysis. Also, often the "experiment" usually an exercise in engineering. The hallmark of engineering is applying well known principles and pre-tested components to acheive a systematic result. It generally saddens me when I have to judge a "science" project where someone simply assembles a remote controlled car or airplane and doesn't even understand the principles of radio or flight (which unforutnatly has happened too many times to count).
Was it worth it? Well, just like all government programs intended to employ people, you might judge that the number of people employed vs the money spent.
Basically MSL (aka Curiosity) was the full-employment program for JPL contractors. While everything else was being cut, all the contractors and JPL employees tried to bill as much as possible to this program to avoid redundancies (layoffs). Sadly, these kind of employees tend to be attached to expensive toys which makes the for lower efficiency when judged by the $/employed metric.
FWIW, they at least managed to land to rover on the (martian) ground. In that sense, it probably was better spent than the billons we spend on other employment programs which simply return only employment, or fund things that are actually unused (like bridges to nowhere, or airports with no scheduled flights) or actually unwanted (e.g, F35, MEADS, EFV).
Sadly, it's a pretty low bar when it comes to government spending...
The revolution is successful. But survival depends on drastic measures. Your continued existence represents a threat to the well-being of society. Your lives mean slow death to the more valued members of the colony. Therefore, I have no alternative but to sentence you to death. Your execution is so ordered, signed...
Maybe this is something they should screen for?
I don't know if I would worry more about someone who knew the reference, or someone that never heard it before...
As with many simplistic analysis, people often ignore risk and time-value analysis.
If getting a person's help in the future requires you to offer your own help today to that other person, you must normalize the cost you have to pay today to that person with the value of that help you might received in the future tempered with uncertainty (since you risk not getting that help in the future).
This is similar to a mortgage. The downpayment you make today is an opportunity cost that you pay today with the value of the reduced interest payments you make in the future which needs to be tempered with uncertainty (since you risk selling your house before the full amortization time of the mortgage and not realizing all that interest savings). You might be able to instead use that downpayment to say not sell your old house and rent it out, where if you waited until you accumulated enough money to buy a rental property, it might be too late to purchase one at a reasonable price (a time value concern).
That's not to say many people make this calculation correctly or apply the proper risk analysis or time-value analysis, but as with any pure strategy, always cooperating is nearly as "stupid" as always being selfish when tempered with risk. A simplistic illustration of this is how "tit-for-tat" was shown to be a good strategy for an iterated prisoner's dilemma which has no time-value component (each cooperation is valued the same as a future cooperation).
But imagine if someone had tried to make the movie "Being John Malkovich" without actually hiring or getting permission from John Malkovich. Then you have the situation that the movie is being sold based upon the likeness.
1. AFAIK, the script was written and shopped around w/o John Malkovich's knowledge or permission. He was picked apparently because the screenwriter liked the sound of his name and his personality. Only later was the actual John Malkovich notified and convinced to sign to do the movie. 2. The movie has literally nothing to do with John Malkovich's real life nor any non hallucinogenic fictional interpretation of anyone's actual life.
I don't think this case is really much different than if someone made a movie called "Citizen Kane", or wrote a book called the "Science of Michael Crichton", or even a sitcom called "That's My Bush!".
I've read that the "theory" that EA was going by is that the NCAA owns the jersey numbers and they paid a license to the NCAA for the use of the college uniform designs and team names. The college players in question didn't share in this revenue (nor do they share in other NCAA revenue like licensing of jerseys to clothing manufacturers, ticket sales or broadcast revenue) and no student's actual names were used in the EA product.
Of course the students are pissed off about this (and the general fact they don't share in any NCAA revenue). It's really just all about the money...
This isn't a matter of parody or satire; this is EA making money from the likenesses of people they never compensated. It is akin to creating a CGI representation of an athlete or celebrity and using it in a TV commercial.
I'm not sure this is that different than say the novel War and Peace making reference to dozens of real people to give it an aura of period authenticity. It's also somewhat akin to say making money from writing an unauthorized biography of some athlete or celebrity. These usually aren't parody or satire (well sometimes, but not always).
In the games in question, EA really only used the jersey numbers and never actually used the real names of the folks, although they were superficially similar to the people involved.
Taken to it's extreme, it would basically prevent celebrity impersonators, or maybe even people that merely are mistaken for another celebrity from being employable.
FWIW, it's not as if non-metallic recycled parts of circuit boards aren't in wide use today.
The groundup non-metalic parts of circuit boards are used in plastic lumber, insulating concrete, asphault, and as a structural filler for some composite materials which are used for various types of products from furniture, to lunch trays and picture frames. Generally this pcb-waste-resin composite material is considered a high-quality replacement for wood-plastic material resulting in material that handle better bending stresses.
The use of this in pulverized power form after treatment with KOH as heavy metal adsorber/filter is perhaps interesting/novel, but as stated in the article...
Although the boards can become effective adsorbents, he says the method for making the materials may not be as energy efficient and cost effective as for other adsorbents, such as granular ferric hydroxide, because of all the processing steps needed to produce the treated powder.
And since there are many other current uses for the waste circuit board material that require less energy and processing steps, it's not clear that this result is anything other than a novelty result...
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not even sure what the stock market *does*. I don't think many people do. Including the people who run it.
You can make that statement with nearly every human endeavour. Nearly everything (computer, cars, etc), rely on so many layers of abstraction that nobody really knows what is going on...
Sadly, it is the illusion of knowledge and the illusion of control that dominate most things that we as a species do (stock market included)...
The superficial reason for the stock market is to employ middlefolk who match those wanting capital with those who have capital (kind of like a grocery store matches those wanting food with those that harvest food). Of course the grocery store mostly functions to restrict the type of food available so that most folks don't have to think and just buy what is available and choose among the most shiny, and get on with their life...
You might imagine that kind of setup is rife for manipulation by the middlefolk... However, in reality nobody knows how it really works or can actually control it. Even the middlefolk.
Don't forget gross margin is not real profit. Net profit margin is.
That's a bit like saying salary is not really salary because it doesn't account for utility bills, rents, maintenance, etc. If businesses are to be taxed only on what's left after paying the bills, individuals should be afforded the same luxury and vice versa.
FWIW, for businesses, most taxes are paid on the NET (e.g., income tax, SE tax), but some are paid on the GROSS (e.g., excise/sales tax, business tax/licenses). For individuals where most taxes are paid on the GROSS (income tax and SS tax), but taxes on passive gains (such as investments) are paid on the NET.
One theory is the expenses of a business are like an investment that the business is making in itself to generate revenue. If a business itemizes $2M in "existance" bills to sell $2.1M worth of stuff, they don't pay taxes on $2.1M, only $100K. Most individuals can only subtract the approved expenses for "existance" (basically the standard deduction of $6K or some itemized list of mortgage interest and state taxes and various other minuta)...
Maybe it isn't fair that the government says you probably only should have $6K in bills/expenses to exist, but that's the way it is. That's why many folks try to run a business on the side...
>And what prevents silicon transistors from operating at frequencies over 400 GHz in theory?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_mobility
Simply put, electrons (and holes, if you're looking at the other way) can only move so quickly through a given material.
It's a bit more complicated than that if you are looking for an "ultimate" limit.
Electron mobility is important when considering the charge drift-velocity limited performance of a transistor (e.g., in a typical sub-micron device of today), but for nano-scale transistors, ballistic charge transport is predicted to be an important factor in charge transfer. Basically instead of operating in an ohmic region where charge motion is modeled by a drift equations and limited by channel scattering effects, in ballistic transport, the charge (or holes) move pretty much unimpeded from source to drain (or vice versa) because of the local field configuration or local quantum potential reasons. Since the ballistic transport is more limited by geometry than the channel composition, it's not clear that the ultimate limit is much different except that you can have higher current levels in graphene for "wires" connecting these switching components (because the wires probably don't need to be connected by "ohmic" contacts to the transistors).
In any case, this paper doesn't really take this angle, but instead posits a modified type of switching element based on connecting and biasing a graphene transitor into a region where the Negative Differential Resistance effect happens (higher voltage, lower current) so that you don't have to rely on an intrinsic band-gap in the material to have a sharp on/off switching. As long as the NDR effect is high enough and you bias everything appropriatly, the on-off current ratio can be significant allowing a practical device to be manufatured The two interesting thing about the paper, are...
1. They theorize that the graphene NDR effect can be used in the nano-scale ballistic regime (even though their experimental device wasn't small enough and only operated in the drift regime) meaning it's not doomed to be out-scaled by silicon...
2. The device configuration that is required to use NDR is also suited for some non-binary computation schemes (e.g., fuzzy or multi-level primitives) mean it has some intrisnic efficiency over traditional transistors for some types of problems...
FWIW, There are other non-graphene materials that make use of NDR effects. Probably the most common example is Gunn diode which is used to make high-speed oscillators (GaN versions can oscillate in the Terahertz range) for various low-power radar transmitters. Of course oscillating isn't really switching, but the principles are very similar. For a while, there was some research on SOI (silicon on insulator) devices which used NDR-capable FETs, but I don't think these used they same type of device topology proposed here...
Get some decent Thorium based tech going.
This is classic top down thinking that leads to sub-optimal solutions...
1. Assume that a certain technology direction that you read about on the internet is the best to go.
2. Bully all people that suggest research decide the best solution, because they are wasting time and the clock is ticking.
3. Then force your best engineers to ignore all other options and attempt to make it work whatever the cost.
Although you may assume that thorium technology is magic technology that solves all problems but is "suppressed" by the powers that be, you can make the same argument about cold fusion.
Does this sound like a thought process that a pointy haired boss would follow? Perhaps if your manager had a thought process like that you might be the first to call them on it, but of course in an internet forum, this type of manager-think is de-rigueur...
Just say'n... ;^)
A tax for people that work outside where they live?
I think San Francisco, NYC and Chicago all have city payroll taxes in order to capture taxes from those folks that live outside the city and commute to jobs. Theoretically, they do this in order to compensate for the fact that such workers earn the money inside the city, yet spend most of the money outside the city, preventing the city from capturing that tax revenue with sales and property tax, yet the city provides infrastructure that benefits those workers. Of course in practice it's just a money grab because they can.
Of course the other way to go is to try to get tax folks that don't live where they work is via http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_congestion_pricing">congestion fees...
Obamacare is a compromise forced by unions and large corporations that want to maintain their tax deductible "cushy" medical plans whilst the rest of the populous get forced into a command-economy style health care industry.
If Obamacare was actually single payer, or socialist, the cushy medical plans couldn't really exist (because the infrastructure that would have supported them meaning the insurance companies and the pay-for-service medical providers would have evaporated) and there would have been no support for it. Regardless if the that is what Obama wanted, his support base wanted to be able to keep their plans, so this is what came out of the backroom deal.
If you want some evidence of this, I suggest you start with the sad fact that congress needed to hastily pass a law to allow their staffers to get a federal subsidy to help pay for getting their insurance through Obamacare since they feared "brain-drain" of people fleeing public service to get better health coverage from the private sector. No, the people in charge of Obamacare don't want the same coverage for everyone, they just want to change the way healthcare is funded for the masses, not the elite.
Tiered coverage often doesn't work with single payer very well, because of economies of scale limit the availability of competition for supplemental insurance resulting in a very have and have-not price points. As an example of this, you can start by looking into the fact that in the US medicare supplemental insurance needs to be subsidized by the government to keep providers in the market. If that seems like an inherently unfair use of government resources to give health benefits to some people over other people, well, you are probably looking at a preview of Obamacare in a few years if they want to keep private insurers in the market as costs rise, but premiums are capped due to political pressure.
On the other hand, if you are a cynic, you probably think that this design was an intentional long-term policy to drive out all insurers so that the system has to convert to single payer. If you want to see some evidence of this, look at what Obamacare is doing to Medicare Advantage programs (alternate Medicare-like insurance provided by private insurers).
Government plans tend to make me wonder if they ever just step back and listen to what they just said before they go and do it.
It's not the elected leaders who come up with this stuff, it's the promoted leaders in the DoD. Internet was a good thing
Past tense, well maybe depending on your point of view...
...but it probably started as some plan to wipe out communism using university research.
People are so cynical these days... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET
The ARPANET was not started to create a Command and Control System that would survive a nuclear attack, as many now claim. To build such a system was, clearly, a major military need, but it was not ARPA's mission to do this; in fact, we would have been severely criticized had we tried. Rather, the ARPANET came out of our frustration that there were only a limited number of large, powerful research computers in the country, and that many research investigators, who should have access to them, were geographically separated from them.
Of course the military wasn't to be left out of any hi-tech toys so they later created their own MILNET (in '83) that used the same ARPANET technology, but was totally under their control. In this case (as is often the case) the egg came first, then the chicken was adopted by the military.
There are also uses of random numbers outside cryptography.I came across this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mersenne_twister [wikipedia.org] which is good for some uses, but bad for cryptography.
Pet peeve of mine, but people often casually use MT as an example of a "golden" PRNG when it is really the first (1997) "popular example" for generating extremely long period uniform distributions using a generalized LFSR-like technique. Unfortunatly with simplicity come certain flaws. The biggest flaw is that it takes many iterations for a seeded initial state to get to a state that is really random. For user that aren't simulating huge universe-sized things (or need an extremely large non repeating, but uniform distribution PRNG), this isn't really the best tradeoff. If you have to throw away the first million numbers to sample a few thousand, that isn't the best efficiency ratio.
Fortunatly, most things get improved over time. For example, the "WELL" PRNG (2004) claims to have a faster state randomization time and is probably suited more to the needs of people wanting a default off-the-shelf PRNG for medium sized simulation purposes (e.g, the average scientist that doesn't spend time researching the properties of PRNGs for their simulations). Sadly, WELL isn't more popular since it is a better default PRNG for nearly all uses.
If your needs are more cryptographic based, DRBGs (deterministic random bit generators) are designed to resist identification of the current state (I've heard that it only takes observing 624 iterations to identify MT19937's state vector) and to reasonably stretch any existing true-random sources. NIST has some reasonably good standardized examples of these EXCEPT for Dual_EC_DRBG which paranoid folks should probably avoid...
I've heard that sugar is acidic.
FWIW, pure sugar is not technically acidic (meaning it has no ionizable excess of H+ in solution). However, the way we metabolize sugar (citric acid cycle, fatty acid storage) creates acids in our bodies. The alkaline diet fad that has been making the rounds has somehow created this misleading impression about sugar.
NVIDIA will have no warranty obligation with respect to the following: (a) Warranted Product hardware that has no defects in materials or workmanship, (b) software, games or applications, (c) cosmetic damage; (d) normal wear and tear; (e) expendable or consumable parts; (f) defects or damage to the Warranted Product arising from or related to: (1) any modifications, alterations, tampering, repair, or servicing by any party other than NVIDIA or its authorized representatives ; (2) handling, transit, storage, installation, testing, maintenance, or use not in accordance with the Warranted Product documentation; (3) abuse, negligence, neglect, accidents, or misuse; (4) third party software or viruses
Depending on how you interpret the highlighted part...
1. Nobody is required to offer a warranty on any product.
2. If there is a warranty, it must be either a full warranty or a limited warranty (as per MMWA it must be conspicuously stated if it is a full or limited waranty)
3. Almost nobody offers a full warranty on their products, only a limited warranty so most of the MMWA provisions applicable to a full waranty or implied waranty are moot.
4. According to MWA, a company can pretty much limit the warranty any way they want if it is a limited waranty.
Shield (as with most actual products in the universe) only offers a limited warranty and conspicuously states this.
Since I typed that fast, I wasn't very precise...
Normal middle class folks sometimes have income from passive investments that throw off a random amount AMT taxable income every year (say like limited partnerships, bonds, etc) which is included in their personal income tax return and may trigger AMT (because sometimes these get preferential tax treatment in the non-AMT case, it create a large discrepency between AMT income and normal income). Since you have to pay the higher of the two taxes, you don't get much benefit from the preferential tax treatment. This is the passive income trap of AMT.
If you are rich, you don't do things like that. You generally don't want any annual income from passive investments, you gravitate towards investments that are held by a holding company (or you create one yourself), that doesn't pay you anything annually (e.g, a passive investment w/ no income). The income received by the holding company (instead of you) is taxed at corporate rates where the comparable bracket has a lower marginal rate (34%) than the highest personal tax rate (39%) instead of your own high personal tax rate and you don't have to pay any of the surtaxes (e.g., medicare, self-employment tax, etc). You can also choose to locate your holding company in a low-tax geography vs where your residence is. As an additional strategy, you also attempt to minimize your personal income (e.g., say you're a CEO and you get $1/year) to attempt to keep your marginal tax rate down and avoid AMT if there is any spill-over. This is a passive investment avoidance technique you can do if you are rich (say less than a billionaire, but more than a multi-millionare).***
So now you saved on those pesky taxes. You're rich, but all the money is held by the holding company, what do you do to fund your lavish lifestyle? You borrow money for your lavish lifestyle using your investment in the holding company as collateral. The interest rate you can get on the money you borrow is much smaller than the amount you saved by having the income taxed at the corporate rate rather than the higher individual tax rate, so you win the game.
This loophole is something too expensive/complicated for normal middle class folks to do (how can an ordinary middle class joe convince a company to pay you $1/year but give you lots of stock, or afford set up a holding company and pay accountants to move the money around, or convince a bank to let you borrow a little bit of spending money at a nearly zero interest rate based on your "massive" amount of collateral holdings).
For those that care, and are still reading, most people just try to avoid passive income/investments all together and try to stick to long term capital investments. These have a favorable tax rate (~20%), relative to any income tax rate and have the advantage that there's no tax unless you buy and sell (avoiding the annual compounding drain of whittling away). For these investment, the companies themselves have to pay the taxes on annual income and you are implicitly relying on them to hide the money from uncle sam to obtain an equivalent amount of tax efficiency, but if you are the type that likes to-the-metal type of investments in non-public captial intensive businesses, like real-estate and construction, many of these only exist as passive investment structures (or you must invest with them through a holding company that takes a large investment managment cut).
***By the time you get to billionare status, this trick doesn't work very well (you'd have to open hundreds of holding companies to keep the corporate tax rate from inching up to be the same as the personal income tax rate), but you probably care less at that point because you can easily move your money off shore... If you still care, other "tricks" open to you like small business startup credits, enterprise zones exemptions and if you cared enough, you could just blatently lobby for a personal tax break.
Sure. The whole point of Bitcoin is to establish something that makes it harder for them to "find out".
Hardly, bitcoin is an experimental currency that is designed to be beyond the power of a governmental entity to manipulate by inflation (e.g., printing more of it). Of course nobody know what happens to an inherently deflationary currency which is why it's experimental.
Of course people that want to avoid paying tax attempt to co-opt anything they can to further their aim. For example Russian folks had a penchant to deposit their money in cypriot banks (until their country went BK) where US folks tended to favor the Swiss and the Caymans... Although some people start their own church, other folks just co-opt ones that already exist...
The purpose of the AMT is loot the middle class.
I don't think you understand AMT except at the talking points level.
Basically AMT just eliminates certain tax deductions and taxes certain types of income (which are normally deferred tax) in exchange for a bigger standard deduction and a flatter progressive tax rate. You pay whichever liability is higher. To protect the middle class, there is a lower limit income level which you become exempt from AMT. For 2013, that number is $52K for single folks, $81K for married folks. I think most normal (non-high-tech salary earning) folks would agree that is pretty near the median (not mean) income.
For some high-tech workers, who tend to have some types of highly variable deferred income component (e.g., stock options), AMT can hit them hard. For normal middle class folks, it tends to only hit folks that have largish investment portfolios (with passive income) or have high value deductions relative to their W2 income.
For the typical W2 wage slave, that earns more than the exemption amount, it doesn't really hit them at all (and if it does, it's only a very little bit).
Of course rich folks have many ways to avoid paying taxes, the primary one is to avoid having any salary at all since income from passive investments is taxed at a lower rate than being paid a salary.
Texas Instruments seems good...
Except for the small problem that last year Texas instruments quit making SOCs for tablets and phones...
FWIW, There is the general security concept of "fail-safe". If the stuff is encrypted on the file store, stupid things like backup programs which often have administrator privileges by default won't become easy backdoors...
Why elliptic curves when we can go back to good old fashioned original RSA that uses prime number factoring as the problem? No patent nonsense to worry about there.
Sometimes the past needs to remain in the past...
Although prime factoring is considered a hard problem, the sparse distribution of prime numbers (~x/ln(x)) makes RSA increasingly inefficient in that superlinearly large moduli (to match large primes) need to be used to increase security linearly.
Lest nostalgia continue to be your guide, the original RSA was also found to be broken and needed to be patched to avoid the insecurity
1. Messages corresponding to small input values could be simply inverted ignoring the modulus operation (just doing numerical root estimation to invert the exponentiation). The larger the modulus, the more "insecure" messages there are.
2. Encryption is deterministic so is subject to dictionary attacks.
When people say they are using RSA today, they are usually using RSA-OAEP (optimal asymmetric encryption padding) which patches these two specific vunerablities of RSA.
FYI, the original RSA was patented (although later RSA labs decided to not enforce the patent and let it expire). This patent nonsense around RSA was a big issue in its day...
Nit alert...
Or judge it by the amazing quantity of good science it's done...
Many people mistake science and technology. *** Sure it was an amazing technical feat of engineering to land something on another planet, but that's not science. Of course there was science too, but that's not what tickles the crowd (yes we're pretty sure there was water on mars is the basic theory we are testing with MSL).
Just like the hoover dam (or the 3 gorges dam) or the various bridges or tall buildings are marvels of technology, and we can choose to spend our money on all sorts of wonders to tickle the mind, but the science aspect of most of that stuff is mostly data gathering and the bulk of the technology is really just applied engineering.
As cost overruns happened and much of the cost of the program can be attributed to keeping quite a few warm bodies fed whilst the engineering aspects of the actuators and the landing system experienced redesign and testing (the grey and dull engineering stuff).
*** I've been a judge at quite a few science fairs and often what passes for science is really just technology demos...
What makes science is theory and experiment and data gathering and analysis.
When technology is passed off as science, it's usually lacking in theory, data gathering and analysis. Also, often the "experiment" usually an exercise in engineering. The hallmark of engineering is applying well known principles and pre-tested components to acheive a systematic result. It generally saddens me when I have to judge a "science" project where someone simply assembles a remote controlled car or airplane and doesn't even understand the principles of radio or flight (which unforutnatly has happened too many times to count).
Was it worth it? Well, just like all government programs intended to employ people, you might judge that the number of people employed vs the money spent.
Basically MSL (aka Curiosity) was the full-employment program for JPL contractors. While everything else was being cut, all the contractors and JPL employees tried to bill as much as possible to this program to avoid redundancies (layoffs). Sadly, these kind of employees tend to be attached to expensive toys which makes the for lower efficiency when judged by the $/employed metric.
FWIW, they at least managed to land to rover on the (martian) ground. In that sense, it probably was better spent than the billons we spend on other employment programs which simply return only employment, or fund things that are actually unused (like bridges to nowhere, or airports with no scheduled flights) or actually unwanted (e.g, F35, MEADS, EFV).
Sadly, it's a pretty low bar when it comes to government spending...
The revolution is successful. But survival depends on drastic measures. Your continued existence represents a threat to the well-being of society. Your lives mean slow death to the more valued members of the colony. Therefore, I have no alternative but to sentence you to death. Your execution is so ordered, signed ...
Maybe this is something they should screen for?
I don't know if I would worry more about someone who knew the reference, or someone that never heard it before...
As with many simplistic analysis, people often ignore risk and time-value analysis.
If getting a person's help in the future requires you to offer your own help today to that other person, you must normalize the cost you have to pay today to that person with the value of that help you might received in the future tempered with uncertainty (since you risk not getting that help in the future).
This is similar to a mortgage. The downpayment you make today is an opportunity cost that you pay today with the value of the reduced interest payments you make in the future which needs to be tempered with uncertainty (since you risk selling your house before the full amortization time of the mortgage and not realizing all that interest savings). You might be able to instead use that downpayment to say not sell your old house and rent it out, where if you waited until you accumulated enough money to buy a rental property, it might be too late to purchase one at a reasonable price (a time value concern).
That's not to say many people make this calculation correctly or apply the proper risk analysis or time-value analysis, but as with any pure strategy, always cooperating is nearly as "stupid" as always being selfish when tempered with risk. A simplistic illustration of this is how "tit-for-tat" was shown to be a good strategy for an iterated prisoner's dilemma which has no time-value component (each cooperation is valued the same as a future cooperation).
But imagine if someone had tried to make the movie "Being John Malkovich" without actually hiring or getting permission from John Malkovich. Then you have the situation that the movie is being sold based upon the likeness.
1. AFAIK, the script was written and shopped around w/o John Malkovich's knowledge or permission. He was picked apparently because the screenwriter liked the sound of his name and his personality. Only later was the actual John Malkovich notified and convinced to sign to do the movie.
2. The movie has literally nothing to do with John Malkovich's real life nor any non hallucinogenic fictional interpretation of anyone's actual life.
I don't think this case is really much different than if someone made a movie called "Citizen Kane", or wrote a book called the "Science of Michael Crichton", or even a sitcom called "That's My Bush!".
I've read that the "theory" that EA was going by is that the NCAA owns the jersey numbers and they paid a license to the NCAA for the use of the college uniform designs and team names. The college players in question didn't share in this revenue (nor do they share in other NCAA revenue like licensing of jerseys to clothing manufacturers, ticket sales or broadcast revenue) and no student's actual names were used in the EA product.
Of course the students are pissed off about this (and the general fact they don't share in any NCAA revenue). It's really just all about the money...
This isn't a matter of parody or satire; this is EA making money from the likenesses of people they never compensated. It is akin to creating a CGI representation of an athlete or celebrity and using it in a TV commercial.
I'm not sure this is that different than say the novel War and Peace making reference to dozens of real people to give it an aura of period authenticity. It's also somewhat akin to say making money from writing an unauthorized biography of some athlete or celebrity. These usually aren't parody or satire (well sometimes, but not always).
In the games in question, EA really only used the jersey numbers and never actually used the real names of the folks, although they were superficially similar to the people involved.
Taken to it's extreme, it would basically prevent celebrity impersonators, or maybe even people that merely are mistaken for another celebrity from being employable.
Next thing you know the Brits will be using petroleum products to clean up oil spills. Crazy Brits.
FTFY...
FWIW, it's not as if non-metallic recycled parts of circuit boards aren't in wide use today.
The groundup non-metalic parts of circuit boards are used in plastic lumber, insulating concrete, asphault, and as a structural filler for some composite materials which are used for various types of products from furniture, to lunch trays and picture frames. Generally this pcb-waste-resin composite material is considered a high-quality replacement for wood-plastic material resulting in material that handle better bending stresses.
The use of this in pulverized power form after treatment with KOH as heavy metal adsorber/filter is perhaps interesting/novel, but as stated in the article...
Although the boards can become effective adsorbents, he says the method for making the materials may not be as energy efficient and cost effective as for other adsorbents, such as granular ferric hydroxide, because of all the processing steps needed to produce the treated powder.
And since there are many other current uses for the waste circuit board material that require less energy and processing steps, it's not clear that this result is anything other than a novelty result...