3. A request for extradition of a person who is sought for prosecution shall also be supported by: (a) a copy of the warrant or order of arrest, if any, issued by a judge or other competent authority of the Requesting State; (b) a document setting forth the charges; and (c) such evidence as would be found sufficient, according to the law of the Requested State, to justify the committal for trial of the person sought if the offense of which the person has been accused had been committed in the Requested State.
This post is clearly extremely informative despite the fact that I did not understand any of it. But to the OP's question, though, what would some practical applications actually be?
Well, let's see if I can be a bit more specific for the typical/. user. Although there are other uses for spintronics, the current "killer" app for spintronics is high density non-volatile storage.
The most popular user application for spintronics has been the Giant MagnetoResistive (aka GMR) read-heads used in modern disc drives to allow them to have much higher bit-density than previous generation technology. A less popular uses that may not be as familiar to the typcial/. user is the MRAM (or magneto-resistive RAM), or some magneto-resistive sensors (used in solid state compasses inside devices like cellphones and GPS car navigators).
The underlying physics of the GMR technology is complicated, but is the result of the QM effects related to the thin layers of alternating feromagnetic materials in the read-head resulting in certain spin-statistics of the electrons in those layers. Without getting into details, the net result is that a small magnetic field can cause a giant change in resistance which can be measured (hence the name GMR) allowing much smaller magnetic domains to be used resulting in increased storage density. This is a basic application of spintronics.
For this specific advance, it probably wouldn't be directly applicable to GMR heads, but possibly advanced spintronic based storage beyond MRAMs and racetrack memory. Having chip interconnect that can reliably transport electron spin information will allow for much more efficient devices.
On the other hand the fixed contour level setting strategy resulted in file sizes 10x larger than their pixel equivalents which we did not attempt to address in the work being reported here....
We have also (knowingly) been far too conservative in the numbers of contours we find, possibly by as much as a factor of 20, but it will take a (much more complex) adaptive encoder to find the local optima. Compression is an obvious focus for future work.
Our original concern was to be able to reproduce photographic images from contour form so that they looked visually indistinguishable from the original. In this we were generally successful.
practical interesting applications for such a material ?
Spintronics will probably be a key practical application area. The basic idea as I understand it is that a material that exhibits strong topological insulator properties will allow for spin transport. One of the properties of topological insulators is that even in the presence of minor impurities, spin currents can be propogated quite a distance. This is apparently due to the 2d nature of the electron wavefunction on the conducting surface, the spin and the linear momentum are tightly corrolated. AFAIK, currently spintronics devices use ferromagnetic materials to create spin-coherent electric current, but apparently currents created this way have limited coherence lifetimes and thus propagation distance which limit the practical deployment.
Another reason that this is so exciting, is that it was previously assumed that graphene conductors would be needed for spin coherent transport (graphene also have a similar 2d electron wavefunction restriction to a conducting surface), but it may turn out that manufacture of these topological insulators can be done similar to today's planar circuit fabrication techniques (which to date haven't been very applicable to creating circuits of graphene wires).
There is also some possiblity that topological insulators this could be used in some quantum computing applications, but I haven't read any easy to digest papers on that yet.
Although the funding and research at the NIF is no doubt aimed towards weapons research, its recent detour to support the National Ignition Campaign was basically a pork barrel project designed to channel federal stimulus money into california. For example, this earmark among others. The funding was sold to other congressfolk as them voting for an alternative energy research program, and now that the results of the campaign have been spotlighted as a failure, they of course are wondering what they voted for.
I'm sure that makes another round of earmarks unlikely and now that the stimulus spending spree is over, the NIF will of course return back to be to its previous pork-barrel life as a weapons research money pit.
Yes, an SoC is a significantly bigger job than a pure CPU core. But Intel hasn't been producing pure CPU cores for a long time; an Ivy Bridge has a large GPU, a collection of video accelerators, two DDR3 controllers, a PCIe 3.0 interface, and quite a fancy power-management microcontroller. The die is less than 50% occupied by CPU cores.
But on Ivy Bridge, all the wacky I/O is in the southbridge (connected through DMI, a PCIe-like physical interface) which was manufactured in an older process technology. On a true SoC, you need to pull all the cruft from the southbridge into your main chip which means you need to port all the I/O cells to your main chip on the advanced process. You also need to worry about board routability more (with a southbridge, you get to put all that nasty I/O stuff far way from your main chip avoiding many of the routing and power-plane voltage droop complications).
There are many thing more complex with SoC vs just CPU-chips. Although CPUs are complicated beasts in their own rights, if you follow the recent trends, they stamp down 4 of the units on the chip with lots of cache and only a few different Input/Output pad connections (e.g., DRAM, DMI). On an SOC, you've got lots of different types of units (CPU's, GPUs, Video decoders, wireless MACs, USB controllers, etc), each having their own clock, power and I/O requirements, and most of the time some licensed designs from outside IP vendors (of varying quality and originating from different design and testing environments), which have to be all integrated on the same chip.
Today, operations like place and route, timing closure, power and noise crosstalk, clock generation, etc, are tough things to do. If you only have a few identical things (say like 4 cores and 2 caches on a chip), you can leverage a lot of things between these modules. On an SoC, you need to do these things on all units, but you can't really leverage much between modules because they are so different, so some of the work is simply more complex (not necessarily harder, but more work and irregular work, so it's easier to overlook things, e..g., high complexity). There are also tons, secondary issues (e.g, thermal/electrical power sharing between GPU/CPU, low-power standby-modes), that you don't necessarily find in a CPU-only design that also need to designed and analyzed (can't fix them after you tape out the SoC, where you might be able to fix them on a board in a discrete design).
On the electrical I/O front, designing and characterizing a few standard I/Os that only have to drive a few mm on fairly standardized circuit boards isn't the same as having lots of different I/Os that run at different frequencies and have varying drive voltage requirements and high density packaging that need to still have a routable board with good signal integrity in several different circuit board designs. Just because Intel could get a few standard low-swing I/Os running on their 22nm process didn't mean it was a cake walk for them to design I/Os that hooks to cables and run at higher voltages and have experience more severe ESD issues (don't want to zap you SoC when you walk across the carpet).
The fact that they got the stuff they need for SoCs working from a design integration and electrical I/O point of view on their advanced 22nm process is certainly a big advance for them worthy of trumpeting...
If you are driving and you refuse a blood-alcohol test on the grounds of "self-incrimination", that won't buy you much in most states. By having a driver's licence (which AFAIK is not a right, but a privilege all states in the US) you pretty much conceded that you know that driving under the influence or impaired is illegal and you have consented to be tested.
Although IANAL, I see little difference (legally) in a black box and testing for DUIs (after the fact), if the information can only be retrieved after the fact and not for survelliance purposes. Your blood (or breath) records an inexact history of your recent alcohol consumption. The police officer that stops under suspicion of DUI has recorded an inexact history of the resultant car actions. This black box will presumably record an inexact history of your recent car command inputs and resultant car actions, which if only available after suspicion is almost the same thing.
FWIW, when Mr Murray was driving the vehicle, it was owned by the state government. After it was discovered that he was speeding when he wrecked the car, it made a political promise to cover the value of the car for the state. This wasn't him buying a car from the government and then crashing it when it was his personal car.
Given how expensive the satellite is it would be foolish to launch it on an unproven platform.
If you really think it is a sin go find a company that wants a 5 ton satellite launched for free, with the possibility of loosing it.
It's not 5-tons, but SpaceX is working with a company (Orbcomm) that apparently is willing to launch a 1/4 ton satellite on an unproven platform. Unfortunatly, their OG2 satellite didn't fare well with its recent experience with SpaceX (they are filing a $10M insurance claim for this loss).
"the liftoff thrust of the Falcon Heavy equals fifteen Boeing 747 aircraft at full power."
So, I just need to figure out how to mount 60 engines on a 747.
That sounds impressive until you realize that a 747 has 4 engines, and the Falcon Heavy takes off with 18 Merlin booster engines (AFAIK the other 9 merlin engines in the first stage core aren't used until the boosters have depleted their fuel).
That means those Merlin engines are less than 4x more powerful than an engine that was first made in 1970 (of course merlin is a rocket engine and can work in a vaccum, not a high-bypass turbo-fan, so it's not really comparable), or say something like the Saturn F1 engine which is more than 10x the Merlin...
While a single flagship program, like SLS, ISS or JWST, could fund dozens of parallel programs in the same scale.
Actually those flagship programs do fund dozens of parallel programs. It's just that those programs aren't directed towards building spacecraft (and many are directed to move money into people's pockets, although some were education and public outreach)...
In fact, just the other day I found out that one of Nasa's prime missions was to
find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science and engineering — science, math and engineering.
That stuff doesn't come for free. What is SpaceX doing about that?
The origins of the Democratic and Republican parties was basically the Democratic-Republican party (which was formed by Jefferson to counter the Federalists).. The split can be traced back to the 1824 election when John Quincy Adams was chosen to be president by the House of Representatives over Andrew Jackson. Adam's power base was in NY and the Northeast, where Jackson's power base was in the south. Although Jackson won the popular vote, he didn't win the electoral vote, so the election was up to the House of Representatives. Henry Clay (speaker of the house and a presidential candidate) threw his support behind Adams, and Jackson was so upset that he and his supporter started the Democratic party. The remainder of the party became the National-Republicans, then the Whigs, Thus the split was really more a personality and geographical based split rather than any inherent policy issue.
Although the Democratic party was a populist party at it's inception, it was populist for the day. That meant were pro-Mexican-American war and for kicking out native-americans to secure more farmland. These were important issues for their souther and agrarian power base at the time.
The Republican party didn't really exist in its modern form until the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 (pushed by the Democrats) effectively voided the earlier Missouri Compromise to limit slavery in the newly acquired territories and caused the split and dissolution of the Whig party and the defection of Northern Democrats to join with the anti-slavery remants of the Whigs to create the Republican party.
You also seem to skip the whole Progressive Era where the Republicans (starting with Teddy Roosevelt) were the trust-busters (against the so-called business interests), supported rail-worker's rights and opposed child-labor, and the opposing Democrats starting with William Jenning Bryant really didn't have much of a populist agenda and might be considered to borderline be a religious fundamentalist party during this time probably only turning when FDR was elected governer of NY (a northern state).
On segregation, in the South was essentially solidly democratic during the initial civil-rights era (hold over from the civil-war when being a reupblican in the south was a non-starter). Although JFK (a northern democrat) was one of the champions of civil rights, when the bills came up for votes, Republicans in both houses voted overwhelmingly FOR it. It was a group of Democratic Senators that initiated a 57 day filibuster to kill the original civil rights bill led by Robert Byrd (D from WV).
Strom Thurmond was a democrat because you basically had to be a democrat to win in the south back when he started his career. Later he became a Dixicrat (basically a Democrat that belived in states rights, specifically the right of a state to enforce seggregation) in response to Truman's civil rights platform in 1948. In fact, Thurmand was the presidential candidate of the Dixicrat party in 1948. Of course he lost that election, but later was elected to the Senate on a seggregationist platform. Thurmand finally bolted to the republican party when he couldn't take the democrat's increasing pro-civil rights platform stances. The triggering event was probably when Barry Goldwater convinced him to join the Republican party as part of a larger demographic electoral strategy to attempt to flip any-and-all anti-civil rights democrats fed up with the democratic party in order to develop a new republican voting block in the south now that much of the anti-republican civil-war sentiment had faded.
So in summary, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have been for any particular racial policy, nor on any particular racial side historically. Averaged over time, these two parties are generally very close to each other in policies and levels of progressivness and egalitarian issues, and much of the events of the last 200 years have been mostly based around specific political personalities that have emerged and the geo-demographics of the particular party base. It is probably just revisionist history to think otherwize.
FWIW, if you look at how countries with falling birth rates are fairing reconsiling their long term revenue vs budgeting outlook, there is some reasonable case to be made to treat folks that pro-create or raise kids (e.g., adoption, foster) a bit special by governments.
Of course that logic doesn't follow for married folks (straight or gay) that do not pro-create or raise kids, although there's some evidence that kids that have two parents tend to fair better than kids with one parent, so there's some indirect case to be made for governments to treat folks like this...
single or married, no kids < single w/ kid < married w/ kid (until the number of kids reaches diminishing returns)
China tried k=1, but that didn't work out so great, so maybe k=2 is a good point to declare diminishing returns. So does that make it better?
Regardless of the piece, Obama made it a campaign pledge to stop Yucca Mountain, and stopping it has happened on his watch.
You can assign Obama blame for this or praise him for doing what he promised to do, but the result is the same and the facts do not appear to be in dispute.
- A 1987 law passed by congress required the NRC to evalute the Yucca Mountain site for suitability for nuclear waste storage. - In fulfilling his campaign promise, the Obama budget didn't allocate any new money to implement this law and Obama told the energy department to withdraw the application to the NRC to build the project. - Henry Reed didn't want it in his state, and was successful in blocking further financing for it in the Senate (even theough the House budget funded it), but he did not have the votes to change the original law that required the NRC evaluate the site. - It appears the NRC will now be forced by a federal appeals court to spend the previously authorized money to continue to evaluate the site until the money is gone (there isn't enough money to complete the evaluation) because of the 1987 law passed by congress.
Certainly there are many problems with Yucca, but it appears that the NRC will be effectively prohibited to publish its report on Yucca Mountain by budgetary manuevers to cut off it's funding w/o actually overturning the law that authorized the evaluation. It probably wasn't gonna happen anyways (even Romney was against Yucca Mountain), so all that money was just a sunk cost. I guess the ends justifies the means in this case...
Actually, in a practical system, quantum teleportation would generally be used to exchange an entangled photon from which a key can be extracted, the data would sent later using a classical communication technique (like the internet) using classical symmetric encryption scheme (say, like AES-CBC). Of course if the message is small enough, you might just transport the message entangled (instead of just a way to key the encrypted message), but that's much less efficient using current QM entanglement techniques***.
Today key exchange is often done with public-private keys, but the mathematical techniques behind them rely on "trap-door" functions (functions that are relatively easy to compute, but much harder to invert). Hard != impossible, so something that is merely hard to invert today, might be easy in the future. With a quantum key exchange scheme you don't transmit the key, only an entangled photon. Thus can't invert it (with currently known physics), and you can't even intercept it (w/o being detected), so it's impossible to deduce the key even in the future. Of course you could always resort to older time-tested techniques like this...
The reason they need the satellite is to transmit the entangled photon (which is used to extract the key). A classical communications channel is effectively a cascade of store-and-forward (every amplifier and digital buffer along the way) so that every stage is making an "observation" and collpasing the quantum state. You basically want to convey the exact same photon you entangled so that the other side can receive it w/o the communication channel observing it in transit. Ideally, you'd bounce a batch of entangled photon off a satellite and the receiver gets the same photons you sent on the other side. Then both sides extract a key from their respective batch of entangled photons and use that key to exchange the message.
Of course, in a fancier system you might use that one entangled photon to quantum teleport some entangled qubits, but that would be more complicated.
***With current QM techniques, you don't really encode a pre-chosen key by somehow "entangling" it into a photon, you are basically creating a type of mind-meld (entanglement) of two photons in a way so that a quantum measurement made on one correlate with the other. With this, magically each side can extract the same information from their respective entangled photons meaning the same bit of information emerges from these measurements. That is why if someone intercepts the photon and retransmit it, both sides would know because they are unlikely have extracted the same bits from the measurments because with currently known physics it's not possible to observe and exactly recreate a quantum state (although apparently you can teleport it). If that doesn't make sense, it's because QM is not supposed to make sense, it just is (or maybe I'm not explaining it very well).
Originally, lobster was originally poor-people's food. In the USA New-England area in both pre-colonial times, they were so plentiful that native americans and early colonists could simply catch them from tidal pools along the shoreline. This made lobsters cheap food to serve toe prisoners and indentured servant (those that bartered for passage to the "new-world" with labor contracts). With the Cod populations crashing, it sounds like we are going back to those times...
The reason lobster got expensive was that transportation costs used to be a large part of the price. Also over time, with most profitible businesses, often the infrastructure determines the price more than the supply. People that own parts of the infrastructure (fishing territories, relay-holding ponds, lobster gangs, etc) demand a price level to keep their profit margin the same even when the underlying commodity supply goes up which would nominally send the price down.
Actually, the messages are more akin to "please stay alive"...
AFAIK, Right now, they are mostly only sending Command Loss Timer Reset messages to keep the watchdog timers on the craft from sending the probe into a safe-mode. Occasionally, they will send commands to cycle power to stuff to save power or just shutting off stuff permanetly to save power (they've been doing this since 1990) as the RTG power levels drop.
As an analogy, Voyager is basically now in critical survival mode, like a car stuck in a snow storm far off the beaten track with no way to turn back. At first there is the luxury of leaving the radio and the dome light on and using the car heater to keep warm. Next, you never turn the radio and the dome light at the same time and turn off the heater every other hour to save power. Now as the battery is critical, they are sending commands to tell it to let limbs freeze off one-by-one to keep the core alive. Eventually, there will be no energy left and the inevitable slow deep freeze death will happen.
The next "limb" scheduled to be shut down is the Ultra Violet Spectrometer (sometime in 2013), then the on board data tape recorder which allows it to record some instrument data at high speed before sending it to the DSN (sometime in 2014).
Tell that first mover story to Altair, Compuserver, Altavista, Netscape, AOL, Friendster, Myspace....
There have been many studies in many industries that show that there isn't any inherent first mover advantage. In fact, there is more advantange in being a fast-follower (market is already evident, finding/stealing customers, raising money and hiring good people is easier).
The general average over all industries for first movers that caputured more than 50% pre-mass-market share is a 60% failure rate (50% for tech, 70% for others). The long-term first mover mass market share averaged a mere 5% (6% for tech). And these studies don't count the failure rate for those first movers that don't even reach the success level to capture more than 50% pre-mass-market share, or those that failed because the mass market didn't materialize.
Ideas are a dime a dozen, the ability to execute those ideas are the keys to success... Maybe you don't need college to develop the abilites to execute those ideas (and I don't just mean writing code, you have to run a business, raise money, etc.) that but don't throw away college just to be a first mover... The odds aren't necessarily with you.
On the other hand, if you think you can out-smart someone that currently has something going in a market, perhaps that's something to think about chasing quickly... That's the real story behind people like Bill Gates. There were many incumbents in that OS market, before Microsoft stepped in. Just tell that Bill Gates first mover story to Gary Kildall (and his predecessors)...
The practice of forcing employees to assign patents is specifically against the CA labor code 2870-2872.
AFAIK here are couple cases are often cited by law firms as a warning to companies attempting to assert strong patent assignment clauses against their employees: DDB Technologies LLC v. MLB Advanced Media LP, case number 1:04-cv-00352 and Applied Materials, Inc. v. Advanced Micro-Fabrication Equipment, Inc., No. 2007-5248 (N.D. Cal. May 20, 2009).
The general outline of the DDB vs MLB case was that a couple of the principals of DDB were working for this other company (Schlumberger) when apparently on their own time they worked on a patent. Although the patent was disclosed to Schlumberger, it didn't pertain to their business, and the patent was pursued independently by the people who later went on to found DDB. Later, Schumberger on the basis of a patent assignment clause transfered whatever interests (and legal rights) they had to the patent to MLB, which later attempted to gain ownership of the patents from DDB on the basis of this patent assignment clause whist they were employeed by Schlumberger. They failed.
The general outline of the AMat case was that AMat had a patent assignment clause in their employment agreement that presumed that patents related to employment filed within one year of leaving the company were owned by AMat, unless a conception date after the AMat employment could be proved. The court invalidated this patent assignment as being an illegal non-compete restriction on the employees that went on to found AMFE.
Of course with any case law, your milage may vary...
As an aside, it's interesting to note that many people don't even agree on what the science of evolution actually is and we want to try to teach it in schools.
Although it is debatable that evolutionary divergence (w/o selective pressure) might be lumped into the science of evolution, when most people talk about the science of evolution, they are refering to what enables complex variation in a population in a short enough timescale to be adaptive (aka adaptive evolution), and that of course requires selective pressure. Darwin's big evolution insight was that the environmental pressures caused a form of natural selection that enabled the development of seemingly complex variation. This was independent of any mechanism that might cause random mutations (Darwin's observations were pre-modern genetics, so only required the general notion of inheritable traits even if epigenetic).
Basically, for these folks, the darknet paper was just writing the obituary for the Palladium (trusted computing) project they were working on for Microsoft. They knew that it wouldn't stop piracy, so might as well explain why that is the case and move on...
Q: Who are these "editors" you speak of? A: They’re a comedy team. Q: Tell me about them. Everything. A: Well, they’re three kind of funny looking guys and they hit each other a lot. Q: You will show me the "editors"? A: I will show you the "editors". Q: When? A: Well, I don’t really know where the "editors" are right now but if I locate them you will be the first to know.
Potsdam (w/ Truman hinting to Stalin about the A-bomb) happened in 1945. Eisenhower was President after 1953. This nuke-the-moon plan didn't get rolling until 1957 (after Sputnik) when the US heard a rumor about a similar Soviet plan to nuke-the-moon (aka Project E-4).
The publication "A Study of Lunar Research Flights" (which documented the nuke-the-moon plan) wasn't printed until 1959.
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently yes..
3. A request for extradition of a person who is sought for prosecution shall also be supported by:
(a) a copy of the warrant or order of arrest, if any, issued by a judge or other competent authority of the Requesting State;
(b) a document setting forth the charges; and
(c) such evidence as would be found sufficient, according to the law of the Requested State, to justify the committal for trial of the person sought if the offense of which the person has been accused had been committed in the Requested State.
This post is clearly extremely informative despite the fact that I did not understand any of it. But to the OP's question, though, what would some practical applications actually be?
Well, let's see if I can be a bit more specific for the typical /. user. Although there are other uses for spintronics, the current "killer" app for spintronics is high density non-volatile storage.
The most popular user application for spintronics has been the Giant MagnetoResistive (aka GMR) read-heads used in modern disc drives to allow them to have much higher bit-density than previous generation technology. A less popular uses that may not be as familiar to the typcial /. user is the MRAM (or magneto-resistive RAM), or some magneto-resistive sensors (used in solid state compasses inside devices like cellphones and GPS car navigators).
The underlying physics of the GMR technology is complicated, but is the result of the QM effects related to the thin layers of alternating feromagnetic materials in the read-head resulting in certain spin-statistics of the electrons in those layers. Without getting into details, the net result is that a small magnetic field can cause a giant change in resistance which can be measured (hence the name GMR) allowing much smaller magnetic domains to be used resulting in increased storage density. This is a basic application of spintronics.
For this specific advance, it probably wouldn't be directly applicable to GMR heads, but possibly advanced spintronic based storage beyond MRAMs and racetrack memory. Having chip interconnect that can reliably transport electron spin information will allow for much more efficient devices.
The reason that people are looking at spintronics based storage is that in addition to the density and the non-volatile nature, the access time and durability is potentially much better than flash memory. Doing things to approach the theoretical density would be a great advance.
Does that help?
On the other hand the fixed contour level setting strategy resulted in file sizes 10x larger than their pixel equivalents which we did not attempt to address in the work being reported here....
We have also (knowingly) been far too conservative in the numbers of contours we find, possibly by as much as a factor of 20, but it will take a (much more complex) adaptive encoder to find the local optima. Compression is an obvious focus for future work.
Our original concern was to be able to reproduce photographic images from contour form so that they looked visually indistinguishable from the original. In this we were generally successful.
practical interesting applications for such a material ?
Spintronics will probably be a key practical application area. The basic idea as I understand it is that a material that exhibits strong topological insulator properties will allow for spin transport. One of the properties of topological insulators is that even in the presence of minor impurities, spin currents can be propogated quite a distance. This is apparently due to the 2d nature of the electron wavefunction on the conducting surface, the spin and the linear momentum are tightly corrolated. AFAIK, currently spintronics devices use ferromagnetic materials to create spin-coherent electric current, but apparently currents created this way have limited coherence lifetimes and thus propagation distance which limit the practical deployment.
Another reason that this is so exciting, is that it was previously assumed that graphene conductors would be needed for spin coherent transport (graphene also have a similar 2d electron wavefunction restriction to a conducting surface), but it may turn out that manufacture of these topological insulators can be done similar to today's planar circuit fabrication techniques (which to date haven't been very applicable to creating circuits of graphene wires).
There is also some possiblity that topological insulators this could be used in some quantum computing applications, but I haven't read any easy to digest papers on that yet.
Although the funding and research at the NIF is no doubt aimed towards weapons research, its recent detour to support the National Ignition Campaign was basically a pork barrel project designed to channel federal stimulus money into california. For example, this earmark among others. The funding was sold to other congressfolk as them voting for an alternative energy research program, and now that the results of the campaign have been spotlighted as a failure, they of course are wondering what they voted for.
I'm sure that makes another round of earmarks unlikely and now that the stimulus spending spree is over, the NIF will of course return back to be to its previous pork-barrel life as a weapons research money pit.
Yes, an SoC is a significantly bigger job than a pure CPU core. But Intel hasn't been producing pure CPU cores for a long time; an Ivy Bridge has a large GPU, a collection of video accelerators, two DDR3 controllers, a PCIe 3.0 interface, and quite a fancy power-management microcontroller. The die is less than 50% occupied by CPU cores.
But on Ivy Bridge, all the wacky I/O is in the southbridge (connected through DMI, a PCIe-like physical interface) which was manufactured in an older process technology. On a true SoC, you need to pull all the cruft from the southbridge into your main chip which means you need to port all the I/O cells to your main chip on the advanced process. You also need to worry about board routability more (with a southbridge, you get to put all that nasty I/O stuff far way from your main chip avoiding many of the routing and power-plane voltage droop complications).
There are many thing more complex with SoC vs just CPU-chips. Although CPUs are complicated beasts in their own rights, if you follow the recent trends, they stamp down 4 of the units on the chip with lots of cache and only a few different Input/Output pad connections (e.g., DRAM, DMI). On an SOC, you've got lots of different types of units (CPU's, GPUs, Video decoders, wireless MACs, USB controllers, etc), each having their own clock, power and I/O requirements, and most of the time some licensed designs from outside IP vendors (of varying quality and originating from different design and testing environments), which have to be all integrated on the same chip.
Today, operations like place and route, timing closure, power and noise crosstalk, clock generation, etc, are tough things to do. If you only have a few identical things (say like 4 cores and 2 caches on a chip), you can leverage a lot of things between these modules. On an SoC, you need to do these things on all units, but you can't really leverage much between modules because they are so different, so some of the work is simply more complex (not necessarily harder, but more work and irregular work, so it's easier to overlook things, e..g., high complexity). There are also tons, secondary issues (e.g, thermal/electrical power sharing between GPU/CPU, low-power standby-modes), that you don't necessarily find in a CPU-only design that also need to designed and analyzed (can't fix them after you tape out the SoC, where you might be able to fix them on a board in a discrete design).
On the electrical I/O front, designing and characterizing a few standard I/Os that only have to drive a few mm on fairly standardized circuit boards isn't the same as having lots of different I/Os that run at different frequencies and have varying drive voltage requirements and high density packaging that need to still have a routable board with good signal integrity in several different circuit board designs. Just because Intel could get a few standard low-swing I/Os running on their 22nm process didn't mean it was a cake walk for them to design I/Os that hooks to cables and run at higher voltages and have experience more severe ESD issues (don't want to zap you SoC when you walk across the carpet).
The fact that they got the stuff they need for SoCs working from a design integration and electrical I/O point of view on their advanced 22nm process is certainly a big advance for them worthy of trumpeting...
You don't need to go that far.
If you are driving and you refuse a blood-alcohol test on the grounds of "self-incrimination", that won't buy you much in most states. By having a driver's licence (which AFAIK is not a right, but a privilege all states in the US) you pretty much conceded that you know that driving under the influence or impaired is illegal and you have consented to be tested.
Although IANAL, I see little difference (legally) in a black box and testing for DUIs (after the fact), if the information can only be retrieved after the fact and not for survelliance purposes. Your blood (or breath) records an inexact history of your recent alcohol consumption. The police officer that stops under suspicion of DUI has recorded an inexact history of the resultant car actions. This black box will presumably record an inexact history of your recent car command inputs and resultant car actions, which if only available after suspicion is almost the same thing.
FWIW, when Mr Murray was driving the vehicle, it was owned by the state government. After it was discovered that he was speeding when he wrecked the car, it made a political promise to cover the value of the car for the state. This wasn't him buying a car from the government and then crashing it when it was his personal car.
Given how expensive the satellite is it would be foolish to launch it on an unproven platform.
If you really think it is a sin go find a company that wants a 5 ton satellite launched for free, with the possibility of loosing it.
It's not 5-tons, but SpaceX is working with a company (Orbcomm) that apparently is willing to launch a 1/4 ton satellite on an unproven platform. Unfortunatly, their OG2 satellite didn't fare well with its recent experience with SpaceX (they are filing a $10M insurance claim for this loss).
"the liftoff thrust of the Falcon Heavy equals fifteen Boeing 747 aircraft at full power."
So, I just need to figure out how to mount 60 engines on a 747.
That sounds impressive until you realize that a 747 has 4 engines, and the Falcon Heavy takes off with 18 Merlin booster engines (AFAIK the other 9 merlin engines in the first stage core aren't used until the boosters have depleted their fuel).
That means those Merlin engines are less than 4x more powerful than an engine that was first made in 1970 (of course merlin is a rocket engine and can work in a vaccum, not a high-bypass turbo-fan, so it's not really comparable), or say something like the Saturn F1 engine which is more than 10x the Merlin...
While a single flagship program, like SLS, ISS or JWST, could fund dozens of parallel programs in the same scale.
Actually those flagship programs do fund dozens of parallel programs. It's just that those programs aren't directed towards building spacecraft (and many are directed to move money into people's pockets, although some were education and public outreach)...
In fact, just the other day I found out that one of Nasa's prime missions was to
find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science and engineering — science, math and engineering.
That stuff doesn't come for free. What is SpaceX doing about that?
I have no idea where you got your information.
The origins of the Democratic and Republican parties was basically the Democratic-Republican party (which was formed by Jefferson to counter the Federalists).. The split can be traced back to the 1824 election when John Quincy Adams was chosen to be president by the House of Representatives over Andrew Jackson. Adam's power base was in NY and the Northeast, where Jackson's power base was in the south. Although Jackson won the popular vote, he didn't win the electoral vote, so the election was up to the House of Representatives. Henry Clay (speaker of the house and a presidential candidate) threw his support behind Adams, and Jackson was so upset that he and his supporter started the Democratic party. The remainder of the party became the National-Republicans, then the Whigs, Thus the split was really more a personality and geographical based split rather than any inherent policy issue.
Although the Democratic party was a populist party at it's inception, it was populist for the day. That meant were pro-Mexican-American war and for kicking out native-americans to secure more farmland. These were important issues for their souther and agrarian power base at the time.
The Republican party didn't really exist in its modern form until the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 (pushed by the Democrats) effectively voided the earlier Missouri Compromise to limit slavery in the newly acquired territories and caused the split and dissolution of the Whig party and the defection of Northern Democrats to join with the anti-slavery remants of the Whigs to create the Republican party.
You also seem to skip the whole Progressive Era where the Republicans (starting with Teddy Roosevelt) were the trust-busters (against the so-called business interests), supported rail-worker's rights and opposed child-labor, and the opposing Democrats starting with William Jenning Bryant really didn't have much of a populist agenda and might be considered to borderline be a religious fundamentalist party during this time probably only turning when FDR was elected governer of NY (a northern state).
On segregation, in the South was essentially solidly democratic during the initial civil-rights era (hold over from the civil-war when being a reupblican in the south was a non-starter). Although JFK (a northern democrat) was one of the champions of civil rights, when the bills came up for votes, Republicans in both houses voted overwhelmingly FOR it. It was a group of Democratic Senators that initiated a 57 day filibuster to kill the original civil rights bill led by Robert Byrd (D from WV).
Strom Thurmond was a democrat because you basically had to be a democrat to win in the south back when he started his career. Later he became a Dixicrat (basically a Democrat that belived in states rights, specifically the right of a state to enforce seggregation) in response to Truman's civil rights platform in 1948. In fact, Thurmand was the presidential candidate of the Dixicrat party in 1948. Of course he lost that election, but later was elected to the Senate on a seggregationist platform. Thurmand finally bolted to the republican party when he couldn't take the democrat's increasing pro-civil rights platform stances. The triggering event was probably when Barry Goldwater convinced him to join the Republican party as part of a larger demographic electoral strategy to attempt to flip any-and-all anti-civil rights democrats fed up with the democratic party in order to develop a new republican voting block in the south now that much of the anti-republican civil-war sentiment had faded.
So in summary, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have been for any particular racial policy, nor on any particular racial side historically. Averaged over time, these two parties are generally very close to each other in policies and levels of progressivness and egalitarian issues, and much of the events of the last 200 years have been mostly based around specific political personalities that have emerged and the geo-demographics of the particular party base. It is probably just revisionist history to think otherwize.
FWIW, if you look at how countries with falling birth rates are fairing reconsiling their long term revenue vs budgeting outlook, there is some reasonable case to be made to treat folks that pro-create or raise kids (e.g., adoption, foster) a bit special by governments.
Of course that logic doesn't follow for married folks (straight or gay) that do not pro-create or raise kids, although there's some evidence that kids that have two parents tend to fair better than kids with one parent, so there's some indirect case to be made for governments to treat folks like this...
single or married, no kids < single w/ kid < married w/ kid (until the number of kids reaches diminishing returns)
China tried k=1, but that didn't work out so great, so maybe k=2 is a good point to declare diminishing returns. So does that make it better?
Regardless of the piece, Obama made it a campaign pledge to stop Yucca Mountain, and stopping it has happened on his watch.
You can assign Obama blame for this or praise him for doing what he promised to do, but the result is the same and the facts do not appear to be in dispute.
- A 1987 law passed by congress required the NRC to evalute the Yucca Mountain site for suitability for nuclear waste storage.
- In fulfilling his campaign promise, the Obama budget didn't allocate any new money to implement this law and Obama told the energy department to withdraw the application to the NRC to build the project.
- Henry Reed didn't want it in his state, and was successful in blocking further financing for it in the Senate (even theough the House budget funded it), but he did not have the votes to change the original law that required the NRC evaluate the site.
- It appears the NRC will now be forced by a federal appeals court to spend the previously authorized money to continue to evaluate the site until the money is gone (there isn't enough money to complete the evaluation) because of the 1987 law passed by congress.
Certainly there are many problems with Yucca, but it appears that the NRC will be effectively prohibited to publish its report on Yucca Mountain by budgetary manuevers to cut off it's funding w/o actually overturning the law that authorized the evaluation. It probably wasn't gonna happen anyways (even Romney was against Yucca Mountain), so all that money was just a sunk cost. I guess the ends justifies the means in this case...
Actually, in a practical system, quantum teleportation would generally be used to exchange an entangled photon from which a key can be extracted, the data would sent later using a classical communication technique (like the internet) using classical symmetric encryption scheme (say, like AES-CBC). Of course if the message is small enough, you might just transport the message entangled (instead of just a way to key the encrypted message), but that's much less efficient using current QM entanglement techniques***.
Today key exchange is often done with public-private keys, but the mathematical techniques behind them rely on "trap-door" functions (functions that are relatively easy to compute, but much harder to invert). Hard != impossible, so something that is merely hard to invert today, might be easy in the future. With a quantum key exchange scheme you don't transmit the key, only an entangled photon. Thus can't invert it (with currently known physics), and you can't even intercept it (w/o being detected), so it's impossible to deduce the key even in the future. Of course you could always resort to older time-tested techniques like this...
The reason they need the satellite is to transmit the entangled photon (which is used to extract the key). A classical communications channel is effectively a cascade of store-and-forward (every amplifier and digital buffer along the way) so that every stage is making an "observation" and collpasing the quantum state. You basically want to convey the exact same photon you entangled so that the other side can receive it w/o the communication channel observing it in transit. Ideally, you'd bounce a batch of entangled photon off a satellite and the receiver gets the same photons you sent on the other side. Then both sides extract a key from their respective batch of entangled photons and use that key to exchange the message.
Of course, in a fancier system you might use that one entangled photon to quantum teleport some entangled qubits, but that would be more complicated.
***With current QM techniques, you don't really encode a pre-chosen key by somehow "entangling" it into a photon, you are basically creating a type of mind-meld (entanglement) of two photons in a way so that a quantum measurement made on one correlate with the other. With this, magically each side can extract the same information from their respective entangled photons meaning the same bit of information emerges from these measurements. That is why if someone intercepts the photon and retransmit it, both sides would know because they are unlikely have extracted the same bits from the measurments because with currently known physics it's not possible to observe and exactly recreate a quantum state (although apparently you can teleport it). If that doesn't make sense, it's because QM is not supposed to make sense, it just is (or maybe I'm not explaining it very well).
Why is Lobster still so expensive?
Originally, lobster was originally poor-people's food. In the USA New-England area in both pre-colonial times, they were so plentiful that native americans and early colonists could simply catch them from tidal pools along the shoreline. This made lobsters cheap food to serve toe prisoners and indentured servant (those that bartered for passage to the "new-world" with labor contracts). With the Cod populations crashing, it sounds like we are going back to those times...
The reason lobster got expensive was that transportation costs used to be a large part of the price. Also over time, with most profitible businesses, often the infrastructure determines the price more than the supply. People that own parts of the infrastructure (fishing territories, relay-holding ponds, lobster gangs, etc) demand a price level to keep their profit margin the same even when the underlying commodity supply goes up which would nominally send the price down.
California was going to try to sell and lease-back a few buildings, but they bailed out before they did the deed...
Actually, the messages are more akin to "please stay alive"...
AFAIK, Right now, they are mostly only sending Command Loss Timer Reset messages to keep the watchdog timers on the craft from sending the probe into a safe-mode. Occasionally, they will send commands to cycle power to stuff to save power or just shutting off stuff permanetly to save power (they've been doing this since 1990) as the RTG power levels drop.
As an analogy, Voyager is basically now in critical survival mode, like a car stuck in a snow storm far off the beaten track with no way to turn back. At first there is the luxury of leaving the radio and the dome light on and using the car heater to keep warm. Next, you never turn the radio and the dome light at the same time and turn off the heater every other hour to save power. Now as the battery is critical, they are sending commands to tell it to let limbs freeze off one-by-one to keep the core alive. Eventually, there will be no energy left and the inevitable slow deep freeze death will happen.
The next "limb" scheduled to be shut down is the Ultra Violet Spectrometer (sometime in 2013), then the on board data tape recorder which allows it to record some instrument data at high speed before sending it to the DSN (sometime in 2014).
Tell that first mover story to Altair, Compuserver, Altavista, Netscape, AOL, Friendster, Myspace....
There have been many studies in many industries that show that there isn't any inherent first mover advantage. In fact, there is more advantange in being a fast-follower (market is already evident, finding/stealing customers, raising money and hiring good people is easier).
The general average over all industries for first movers that caputured more than 50% pre-mass-market share is a 60% failure rate (50% for tech, 70% for others). The long-term first mover mass market share averaged a mere 5% (6% for tech). And these studies don't count the failure rate for those first movers that don't even reach the success level to capture more than 50% pre-mass-market share, or those that failed because the mass market didn't materialize.
Ideas are a dime a dozen, the ability to execute those ideas are the keys to success... Maybe you don't need college to develop the abilites to execute those ideas (and I don't just mean writing code, you have to run a business, raise money, etc.) that but don't throw away college just to be a first mover... The odds aren't necessarily with you.
On the other hand, if you think you can out-smart someone that currently has something going in a market, perhaps that's something to think about chasing quickly... That's the real story behind people like Bill Gates. There were many incumbents in that OS market, before Microsoft stepped in. Just tell that Bill Gates first mover story to Gary Kildall (and his predecessors)...
Firstly, IANAL, so this isn't legal advice.
The practice of forcing employees to assign patents is specifically against the CA labor code 2870-2872.
AFAIK here are couple cases are often cited by law firms as a warning to companies attempting to assert strong patent assignment clauses against their employees: DDB Technologies LLC v. MLB Advanced Media LP, case number 1:04-cv-00352 and Applied Materials, Inc. v. Advanced Micro-Fabrication Equipment, Inc., No. 2007-5248 (N.D. Cal. May 20, 2009).
The general outline of the DDB vs MLB case was that a couple of the principals of DDB were working for this other company (Schlumberger) when apparently on their own time they worked on a patent. Although the patent was disclosed to Schlumberger, it didn't pertain to their business, and the patent was pursued independently by the people who later went on to found DDB. Later, Schumberger on the basis of a patent assignment clause transfered whatever interests (and legal rights) they had to the patent to MLB, which later attempted to gain ownership of the patents from DDB on the basis of this patent assignment clause whist they were employeed by Schlumberger. They failed.
The general outline of the AMat case was that AMat had a patent assignment clause in their employment agreement that presumed that patents related to employment filed within one year of leaving the company were owned by AMat, unless a conception date after the AMat employment could be proved. The court invalidated this patent assignment as being an illegal non-compete restriction on the employees that went on to found AMFE.
Of course with any case law, your milage may vary...
As an aside, it's interesting to note that many people don't even agree on what the science of evolution actually is and we want to try to teach it in schools.
Although it is debatable that evolutionary divergence (w/o selective pressure) might be lumped into the science of evolution, when most people talk about the science of evolution, they are refering to what enables complex variation in a population in a short enough timescale to be adaptive (aka adaptive evolution), and that of course requires selective pressure. Darwin's big evolution insight was that the environmental pressures caused a form of natural selection that enabled the development of seemingly complex variation. This was independent of any mechanism that might cause random mutations (Darwin's observations were pre-modern genetics, so only required the general notion of inheritable traits even if epigenetic).
Basically, for these folks, the darknet paper was just writing the obituary for the Palladium (trusted computing) project they were working on for Microsoft. They knew that it wouldn't stop piracy, so might as well explain why that is the case and move on...
How did this get past the editors?
Q: Who are these "editors" you speak of?
A: They’re a comedy team.
Q: Tell me about them. Everything.
A: Well, they’re three kind of funny looking guys and they hit each other a lot.
Q: You will show me the "editors"?
A: I will show you the "editors".
Q: When?
A: Well, I don’t really know where the "editors" are right now but if I locate them you will be the first to know.
Hmm, might review your history a bit.
Potsdam (w/ Truman hinting to Stalin about the A-bomb) happened in 1945. Eisenhower was President after 1953. This nuke-the-moon plan didn't get rolling until 1957 (after Sputnik) when the US heard a rumor about a similar Soviet plan to nuke-the-moon (aka Project E-4).
The publication "A Study of Lunar Research Flights" (which documented the nuke-the-moon plan) wasn't printed until 1959.