It is (minus radiation concerns) theoretically doable.
A couple things in Mercury's favor. First, Mercury has an "earth-like" magnetic field (unlike venus and mercury). Second the "tilt" is pretty small so, near the poles you could probably reasonably straddle the day/night region.
The big down side, (that others have mentioned), is you got this big gravity pit near you and no atmosphere for braking, so getting stuff from Earth to Mercury is gonna be much more expensive than other places in the solar system.
Too bad the BepiColombo's MSE (mercury surface element) probe was cancelled.
As I recall it was suppose to land near the north pole (since Mercury's axis tilt is small, near north pole would be an ideal spot, not too hot, not too cold).
I wonder if any of the auto manufacturers have considered working with Google and using Android?
Why not just toss a Nexus 7 in? you can bluetooth link with a phone, GPS already in the tablet.
You can also put in a Bluetooth ODBII adapter in later (after about 1996) models.
Why do you think this would change the situation much? By the time the car ships with a Nexus 7 with Android 4.1.2 (Jellybean), Google will probably be on something like Nexus 52 w/ Android 12.2.1 (Pecan Pie??) and it will be equally obsolete and unsupported. As a historical example, take the Nexus One: no upgrades past Android 3.2.6 (Gingerbread). The main problem is that cars last 10 years, mobile devices 2 years. Anything you put in a car will be obsolete after 2-3 mobile generations meaning at least 1/2 it's life it will be obsolete.
As far as I can tell, this is probably not best described as "new matter", but perhaps more like a distribution from a scattering collision that was theorized to exist, but not yet observed (although there are debates if it has been seen before in other colliders).
I'm not up on all the details, but as I remember it, there is a mathematical result from QCD (quantum chromo-dynamics) that scattering angle has a power-law relationship which varies with energy (or something like that). I guess they found some scattering corrolation in a recent lead-ion/proton collision experiment that fit with pretty high energies. Apparently, the underlying theory seems to be well explained by QCD so that evidence of this scattering distribution would infer the energy-level consistant with a temporary presence of a certain configuration of matter during the collision: either a quark-gluon plasma, or perhaps even a color-glass condensate (basically a nucleus squished so much so that temporarily it looks like gluons frozen in a pancake configuration).
CO2 isn't the biggest problem terraforming Venus, but even the CO2 problem probably can't be solved with just bacteria. Carl Sagan was one of the original proponants of that idea, but after further study, he conceded that it wouldn't work because of thermodynamics (it's currently just too hot, you must first cool it down to make those reactions stable).
Changing the day/night ratio to something reasonable and establishing some sort of magnetic field to block out solar radiation would probably also be required (and perhaps these are related problems). I'm pretty sure these problems probably couldn't be solved as a grad-student synthetic biology project.
The same Intel-inside sticker goes on a computer regardless if its a soldered down CPU or a socketed CPU. Those intel-atom processors were all BGA, and they all have the same Intel-inside stickers on the outside as the laptops which have intel-core processors and LGA sockets.
Although you can solder down LGA, it's a slightly more complicated assembly flow than BGA. As I understand it, the current technique for LGA results in a lower solder joint height which results in higher void percentage (from flux) and equivalently poorer thermal cycle performance which necessitates a more sophisticated assembly flows to get it right. By offering BGA packages, this would allow OEM to use cheaper manufacturing houses.
Also by offering BGAs to OEMs, Intel won't have to fight as many grey-market chips (some of chips sold in bulk lots at lower prices direct to OEMs, eventually find themselves sold through the distribution channel and offered as processor upgrades instead of boxed processors which are sold at higher profit margins). This allows Intel to more easily capture the profit from tiering their customers (rather than have the grey market steal some of that profit).
FWIW, This is an mRNA technique (bonded with protamine to keep it stable). The claimed advantage of a mRNA techique over a DNA technique is that it doesn't have to get all the way into a cell nucleus (where the molecules that read the DNA exist). Since the actual protein synthesis is all you care about, it's likely more efficient to use mRNA, except that the mRNA breaks down (which is why they bond it with protamine).
I haven't seen the timescale involved in how the protamine stabilizes the mRNA, but it doesn't seem like it is "forever" like DNA (although even for a vaccine which used DNA snippets, they probably won't replicate with the chromasomes, so it seems like even the DNA based vaccines don't seem obviously "forever" either).
A quick google shows that they've been trying this kinda stuff for a while with other proteins, but I haven't heard of any "fucking magic" results yet, so I'm not holding my breath for the hype...
cigarettes: give out free samples, charge after they get addicted drug dealers: give out free samples, charge after they get addicted jenny craig: give meal (not nutrition) advice, charge for food musicians: give aways songs for "free" on the radio, charge for recordings
So how do these businesses deal with people that complain loudly about being charged in a way that might damage future business? Usually give out a few discounts or freebies to grease the squeeky wheel. Yes that's just like hush-money, or payola, or protection money or whatever you want to call it, but that's what you gotta do sometimes (if you are in business for real).
I've found that many of the people that need to ask this type of question are often intransigent hardasses (a common personality trait, esp on my wife's side of the family) instead of customer oriented business people. When they find they have a "customer" that is a hardass, they respond by being a hardass and they wonder why they start to get a bad rep. Sure it may seem like you are giving something away for free, but sometimes that's the cost of doing business...
What would I do? Get their email addresses, contact name, telephone, type of business and as much identification information as you think they can stomach for future reference, then offer them a one-time discount (or a bundle for future support, or training), or maybe even a freebie (if you think they'll be back for more), maybe shoot them some swag (coupons, promo material, whatever), but make sure they know that next time it will cost them full price. If I had a trainee, maybe I'd send the call over to them. Call it a marketing expense, or an investment in your future profitability, if it will help you sleep at night, but there's very little way around these type of "customers" in the internet/social media age.
If you haven't factored any sales/marketing into the cost structure of your business model that you could bill this type of customer expense to and/or you don't have tiered support model, (e.g., blogs/email, live/phone, training classes, personal hand-holding), you probably aren't doing it right. Usually businesses tier customers for a reason: some customers are cheapskates, but you make it up from the ones that don't care as much about the cost.
I can't really see how this technique could offer lifelong protection from the flu, the current encarnation currently does not and it's not clear how it would all work.
First of all, the vaccine they developed is a "hardened" mRNA that encodes the manufacture of a particular varient one of the two proteins (hemagglutinin or HA) that are found on the surface of a flu virus (the other one is neuraminidase or NA). In this case they chose the recent H1 part of the H1N1 varient was recently going around. This mRNA tricks the host's own cells to produce this H1 protein which triggers the immune response. In contrast, the "traditional" flu shot just has HA and NA proteins (usually made from dead flu viruses grown in eggs, but sometimes made in labs) in it along with some other "stuff" like adjuvents, to amp up the immune response.
Unfortunatly this particular vaccine is like traditional vaccines in that it primes the immune system to look for HA/NA proteins, and these are the flu proteins that mutate all the time, so it would just provide life-line protection for one particular strain (and some close relatives), kinda like the current flu shot.
The current breakthrough was in "hardening" the mRNA so that it isn't dissolved in you blood. These researchers discovered a protein called protamine can bind with the mRNA so that it can make it into enough cells so that the cellular mechanims can transcribe it into the encoded protein into H1.
There is some promise that this technique could be easily adapted to target part of the flu surface proteins that don't mutate as much (whereas the current technique is mostly about refining HA/NA proteins so might not be applicable to something else) but that lifelong protection from the flu using a technique like this seems like a dream. I don't think anyone knows how to do that yet, although many folks are working on it and most of them aren't just relying on just stimulating a human immune response.
On the other hand, as with most hype, there is a kernel of something there. The current crop of modern flu-treatments (like tamiflu) target the NA part of the flu virus (technically they are neuraminidase inhibitors, so they interfere with part of the virus reproduction cycle). Unfortuantly the NA part is the faster mutating protein and there have been cases where mutation in the NA part of the virus can circumvent these modern treatments. The HA part mutates more slowly and as I mentioned above, this particular treatment has been steered to target the HA part. Who knows, maybe you'd get a vaccine with mRNA for every HA subtype they know about***. Of course that is until there is another mutation. I'm guessing that on this basis they've annointed this new thing as having the potential "lifelong" protection from the flu. As for how this would be significantly different than just giving someone a regular flu shot with all the known HA subtypes, I don't see it. Seems like a bit of hype to me compared to what other folks are working on (e.g., specific artificial antibodies that target all HA subtypes).
*** AFAIK, there are 17 types of HA, although viruses that infect humans don't appear to have that many variations, so maybe you could get away with just H1, H2, H3, H5 (the ones known to infect humans).
The way I read it is that they are going to offer BGA packaging to satisfy the large OEMs (e.g, dell, lenovo, etc). Now that most desktop PC are commodities, offering chips in BGAs reduces motherboad cost by eliminating the cost of the socket, improving yield (can sell kits of chips that just barely work together rather than requiring every component to satisfy the maximum electrical margins), and maybe reduce power (better electrical interface to memory).
My guess is that they will probably still offer a socket for servers and high-end enthusiast PCs, etc, but that means that it will be only specific enthusiast PCs that will support upgrades (e.g, you will not be able to upgrade a commodity desktop PC). So instead of outright killing the enthusiast PCs, I'm guessing Intel is simply going to make dabbling in enthusiast PCs a very expensive hobby (like it was in the old days).
In the old days, basically Intel was "forcing" all the computer vendors to have this latent ability to upgrade which enabled a custom motherboard industry that didn't need to sell-through (buy/resell) expensive CPUs. With this new change, only high-end motherboard companies will remain, and the computer vendors will just JIT motherboards the same way they purchase CPUs and memory. Undoubtly this will force even more consolidation in smaller motherboard form factors (although ATX/BTX/ITX was pretty standard, you saw some variations in the mini-ITX area) and the jellybean components on them (e.g., audio, power-regulators, etc).
What this might do, however, is kill is the desktop motherboard repair small businesses (mom/pop computer repair shops), not the enthusiast PC business. They won't be able to afford to stock motherboards anymore (since they will have CPUs mounted on them). On the other hand, the car repair business evolved around similar issues, most auto repair shops need to same-day order most of the parts need to repair cars from centralized parts distributors (they couldn't afford to stock things), so maybe mom/pop computer repair shops could evolve too... Maybe...
As another aside, one of the weaknesses of the Enigma Cipher was that the subsitution wheels never substituted one letter with the same letter. This fact turned out to be somewhat helpful in breaking the cipher...
Many early ciphers had weaknesses that were the result of not fully understanding the loss of randomness from seemingly logical "optimizations".
comparing nuclear fuel in a commercial reactor vs a bomb is like comparing the hydrogen peroxide you buy in the pharmacy (~3% solution), vs the stuff you use to launch rocket (~98% pure).
Currently nobody knows how to make a fusion reactor that is net energy positive and/or doesn't eventually create a highly radioactive reactor (which must eventually be decommissioned when it reaches past its useful life). If we built 1000's of the best fusion reactors we knew about today, we'd be stupid (maybe we could make up the energy deficit in volume... NOT).
Maybe one day we will know how create a fusion reactor that is viable, but today we do not...
And all countries tell little white lies to push people in the direction they want them to go.
That's why it's sooo important to not have any information contrary to the government doctrines available to the people. Can't have the people be unhappy about the direction they are herded...
Like kissing causes pregnancy.
Yes, in the same way that eating meat causes global warming.
Or condoms don't protect against STDs.
Although condoms are pretty good against AIDS and gonorrhea, they are apparently not very good at stopping HPV and herpes (which can be fairly easily contracted by skin-to-skin or skin-to-genital contact). Of course something is better than nothing, but apparently this is not a well known fut but of course we don't want to scare the people so better to tell the white lie to people that condoms protect you against STDs, so we can all feel empowered.
Or meat is needed to be healthy.
Although a proper sources of B12 and protein are. If you don't have good access to good sources of them (say if you are poor in a 3rd world country), it is likely that the only affordable access to these essential nutrients needed to be healthy is meat.
Or eating the occasional junk, or smoking, or anyother of silly things, is going to cause no harm.
I think you meant that it causes irreparable harm. Just like eating a some meat causes irreparable harm to you and the environment.
Republicans have stalled the Cybersecurity Act of 2012 with a Senate vote of 51–47 against the legislation.
Last I heard, the democrats had a majority (and the tie-break vote) in the senate. Why blame this on the republicans?
Many Senate Republicans took their cues from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and businesses that framed the debate not as a matter of national security, but rather as a battle between free enterprise and an overreaching government. They wanted to let companies determine whether it would be more cost effective — absent liability laws around cyber attacks — to invest in the hardware, software, and manpower required to effectively prevent cyber attacks, or to simply weather attacks and fix what breaks afterwards.
Not that I advocate waiting can cleaning up the mess later, I fear that all we would be doing is creating a safe harbor for companies by the proposed approach (basically I did the government recommendations, still got hacked, no problem). It would be much better to clarify what companies would be liable for and how much. I think better tradeoffs could be made rather than with a proscriptive government approach. See Section 706 of the bill: http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/112/s2105/text .
Even if this doesn't pass, for federal infrastructure and infrastructure deemed important to national security, Obama can unilateral impose most of these things as an Executive order for government entities and contractors.
As written the bill attempts to force IT that causes the interruption of life-sustaining services, catastrophic economic damage (vs just severe degradation of national security or national security capabilities) which is a much wider scope. You might argue as written, this bill is so vague that could be construed to apply to Amazon, or Google, or even a small airline or bus or telephone company that has the only service for an isolated area. Also as with many bills, it comes with its share of government overhead (appropriations for national education and awareness programs, recruiting for various government agencies, etc)...
I guess it's still divided government, and very few people want to write a good bill, but just try to force their bill and blame the other side for not being able to pass them... Sigh...
Everspin has announced that it's shipping the first 64Mb ST-MRAM in a DDR3-compatible module. These modules transfer data at DDR3-1600 clock rates, but access latencies are much lower than flash RAM, promising an overall 500x performance increase over conventional NAND.
Wait, so, is this to replace RAM (the mention of DDR3) or to replace drive storage?
MRAM might be a potential candidate to replace current solid state storage (NAND-flash) which is a candiate to replace drive storage. In a system with small amounts of DRAM, MRAM might be used to replace the DRAM as well. Unfortunatly, because of its current high price and low density, it is currently not very good substitute for either one except in perhaps a very small embedded system.
These modules transfer data at DDR3-1600 clock rates, but access latencies are much lower than flash RAM
Isn't that comparing apples (DDR3) and oranges (flash RAM)?
Instead of implementing the slow standard flash memory electrical interface on MRAMs, they (everspin) elected to support the same fast electrical interface that DRAMs use (DDR3). They can do this because just like DRAM, writing data on MRAMs is about as quick as reading data (which isn't the case with NAND-flash). By choosing the standarized DDR3 interface, chips that might want to use these MRAMs won't have to be specially designed to do so (which wouldn't be the case if they came up with a non-standard interface). It will apparantly just look like a small capacity DRAM chip that doesn't forget when you take the power away (I'm guessing the MRAMs probably also ignore any refresh requests that come across the interface).
The reason that current flash memory electrical interfaces are slow, is that flash memories have pretty slow access times and are read/written in large blocks. This led to an efficient interface that multiplexes the address and data on the same pins. DRAM is however more randomly accessed in smaller blocks and has separate address and data pins. This allows a higher duty cycle of data transfer on the data pins for smaller transactions: you don't have to constantly turn the bus around between sending commands and reading data, and you can pipeline new addresses on the address bus at the same time data from older commands are transfered on the data bus.
By targetting the DRAM interface, it appears that Everspin is positioning their chip as a DRAM+Flash replacement for systems that don't require much total storage. They need to target the DRAM interface for this because you can't really do random access efficiently on the flash interfaces (but you can do block transactions on a random access interface). In fact in many embedded systems, the first action of the bootstrap code is to copy parts of the NAND into DRAM (for fast access). With MRAM, you could just bypass this step.
Of course if you buy the company, you also buy the debt. AMD currently has $2B in debt, $1.5B in liabilities (e.g., accounts payable) with only $1.3B in cash in the bank.
Of course AMD also has operating cash flows (e.g., receivables ~$700M) other misc assets (e.g, goodwill~$700M, inventory~$750M, property~$700M, etc~$500M), totaling about $3.3B, but many of these other things are only fully valued if you keep everything running as they are today (e.g., goodwill generally resets to zero and inventory is pennies on the dollar when you change your business model).
Don't think that AMD would be worth paying very much for if you wanted to just make game consoles... Might be better to just hire all the people away an leave the $3.5B on the table for the "investors"...
According to the Argonne National Laboratory, it takes two barrels of water to produce one barrel of oil shale liquid. A lot of the shale rock is out where water is already being fought over between farmers, cities, and Native Americans.
Easy one: Case 1: Native American DO own the mineral rights. They will win. Case 2: Native Americans do NOT own the mineral rights. Every one will lose to the owners of the mineral rights.
US-ians in fact export gasoline now because we currently have excess refining capacity. Although in 2010, we net imported about 269K barrels of gasoline, today (2012) we net export about 439K barrels of gasoline.
Why?
Because USA refiners on the Gulf coas are now playing a profit arbitrage "trick". They are sourcing some of their oil from the US over land (basically at west-texas intermediary crude prices), and selling the refined products (gasoline, diesel), as if they were based on Brent Crude oil (the benchmark crude oil price for refineries that source to the USA via gulf coast ports). WTI is currently about $15/barrel cheaper than Brent.
This gives the gulf-coast refineries a huge incentive to be at full production sourcing WTI-oil as they are making more profit per barrel now relative to the offshore refinery competitors (that mostly need to pay the benchmark Brent Crude oil prices for their sources unless they also have cheaper internal sources to draw on). Also since gasoline usage is down (thanks to great recession) these things flipped the US to being a net exporter of gasoline.
Between this and the (possible) discovery of the Higgs Boson, we may be about to launch into a new era of particle physics theory and research.
Actually, I think it's the reverse. Between this and the (possible) discovery of the Higgs Boson, we have simply just confirmed the parts of the standard model that we think we already understand. No new physics.
What people are actually looking for (and have found some hints/clues about like unexpected non-uniform decay paths in other experiments) are things that might suggests new physics that we don't understand at all which would launch a new era of particle physics theory and research. Some physists posit that some new physics exists (like SUSY) that might help us understand these hints/clues better, but so far the evidence has been lacking in support of a specific direction for new physics outside the standard model.
For example, the standard model doesn't seem to have a much of a say on the hierarchy problems (e.g., how come the higgs is so light), the observed electroweak symmetry breaking (e.g, why the higgs field yields mass), or give us much of a clue about dark matter (e.g., are there super heavy, neutral particles). As I understand it, as a straw man, SUSY might have something to help explain some of these deficiencies of the Standard Model, if there was evidence to support it.
If we keep running experiments and just find predictions that are supported/predicted by the Standard Model, we've only eliminated potential new physics, we need to find something that we can't predict to launch a new era of particle physic theory and research.
Well, now Samsung has got all this new overhead to deal with (lawsuits and stuff, ya know). Last year they had a large customer stop buying memory chips from them, and they also just had a very large customer signal that they would stop buying lcd panels from them and then a customer threatened to take their future SOC fabrication business to TSMC. They have find a way to make more money from their current customers and to pass that increased overhead on to someone... Who better but one of their most unloyal customers?
I think it's great for many reasons, but I'm wondering something.
The Forbes article links to a digitimes article. The digitimes article says, "The program will give the engineers an environment to learn the Chinese language, first-hand expereince in the manufacturing process, and a training that can be helpful after they return to the US, he added."
If the American workers will work in the US, why should they learn the Chinese language?
Perhaps to communicate with Foxconn managers and Chinese suppliers more efficiently? Through my dealings with Chinese and Taiwanese companies, I've found that although many engineering/tech personnel in China have a minimal ability to communicate in English (although some only by email), almost none of the factory or production personnel nor tech employees at low-level parts suppliers have servicable English communication abilities (neither verbal nor email). In a production environment, good communication skills are very important. A manufacturing "lines-down" situation can means thousands of dollars going down the toilet every second.
I'm sure this is just for supervisors and managers and product and quality engineers. They aren't gonna ship all the hourly assembly employees over to china/taiwan for training.
The function of unions is not to exclude some part of the labor market and limit the labor supply. That is a choice that some unions have made in order to put upward pressure on wages.
Unions could instead promote safety and productivity advantage that result in a union member being higher net value to employers (and that is what some have done in the past and claim they do now, but sadly it is somewhat of a historical artifact). In a typical union-shop where a company must pay essentially the same wages to union and non-union members, there would be no net financial advantage to hiring the non-union employee if they were of lower quality and eventually that person would be forced to join the union anyhow.
Instead unions have generally forced the seniority pill on most of the union-shops using pre-hire agreements which effectively excludes parts of the labor market. I guess the people that get screwed by this get to go on welfare in your world. Sure perhaps historically one tool to help keep the company in line to not attempt to hire lower-skill employees for higher skill jobs (and bring down wages), but it's basically just the union paying back people who have contributed union due for a longer period of time. It has little to do with overall wage stability for union members and might be considered a borderline pyramid scheme for union members.
That's my economic theory. Feel free to dispute the underlying premises.
In several studies, the effect of many recreational drugs is simply to inhibit the executive functional parts of the brain. In some individuals this has the potential to release bursts of creativity or insight that are being supressed by the executive function parts of the brain. In other individuals, it just releases social inhibition and sometimes even chaos. Unfortunatly, since a large part of programming is focus and high-attention span, and directing the brain to focus on tasks at hand is a large function of the executive funtional parts of the brain, this is not likely to result in a significant net benefit from programmers. Even if it were to help somehow, it is probably just as likely to steer you produce code which is stunningly creative, yet totally unrelated to the task at hand (or worse, totally underengineered useless code) mitigating the total overall benefit. This is why we probably see net benefit of recreational drugs for those endeavors that can fully embrace open-ended style creativity (writing, music, art, aesthetics, etc).
On the other hand, the jury is out on the other side of the coin with some types of drugs that work to improve focus and attention (e.g., the ADHD treatment drugs such as adderall, ritlin, etc.). Although these types of drugs aren't generally taken recreationally, they have some similarities to amphetamine like drugs, so maybe there's something there. The bottom line is that I imagine that most good programmers have already found ways to channel focus and attention towards programming and probably benefit little from whatever improvement these types of drugs might yield (except perhaps improved productivity by reducing the need for sleep/food, etc). I would suspect that these things benefit whoever is employing the programmer more than the programmer (unless, of course, the programmer is self employed).
But the benefits for programming aside, everyone (including programmers) has ways they like to blow off steam and shut off the executive side of their brain for a while to relax, recharge, and help gain insight into problems. If a programmer thinks recreational drugs are a good way to do that, so be it, but they probably shouldn't expect it to necessarily be a net help with their programming.
As I understand it, humans will always produce antibodies to fight infections like HIV. Unfortunatly, the antibodies that humans normally produce in the attempt to neutralize and HIV infection don't appear to be very good at it. The short story is that somehow HIV evolved to avoid having many fewer binding locations so the most effective "Y" shaped antibodies cannot effectively attach bivalently (in two places). This bivalent attach is apparently the most common strategies used by our immune system.
Apparently some people can make more potent antibodies called bNAbs, but often HIV mutates to avoid these as well, but sometimes there are successes.
I'm unclear on why this new Canadian/Korean HIV vaccine would be any better at bootstrapping the immune system than the most recent failed attempts. The only novel part that I can tell about this, is that they are using "whole" (but genetically modified) HIV instead of putting HIV protein genes codings into more common viruses, but if HIV is as crafty as it seems to be, this may only be a simple shot-in-the-dark hope that somehow bootstrapping the immune system will allow the body to come up with a way to fight off HIV before it gets a chance to overwhelm the immune system. Color me skeptical as that was what the other vaccines attempted to do, but it's not clear that this will be a successful route.
Slashdot Mirror
It is (minus radiation concerns) theoretically doable.
A couple things in Mercury's favor. First, Mercury has an "earth-like" magnetic field (unlike venus and mercury). Second the "tilt" is pretty small so, near the poles you could probably reasonably straddle the day/night region.
The big down side, (that others have mentioned), is you got this big gravity pit near you and no atmosphere for braking, so getting stuff from Earth to Mercury is gonna be much more expensive than other places in the solar system.
Too bad the BepiColombo's MSE (mercury surface element) probe was cancelled.
As I recall it was suppose to land near the north pole (since Mercury's axis tilt is small, near north pole would be an ideal spot, not too hot, not too cold).
I wonder if any of the auto manufacturers have considered working with Google and using Android?
Why not just toss a Nexus 7 in? you can bluetooth link with a phone, GPS already in the tablet.
You can also put in a Bluetooth ODBII adapter in later (after about 1996) models.
Why do you think this would change the situation much? By the time the car ships with a Nexus 7 with Android 4.1.2 (Jellybean), Google will probably be on something like Nexus 52 w/ Android 12.2.1 (Pecan Pie??) and it will be equally obsolete and unsupported. As a historical example, take the Nexus One: no upgrades past Android 3.2.6 (Gingerbread). The main problem is that cars last 10 years, mobile devices 2 years. Anything you put in a car will be obsolete after 2-3 mobile generations meaning at least 1/2 it's life it will be obsolete.
As far as I can tell, this is probably not best described as "new matter", but perhaps more like a distribution from a scattering collision that was theorized to exist, but not yet observed (although there are debates if it has been seen before in other colliders).
I'm not up on all the details, but as I remember it, there is a mathematical result from QCD (quantum chromo-dynamics) that scattering angle has a power-law relationship which varies with energy (or something like that). I guess they found some scattering corrolation in a recent lead-ion/proton collision experiment that fit with pretty high energies. Apparently, the underlying theory seems to be well explained by QCD so that evidence of this scattering distribution would infer the energy-level consistant with a temporary presence of a certain configuration of matter during the collision: either a quark-gluon plasma, or perhaps even a color-glass condensate (basically a nucleus squished so much so that temporarily it looks like gluons frozen in a pancake configuration).
Unfortuantly, I'm not an expert in this area...
CO2 isn't the biggest problem terraforming Venus, but even the CO2 problem probably can't be solved with just bacteria. Carl Sagan was one of the original proponants of that idea, but after further study, he conceded that it wouldn't work because of thermodynamics (it's currently just too hot, you must first cool it down to make those reactions stable).
Changing the day/night ratio to something reasonable and establishing some sort of magnetic field to block out solar radiation would probably also be required (and perhaps these are related problems). I'm pretty sure these problems probably couldn't be solved as a grad-student synthetic biology project.
The same Intel-inside sticker goes on a computer regardless if its a soldered down CPU or a socketed CPU. Those intel-atom processors were all BGA, and they all have the same Intel-inside stickers on the outside as the laptops which have intel-core processors and LGA sockets.
Although you can solder down LGA, it's a slightly more complicated assembly flow than BGA. As I understand it, the current technique for LGA results in a lower solder joint height which results in higher void percentage (from flux) and equivalently poorer thermal cycle performance which necessitates a more sophisticated assembly flows to get it right. By offering BGA packages, this would allow OEM to use cheaper manufacturing houses.
Also by offering BGAs to OEMs, Intel won't have to fight as many grey-market chips (some of chips sold in bulk lots at lower prices direct to OEMs, eventually find themselves sold through the distribution channel and offered as processor upgrades instead of boxed processors which are sold at higher profit margins). This allows Intel to more easily capture the profit from tiering their customers (rather than have the grey market steal some of that profit).
s/DNA/mRNA/g
FWIW, This is an mRNA technique (bonded with protamine to keep it stable). The claimed advantage of a mRNA techique over a DNA technique is that it doesn't have to get all the way into a cell nucleus (where the molecules that read the DNA exist). Since the actual protein synthesis is all you care about, it's likely more efficient to use mRNA, except that the mRNA breaks down (which is why they bond it with protamine).
I haven't seen the timescale involved in how the protamine stabilizes the mRNA, but it doesn't seem like it is "forever" like DNA (although even for a vaccine which used DNA snippets, they probably won't replicate with the chromasomes, so it seems like even the DNA based vaccines don't seem obviously "forever" either).
A quick google shows that they've been trying this kinda stuff for a while with other proteins, but I haven't heard of any "fucking magic" results yet, so I'm not holding my breath for the hype...
cigarettes: give out free samples, charge after they get addicted
drug dealers: give out free samples, charge after they get addicted
jenny craig: give meal (not nutrition) advice, charge for food
musicians: give aways songs for "free" on the radio, charge for recordings
So how do these businesses deal with people that complain loudly about being charged in a way that might damage future business? Usually give out a few discounts or freebies to grease the squeeky wheel. Yes that's just like hush-money, or payola, or protection money or whatever you want to call it, but that's what you gotta do sometimes (if you are in business for real).
I've found that many of the people that need to ask this type of question are often intransigent hardasses (a common personality trait, esp on my wife's side of the family) instead of customer oriented business people. When they find they have a "customer" that is a hardass, they respond by being a hardass and they wonder why they start to get a bad rep. Sure it may seem like you are giving something away for free, but sometimes that's the cost of doing business...
What would I do? Get their email addresses, contact name, telephone, type of business and as much identification information as you think they can stomach for future reference, then offer them a one-time discount (or a bundle for future support, or training), or maybe even a freebie (if you think they'll be back for more), maybe shoot them some swag (coupons, promo material, whatever), but make sure they know that next time it will cost them full price. If I had a trainee, maybe I'd send the call over to them. Call it a marketing expense, or an investment in your future profitability, if it will help you sleep at night, but there's very little way around these type of "customers" in the internet/social media age.
If you haven't factored any sales/marketing into the cost structure of your business model that you could bill this type of customer expense to and/or you don't have tiered support model, (e.g., blogs/email, live/phone, training classes, personal hand-holding), you probably aren't doing it right. Usually businesses tier customers for a reason: some customers are cheapskates, but you make it up from the ones that don't care as much about the cost.
I can't really see how this technique could offer lifelong protection from the flu, the current encarnation currently does not and it's not clear how it would all work.
First of all, the vaccine they developed is a "hardened" mRNA that encodes the manufacture of a particular varient one of the two proteins (hemagglutinin or HA) that are found on the surface of a flu virus (the other one is neuraminidase or NA). In this case they chose the recent H1 part of the H1N1 varient was recently going around. This mRNA tricks the host's own cells to produce this H1 protein which triggers the immune response. In contrast, the "traditional" flu shot just has HA and NA proteins (usually made from dead flu viruses grown in eggs, but sometimes made in labs) in it along with some other "stuff" like adjuvents, to amp up the immune response.
Unfortunatly this particular vaccine is like traditional vaccines in that it primes the immune system to look for HA/NA proteins, and these are the flu proteins that mutate all the time, so it would just provide life-line protection for one particular strain (and some close relatives), kinda like the current flu shot.
The current breakthrough was in "hardening" the mRNA so that it isn't dissolved in you blood. These researchers discovered a protein called protamine can bind with the mRNA so that it can make it into enough cells so that the cellular mechanims can transcribe it into the encoded protein into H1.
There is some promise that this technique could be easily adapted to target part of the flu surface proteins that don't mutate as much (whereas the current technique is mostly about refining HA/NA proteins so might not be applicable to something else) but that lifelong protection from the flu using a technique like this seems like a dream. I don't think anyone knows how to do that yet, although many folks are working on it and most of them aren't just relying on just stimulating a human immune response.
On the other hand, as with most hype, there is a kernel of something there. The current crop of modern flu-treatments (like tamiflu) target the NA part of the flu virus (technically they are neuraminidase inhibitors, so they interfere with part of the virus reproduction cycle). Unfortuantly the NA part is the faster mutating protein and there have been cases where mutation in the NA part of the virus can circumvent these modern treatments. The HA part mutates more slowly and as I mentioned above, this particular treatment has been steered to target the HA part. Who knows, maybe you'd get a vaccine with mRNA for every HA subtype they know about***. Of course that is until there is another mutation. I'm guessing that on this basis they've annointed this new thing as having the potential "lifelong" protection from the flu. As for how this would be significantly different than just giving someone a regular flu shot with all the known HA subtypes, I don't see it. Seems like a bit of hype to me compared to what other folks are working on (e.g., specific artificial antibodies that target all HA subtypes).
*** AFAIK, there are 17 types of HA, although viruses that infect humans don't appear to have that many variations, so maybe you could get away with just H1, H2, H3, H5 (the ones known to infect humans).
I saw this rumor over here.
The way I read it is that they are going to offer BGA packaging to satisfy the large OEMs (e.g, dell, lenovo, etc). Now that most desktop PC are commodities, offering chips in BGAs reduces motherboad cost by eliminating the cost of the socket, improving yield (can sell kits of chips that just barely work together rather than requiring every component to satisfy the maximum electrical margins), and maybe reduce power (better electrical interface to memory).
My guess is that they will probably still offer a socket for servers and high-end enthusiast PCs, etc, but that means that it will be only specific enthusiast PCs that will support upgrades (e.g, you will not be able to upgrade a commodity desktop PC). So instead of outright killing the enthusiast PCs, I'm guessing Intel is simply going to make dabbling in enthusiast PCs a very expensive hobby (like it was in the old days).
In the old days, basically Intel was "forcing" all the computer vendors to have this latent ability to upgrade which enabled a custom motherboard industry that didn't need to sell-through (buy/resell) expensive CPUs. With this new change, only high-end motherboard companies will remain, and the computer vendors will just JIT motherboards the same way they purchase CPUs and memory. Undoubtly this will force even more consolidation in smaller motherboard form factors (although ATX/BTX/ITX was pretty standard, you saw some variations in the mini-ITX area) and the jellybean components on them (e.g., audio, power-regulators, etc).
What this might do, however, is kill is the desktop motherboard repair small businesses (mom/pop computer repair shops), not the enthusiast PC business. They won't be able to afford to stock motherboards anymore (since they will have CPUs mounted on them). On the other hand, the car repair business evolved around similar issues, most auto repair shops need to same-day order most of the parts need to repair cars from centralized parts distributors (they couldn't afford to stock things), so maybe mom/pop computer repair shops could evolve too... Maybe...
As another aside, one of the weaknesses of the Enigma Cipher was that the subsitution wheels never substituted one letter with the same letter. This fact turned out to be somewhat helpful in breaking the cipher...
Many early ciphers had weaknesses that were the result of not fully understanding the loss of randomness from seemingly logical "optimizations".
reactor != bomb
comparing nuclear fuel in a commercial reactor vs a bomb is like comparing the hydrogen peroxide you buy in the pharmacy (~3% solution), vs the stuff you use to launch rocket (~98% pure).
Currently nobody knows how to make a fusion reactor that is net energy positive and/or doesn't eventually create a highly radioactive reactor (which must eventually be decommissioned when it reaches past its useful life). If we built 1000's of the best fusion reactors we knew about today, we'd be stupid (maybe we could make up the energy deficit in volume... NOT).
Maybe one day we will know how create a fusion reactor that is viable, but today we do not...
And all countries tell little white lies to push people in the direction they want them to go.
That's why it's sooo important to not have any information contrary to the government doctrines available to the people. Can't have the people be unhappy about the direction they are herded...
Like kissing causes pregnancy.
Yes, in the same way that eating meat causes global warming.
Or condoms don't protect against STDs.
Although condoms are pretty good against AIDS and gonorrhea, they are apparently not very good at stopping HPV and herpes (which can be fairly easily contracted by skin-to-skin or skin-to-genital contact). Of course something is better than nothing, but apparently this is not a well known fut but of course we don't want to scare the people so better to tell the white lie to people that condoms protect you against STDs, so we can all feel empowered.
Or meat is needed to be healthy.
Although a proper sources of B12 and protein are. If you don't have good access to good sources of them (say if you are poor in a 3rd world country), it is likely that the only affordable access to these essential nutrients needed to be healthy is meat.
Or eating the occasional junk, or smoking, or anyother of silly things, is going to cause no harm.
I think you meant that it causes irreparable harm. Just like eating a some meat causes irreparable harm to you and the environment.
Republicans have stalled the Cybersecurity Act of 2012 with a Senate vote of 51–47 against the legislation.
Last I heard, the democrats had a majority (and the tie-break vote) in the senate. Why blame this on the republicans?
Many Senate Republicans took their cues from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and businesses that framed the debate not as a matter of national security, but rather as a battle between free enterprise and an overreaching government. They wanted to let companies determine whether it would be more cost effective — absent liability laws around cyber attacks — to invest in the hardware, software, and manpower required to effectively prevent cyber attacks, or to simply weather attacks and fix what breaks afterwards.
Not that I advocate waiting can cleaning up the mess later, I fear that all we would be doing is creating a safe harbor for companies by the proposed approach (basically I did the government recommendations, still got hacked, no problem). It would be much better to clarify what companies would be liable for and how much. I think better tradeoffs could be made rather than with a proscriptive government approach. See Section 706 of the bill: http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/112/s2105/text .
Even if this doesn't pass, for federal infrastructure and infrastructure deemed important to national security, Obama can unilateral impose most of these things as an Executive order for government entities and contractors.
As written the bill attempts to force IT that causes the interruption of life-sustaining services, catastrophic economic damage (vs just severe degradation of national security or national security capabilities) which is a much wider scope. You might argue as written, this bill is so vague that could be construed to apply to Amazon, or Google, or even a small airline or bus or telephone company that has the only service for an isolated area. Also as with many bills, it comes with its share of government overhead (appropriations for national education and awareness programs, recruiting for various government agencies, etc)...
I guess it's still divided government, and very few people want to write a good bill, but just try to force their bill and blame the other side for not being able to pass them... Sigh...
Everspin has announced that it's shipping the first 64Mb ST-MRAM in a DDR3-compatible module. These modules transfer data at DDR3-1600 clock rates, but access latencies are much lower than flash RAM, promising an overall 500x performance increase over conventional NAND.
Wait, so, is this to replace RAM (the mention of DDR3) or to replace drive storage?
MRAM might be a potential candidate to replace current solid state storage (NAND-flash) which is a candiate to replace drive storage. In a system with small amounts of DRAM, MRAM might be used to replace the DRAM as well. Unfortunatly, because of its current high price and low density, it is currently not very good substitute for either one except in perhaps a very small embedded system.
These modules transfer data at DDR3-1600 clock rates, but access latencies are much lower than flash RAM
Isn't that comparing apples (DDR3) and oranges (flash RAM)?
Instead of implementing the slow standard flash memory electrical interface on MRAMs, they (everspin) elected to support the same fast electrical interface that DRAMs use (DDR3). They can do this because just like DRAM, writing data on MRAMs is about as quick as reading data (which isn't the case with NAND-flash). By choosing the standarized DDR3 interface, chips that might want to use these MRAMs won't have to be specially designed to do so (which wouldn't be the case if they came up with a non-standard interface). It will apparantly just look like a small capacity DRAM chip that doesn't forget when you take the power away (I'm guessing the MRAMs probably also ignore any refresh requests that come across the interface).
The reason that current flash memory electrical interfaces are slow, is that flash memories have pretty slow access times and are read/written in large blocks. This led to an efficient interface that multiplexes the address and data on the same pins. DRAM is however more randomly accessed in smaller blocks and has separate address and data pins. This allows a higher duty cycle of data transfer on the data pins for smaller transactions: you don't have to constantly turn the bus around between sending commands and reading data, and you can pipeline new addresses on the address bus at the same time data from older commands are transfered on the data bus.
By targetting the DRAM interface, it appears that Everspin is positioning their chip as a DRAM+Flash replacement for systems that don't require much total storage. They need to target the DRAM interface for this because you can't really do random access efficiently on the flash interfaces (but you can do block transactions on a random access interface). In fact in many embedded systems, the first action of the bootstrap code is to copy parts of the NAND into DRAM (for fast access). With MRAM, you could just bypass this step.
Of course if you buy the company, you also buy the debt. AMD currently has $2B in debt, $1.5B in liabilities (e.g., accounts payable) with only $1.3B in cash in the bank.
Of course AMD also has operating cash flows (e.g., receivables ~$700M) other misc assets (e.g, goodwill~$700M, inventory~$750M, property~$700M, etc~$500M), totaling about $3.3B, but many of these other things are only fully valued if you keep everything running as they are today (e.g., goodwill generally resets to zero and inventory is pennies on the dollar when you change your business model).
Don't think that AMD would be worth paying very much for if you wanted to just make game consoles... Might be better to just hire all the people away an leave the $3.5B on the table for the "investors"...
According to the Argonne National Laboratory, it takes two barrels of water to produce one barrel of oil shale liquid. A lot of the shale rock is out where water is already being fought over between farmers, cities, and Native Americans.
Easy one:
Case 1: Native American DO own the mineral rights. They will win.
Case 2: Native Americans do NOT own the mineral rights. Every one will lose to the owners of the mineral rights.
Cities and farmers never win this fight.
US-ians in fact export gasoline now because we currently have excess refining capacity.
Although in 2010, we net imported about 269K barrels of gasoline, today (2012) we net export about 439K barrels of gasoline.
Why?
Because USA refiners on the Gulf coas are now playing a profit arbitrage "trick". They are sourcing some of their oil from the US over land (basically at west-texas intermediary crude prices), and selling the refined products (gasoline, diesel), as if they were based on Brent Crude oil (the benchmark crude oil price for refineries that source to the USA via gulf coast ports). WTI is currently about $15/barrel cheaper than Brent.
This gives the gulf-coast refineries a huge incentive to be at full production sourcing WTI-oil as they are making more profit per barrel now relative to the offshore refinery competitors (that mostly need to pay the benchmark Brent Crude oil prices for their sources unless they also have cheaper internal sources to draw on). Also since gasoline usage is down (thanks to great recession) these things flipped the US to being a net exporter of gasoline.
Things are never as they always were...
Between this and the (possible) discovery of the Higgs Boson, we may be about to launch into a new era of particle physics theory and research.
Actually, I think it's the reverse. Between this and the (possible) discovery of the Higgs Boson, we have simply just confirmed the parts of the standard model that we think we already understand. No new physics.
What people are actually looking for (and have found some hints/clues about like unexpected non-uniform decay paths in other experiments) are things that might suggests new physics that we don't understand at all which would launch a new era of particle physics theory and research. Some physists posit that some new physics exists (like SUSY) that might help us understand these hints/clues better, but so far the evidence has been lacking in support of a specific direction for new physics outside the standard model.
For example, the standard model doesn't seem to have a much of a say on the hierarchy problems (e.g., how come the higgs is so light), the observed electroweak symmetry breaking (e.g, why the higgs field yields mass), or give us much of a clue about dark matter (e.g., are there super heavy, neutral particles). As I understand it, as a straw man, SUSY might have something to help explain some of these deficiencies of the Standard Model, if there was evidence to support it.
If we keep running experiments and just find predictions that are supported/predicted by the Standard Model, we've only eliminated potential new physics, we need to find something that we can't predict to launch a new era of particle physic theory and research.
Well, now Samsung has got all this new overhead to deal with (lawsuits and stuff, ya know). Last year they had a large customer stop buying memory chips from them, and they also just had a very large customer signal that they would stop buying lcd panels from them and then a customer threatened to take their future SOC fabrication business to TSMC. They have find a way to make more money from their current customers and to pass that increased overhead on to someone... Who better but one of their most unloyal customers?
I think it's great for many reasons, but I'm wondering something.
The Forbes article links to a digitimes article. The digitimes article says, "The program will give the engineers an environment to learn the Chinese language, first-hand expereince in the manufacturing process, and a training that can be helpful after they return to the US, he added."
If the American workers will work in the US, why should they learn the Chinese language?
Perhaps to communicate with Foxconn managers and Chinese suppliers more efficiently? Through my dealings with Chinese and Taiwanese companies, I've found that although many engineering/tech personnel in China have a minimal ability to communicate in English (although some only by email), almost none of the factory or production personnel nor tech employees at low-level parts suppliers have servicable English communication abilities (neither verbal nor email). In a production environment, good communication skills are very important. A manufacturing "lines-down" situation can means thousands of dollars going down the toilet every second.
I'm sure this is just for supervisors and managers and product and quality engineers. They aren't gonna ship all the hourly assembly employees over to china/taiwan for training.
The function of unions is not to exclude some part of the labor market and limit the labor supply. That is a choice that some unions have made in order to put upward pressure on wages.
Unions could instead promote safety and productivity advantage that result in a union member being higher net value to employers (and that is what some have done in the past and claim they do now, but sadly it is somewhat of a historical artifact). In a typical union-shop where a company must pay essentially the same wages to union and non-union members, there would be no net financial advantage to hiring the non-union employee if they were of lower quality and eventually that person would be forced to join the union anyhow.
Instead unions have generally forced the seniority pill on most of the union-shops using pre-hire agreements which effectively excludes parts of the labor market. I guess the people that get screwed by this get to go on welfare in your world. Sure perhaps historically one tool to help keep the company in line to not attempt to hire lower-skill employees for higher skill jobs (and bring down wages), but it's basically just the union paying back people who have contributed union due for a longer period of time. It has little to do with overall wage stability for union members and might be considered a borderline pyramid scheme for union members.
That's my economic theory. Feel free to dispute the underlying premises.
In several studies, the effect of many recreational drugs is simply to inhibit the executive functional parts of the brain. In some individuals this has the potential to release bursts of creativity or insight that are being supressed by the executive function parts of the brain. In other individuals, it just releases social inhibition and sometimes even chaos. Unfortunatly, since a large part of programming is focus and high-attention span, and directing the brain to focus on tasks at hand is a large function of the executive funtional parts of the brain, this is not likely to result in a significant net benefit from programmers. Even if it were to help somehow, it is probably just as likely to steer you produce code which is stunningly creative, yet totally unrelated to the task at hand (or worse, totally underengineered useless code) mitigating the total overall benefit. This is why we probably see net benefit of recreational drugs for those endeavors that can fully embrace open-ended style creativity (writing, music, art, aesthetics, etc).
On the other hand, the jury is out on the other side of the coin with some types of drugs that work to improve focus and attention (e.g., the ADHD treatment drugs such as adderall, ritlin, etc.). Although these types of drugs aren't generally taken recreationally, they have some similarities to amphetamine like drugs, so maybe there's something there. The bottom line is that I imagine that most good programmers have already found ways to channel focus and attention towards programming and probably benefit little from whatever improvement these types of drugs might yield (except perhaps improved productivity by reducing the need for sleep/food, etc). I would suspect that these things benefit whoever is employing the programmer more than the programmer (unless, of course, the programmer is self employed).
But the benefits for programming aside, everyone (including programmers) has ways they like to blow off steam and shut off the executive side of their brain for a while to relax, recharge, and help gain insight into problems. If a programmer thinks recreational drugs are a good way to do that, so be it, but they probably shouldn't expect it to necessarily be a net help with their programming.
As I understand it, humans will always produce antibodies to fight infections like HIV. Unfortunatly, the antibodies that humans normally produce in the attempt to neutralize and HIV infection don't appear to be very good at it. The short story is that somehow HIV evolved to avoid having many fewer binding locations so the most effective "Y" shaped antibodies cannot effectively attach bivalently (in two places). This bivalent attach is apparently the most common strategies used by our immune system.
Apparently some people can make more potent antibodies called bNAbs, but often HIV mutates to avoid these as well, but sometimes there are successes.
I'm unclear on why this new Canadian/Korean HIV vaccine would be any better at bootstrapping the immune system than the most recent failed attempts. The only novel part that I can tell about this, is that they are using "whole" (but genetically modified) HIV instead of putting HIV protein genes codings into more common viruses, but if HIV is as crafty as it seems to be, this may only be a simple shot-in-the-dark hope that somehow bootstrapping the immune system will allow the body to come up with a way to fight off HIV before it gets a chance to overwhelm the immune system. Color me skeptical as that was what the other vaccines attempted to do, but it's not clear that this will be a successful route.