I think you missed my point. China is cutting supply just as alternative are ramping up. Once other folks are ramped up I'm pretty sure they will flood the market and bomb the price. This will kill these upstarts by destroying their financing model as most mining companies borrow money for development of production facilities and need the ongoing revenue stream to support their debt payments.
Flooding the market to keep competitors out of the market before the companies are ramped up means you don't get all the value from your commodities. Better to have your adversary commit resources and then cut them down (if you can) because then it deters your adversaries from trying again the next time (or at least makes their financing more expensive in the future).
Of course the governments could step in and bail out these upstarts, but for a $1B/year, they don't have the political muscle to do that. Oil production startups that get financed when oil is >$100/barrel, routinely get crushed when oil dives back under $40/barrel (this has been a recurring theme in Colorado and Wyoming where my family is from). Governments never seem to step in and bail out these oil startups either, so why would it be different for rare earths?
Also, you mentioned that Japan has developed alternate sourcing for rare-earths, but that country has limited manufacturing capability that uses these materials (mostly just capacitor manufacturing, not much in batteries/solar panels). Where is the bulk of that manufacturing capability today? Well China. And they want to keep it that way, not export the minerals to say Vietnam or Malaysia and have the manufacturing jobs and companies that capture more of the value chain migrate off China's shores.
The headline is slighly misleading. It's not MSFT's spec, it's the Trusted Computing Group (TCG) and their TPM spec.
One of the goals of the new TPM spec was to allow a better way to replace some algorithms because the original TPM spec entangle SHA1 hash in such a way (with the PCR extension mechanism) that it was difficult to replace that hash algorithm when weakness was discovered that algorithm and people wanted to replace it. Once you change the design and open that up you should probably include the usual suspects.
Some interesting additional algorithms added to the support library were SM3_256 and SM4 (the hash and symmetric key algorithms mandated for use in chinese DRM), WHIRLPOOL512 (hash function from NESSIE). In addition of the normal RSA public key stuff, they've also added ECC, ECDSA, ECDH, ECDAA, ECSCHNORR (a smattering of ellipitic curve based standards) to the mix in order to help gain acceptance in those markets that want/need shorter key lengths that are available to EC-derived algorithms that presumably have similar security to their RSA counterparts with longer keys.
Interestingly, although they include the SHA2 family of hash functions as an SHA1 upgrade, the newly minted SHA3 was strangely absent. Also, I don't think they have included SM2 (the chinese ECC signature technique), but that's probably just an oversight. I expect both of these omissions to be remedied with the next release.
Sounds short-sighted. Since [oil is] a commodity, this will just drive prices up and thus other people will [drill for it]. Businesses may even prefer these new sources for stability. Then prices will crash as a glut of supply hits the market, and the unreliable producer will command an even lower price.
Or the market could do something totally unpredictable:)
How did that work out for the oil cartel? Sure short term supply constriction driving up prices will enable other sources to come on line (as they become profitable at the new price), but later on the cartel cashes in the the increase (or in the case of oil, the cartel member either increase production or just plain cheat on quotas). This causes the price to crash and drives all of those companies into bankrupcy (just after they borrowed big to invest in production capability assuming a higher commodity pricing level) this creates a situation where alternate sources are small or unstable allowing the oil cartel monopoly to remain.
You don't think China can figure out a similar way to play the game as well as OPEC?
There is no such thing as unearned arrogance. If you're arrogant, you've been successful at something, and you have every right to think highly of yourself. It's a trait to be celebrated, not scorned.
Oye... where do I begin...
1. Arrogant != successful (these are orthogonal things) 2. Although you have every right to think highly of yourself, others have the right to scorn you. No particular reason, that's just their right.
If there is something to be gained by cooperation (and there usually is) an evolutionary stable strategy is one that cooperates more than not, but punishes folks for being non-cooperative (think a tit-for-tat). If practicing continued arrogance is considered by people to be non-cooperative, it could potentially be out-competed by other strategies (e.g., being humble until confronted with someone that is arrogant). No need to toss religion in there: that's a red herring...
Of course you also have the right to follow a non-optimal strategy in social interactions, but as with all choices, there are potential consequences.
I'm gonna generally agree with you on this, although I wouldn't call it so much a coping strategy, but a defense mechanism. Instinctively, most folks want a turf to own as it feed their ego and sense of self worth. How you learn how to defend that turf is really a learned mechanism.
It's sort of like commanding by yelling, or commanding by whispering. You can't usually do the later, unless there is some amount of built-in respect for your command, so in a new situation, you do the former. Yelling commands is basically a form of arrogance. It attempts to convey a sense of importance when there is no other social context: e.g, I can yell because I have the authority to yell at people.
Of course it is possible to for people to apply learned behaviours in inappropriate circumstances or develop bad habits or fail to learn new defense strategies (e.g., applying an arrogant stance when confidence is low), but that is basically a learning deficit (or perhaps in the case of someone with ASD, a learning disability). As with most learning deficits (disabilities), additional training can probably help. Usually friends that are willing to put up with your bullshit and call you on it are most helpful training partners.
Or we can just throw people into the deep end of the pool and see who can swim (as suggested by many postings in this thread).
The way they describe it, it appears to be a simple point-to-point adaptive error correction which is like FEC.
A simple way to think about this is to think about a trivial code. Consider the situation where a transmitter batches up 10 TCP packets and the receiver receives 9/10. If the transmitter thinks that any of those 10 packets weren't received (say because of a timeout), it could just send the parity of all 10 packets. In a pure FEC system, it would always send that parity packet. In an adaptive system, it would only send that packet if it thought any 1 of 10 was lost. Of course you can replace parity with more sophisticated coding schemes that can more easily correct for more than 1 lost packet out of 10, and you can look at the packet loss statistics and speculatively send some of the "parity" packets in anticipation. Of course if all 10 packets are lost, you'd have to send all 10 new "parity" packets (can't avoid that).
Contrast this with normal TCP where if you lost the 1st and the 10'th packet, you'd probably have to wait until the transmitter sent all 10 packets (because the receiver can't communicate this back to the transmitter using standard TCP). With an adaptive FEC-like scheme, as soon as 2 packets were recieved, you could correct both the 1st and the 10th packet (not have to wait for packets 2-9 which you already got). I'm sure the scheme is a bit more sophisticated than this, but I'm pretty sure that's the general idea. They are probably are using a simple punctured convolution code instead of basic parity packets, but the idea is the same.
The Linear Network Coding idea is slightly different. It attempts to optimize the multi-cast scenario (not the point-to-point scenario). As I understand LNC, you take advantage of looking at broadcast packets and reconstructing your stream out of the ones you receive (kinda like how CDMA works over the shared air medium).
Hopefully, for you and many other folks, we won't discover some day that Adderall has an unforseen side effect (say like that miracle diet drug Fen-Phen)... As I understand it, Adderall basically a stimulant that works similarly to meth and coke in the body and (like Fen-Phen) has a potential for causing cardiac problems.
So, according to you somehow purchasing adderall off the street is "possibly depriving someone of their needed prescription"... Q: When has purchasing prescription drugs off the street ever made this statement true?
Also, your plan seems to only make it available for people rich enough to afford to buy off a physician to manage it. Basically if you are too poor to afford it, you get left in the dust. A modern day quaint extension of the idea that only rich kids get to go to college...
That may be true, but can the company that produces these products survive with a small sliver of a market like that? I'm sure that argument was made by many companies (e.g., say Kodak, Blockbuster, AOL, Altavista, Godrej & Boyce, Newsweek,...). They really need to figure out a new game plan, though. At some point, they won't have enough revenue/capital to do their own development anymore and they'll just be buying phones from other companies, writing a captive BBAPP and pasting their label on them and selling them.
Perhaps there is an outside chance they can survive as a niche player even if they don't figure out a new game plan like the last remaining buggy whip manufacturer. However, survival like that means just like the Westfield Whip Company, they'll just be catering to the rich and sentimental audience, not making something that is deployed to Disney's theme parks (unless they open up a noughties-land)... I think the better bet is for them to figure out a new game plan...
Does anyone else think that the game of baseball survived the 50's and 60's simply because math and science could utilize it to teach their subjects? I don't see baseball as a game, but of a boatload of data and statistics.
No. The reason that Baseball thrived in the 50's and 60's was because the expansion teams in the west coast, the breaking of the black barrier and televised games and the press surrounding the "home-run" battles.
I doubt in the 50's and early 60's, many math and science teachers used baseball to teach their subjects . For math at that era, all the rage was "new-math" which emphasized stuff like set-theory and alternate number bases (not statistics). The physics in baseball is more about complex "pitching" and ball transport physics which is above what most people studied. Applying occam's razor, the simpler explanation that baseball's success was more likely due to tv and news-cycles (and a lesser extent local west-coast teams to cheer for).
FWIW, actual sabermetrics didn't really take off until after this book Percentage Baseball. Although it was published in 1964, it wasn't until early '70s and the use of computers that sabermetrics was really going enough to dribble down to the masses...
Contrary to multiple postings on this thread, Qualcomm designs it's own ARM compatible CPUs (they call the latest version Krait) via an architecture licence from ARM. That's pretty make Qualcomm somewhat like the old-AMD designed it's own x86 compatible CPUs via an architecture license from Intel. However, the new-AMD licences their x86-64 architecture to Intel which designs it's own CPUs (arguably better than AMD).
On the other hand, Qualcomm acts alot like Intel in the cell-phone space. They use their patents on CDMA and other wireless communications and their first generation 4G-LTE modem/radio to bully cell-phone manufactuers into using Qualcomm SOC chipsets very similar to they way that Intel uses their CPUs to bully computer manufacturers into using Intel chipsets. They have been known to threaten to use bundling, bulk pricing, and even limited availability tricks on other low-end high-volume phone product lines to convince cell phone designers to use their chipsets. Thus you see even Samsung is forced to use Qualcomm SOC chipsets even though they make their own Exynos SOC. This makes them definitey not-like the new AMD in this sense.
In this case Google requested that the Nasdaq halt trading for a "news-pending" reason. The general theory behind allowing a company to halt it's own stock is so to give time for investors to evalute potentially material financial information (or in this case accidential financial information).
There is also a regulatory pause (called a circuit-breaker) if a stock moves more than 10% in five minute window. The primary reason for this type of halt trading is that there is a large imbalance between buyers and sellers (much larger than the market makers can absorb). In these types of situations, it is essentially impossible to fairly price (and thus report) a stock trade which can cause the instability in automated trading programs that you are referring to.
I believe that the erroneous report was released @12:30EDT and by the time GOOG was halted @12:50, it was only down about 9%, and it resumed trading @3:20 and finished only about 8% down. I don't think that was enough to trigger an automatic circuit-breaker. The stock was halted because GOOG requested it (when it realized what had happened).
Wouldn't it be better for schools to assess kids to see what their strengths/weaknesses are and then have them take courses that are more suited to their abilities?
Wouldn't it be better for schools to assess kids to see what their strengths/weaknesses are and then have them take courses that help them address their weaknesses?
Education (at the HS level and below) shouldn't be about specialization, but about exploration. Many people that age don't know what they want to do or even what their abilities might be. I understand that most of the world doesn't see it that way (in many countries, you are tracked into an educational eventuality at a very early age with a series of high-stakes testing), but I see the exploration part as one of the real (remaining) strenghts of the US system. It would be a pity that in the face of parental pressure we morph into another system...
There is a system for national bankrupcy. It's called war (either civil or external). Currently, that is the only estalbished way for a country to free itself of international debt. Look what happened to Argentina in 1999...
The pre-BK system we have today, however, is called the IMF. This is analogous to credit counseling before BK. Assuming the IMF is somehow a-politicial is absurd in the extreme.
The typical prescription that the IMF had a country follow is to cut their budget, force a country to open up to (more) global trade, and divest their state owned corporations to private capital interests around the world. However, this credit-counseling prescription is predicated on the idea that a country is "too-big-to-fail" and that if it were to go into default (or BK), private capital interests would get damaged and cause global economic chaos. Thus the IMF prescription is heavily tilted to global economic interest, often at the expense of the state's best interests. This means the IMF is essentially like a credit-counseling service working for the creditors. They carrot they hold out is so that your country can get credit.
Having the IMF handle a state BK (if there were an organized way to do such a thing) would be like having a credit counselor who works for your creditors handle you BK. Can you say serious conflict of interest?
On the other hand, when a country takes things into its own hands instead of the IMF...
as long as their government needs insane amounts of money
Okay, what government doesn't want an insane amount of money?
In mathematics, I think they call that making a theory about an empty set. It may be interesting or even aesthetic from some people's point of view, but it doesn't apply in real life, so people don't spend to much time thinking about them.
I guess this puts to rest the myth of the Iranian source for those $100 superbills from the late '80s... If they had the printing presses to make those superbills, they could probably print their own money now.
Maybe if they can just hold out till next year. That's when they will be able to start spending that plane load of new unreleased $100 bills they stole in Phily last week;^)
Somehow, that's what comes to mind when I think about this...
Of course the reality is that it requires some sort of symmetry breaking field (where the mathematics work out like an oscillating soliton).
The problem of course is that if such a minimum energy oscillating system existed, you would likely not be able to use it like a clock since once you attempted to measure it somehow, you would likely disturb in a way where it would no longer be accurate going forward.
Maybe this could be used in some weird thought experiment as a timer in along with Schrödinger's cat? If you look at the timer before it expires, the cat is dead, if you wait until the timer expires, the cat is alive, but if you don't look at the timer, the cat is still in a superposition between alive and dead? Okay, maybe that's just silly;^)
I doubt there's much Intel could do to keep AMD alive at this point (even if they wanted to).
If they had a fab perhaps Intel could allow them to second source parts (but they spun out Global Foundaries) If they had something Intel didn't have they could license it (like a mobile GPU which they sold to Qualcomm) If they had an ARM licence (which they don't and Intel sold theirs to Marvell, so they probably don't really want it anyhow) If they just gave them money (they already gave them $1B, about 50% of their current market cap)
I don't think at this point Intel can legally do much to keep AMD alive (without violating Anti-trust, and/or their shareholder fiduciary duty)... If you recall several years ago Google was trying some manuvers to keep Yahoo from falling into Microsoft's hand, and they realized there was little they could do for them w/o violating Anti-trust and/or their shareholder fiduciary duty...
Given that the PC market is in freefall right now, there's about 0% chance that there will be any consequence from regulators of being a monopoly in that space. In the server space, they are likely to become a strategic resource to the government (not unlike Boeing or Micron), so they probably can breathe easy in this area as well.
The only remote danger they probably face is someone proposing they get broken up (like AT&T) into a fab business and a chip design business, but given the state of the economy, I don't see anyone in government pushing for that anytime soon.
This is totally off topic, but under the Outer Space Treaty, mining is not a prohibited activity, but if you read closer, you don't get to escape all jurisdiction by simply going into space. You are still under the jurisdiction of the place where you launched from.
Article VIII
A State Party to the Treaty on whose registry an object launched into outer space is carried shall retain jurisdiction and control over such object, and over any personnel thereof, while in outer space or on a celestial body.
Re:Putting the cart before the horse.
on
The Great Meteor Grab
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· Score: 3, Informative
No, but when the US starts planting flags on more heavenly bodies, they may be able to define them as "Federal Land", subject to BLM regulation.
Article II Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.
I imagine a practical system will be somewhat similar to the techique they use to safeguard currency. In case people aren't aware of this, I put a couple links below. The basic idea is that embedded in the design of modern currency is a robust signature (created by Digimarc) which is steganographically hidden in the data.
In the case of currency, when you scan in something, programs (like Adobe Photoshop) run some code that looks for steganographic the currency signature in the image and if it finds it, then refuses to let process it. It is estimated, but not known, how this works, but empirically, a crop as small as 10% of the image a banknote can currency contains enough information to trigger the detection of the currency signature.
I imagine something could be done similarly with 3d printers. The carrot that will make the manufacturers of printers put this in will probably be legislation that shields them from legal reprecussions (sort of a safe harbor against enabling copyright infringement). As an example, color photocopiers have been convinced to include yellow ID dot codes...
Apparently things are a bit more complicated in the air...
Drafting helps by reducing air resistance (drag) and requires you to be really close, this technique is a bit more subtle in that it involves using trailing air vortices to get free "lift". The article had a handy link to explain this... http://www.av8n.com/fly/vortex.htm
Of course I'm sure that someone will draw such an analogy in a pop-science article...
Does anyone know why two American companies are suing each other in Germany? Are these German patents?
Two reasons that I can think of...
1. The patent in question is european (although it appears to be also filed as a US patent as well). 2. The law firm they are using, Bardehle Pagenberg, has apparently won more injunctions against Android than any other law firm in the world.
AFAIK, the patent in question actually came into Microsoft's possession after it purchased Multimap.com (a UK based company) back in 2007, which jives with the european flavor of this dispute.
I don't think there is much new here, several tachyon papers have trodden down this road before (e.g., http://arxiv.org/pdf/1112.4187v2.pdf). If they somehow have figure out how to extend the lorentz transform for v > c in 4 dimensional space (vs 6 dimensional space as asserted in the above reference paper to void imaginary distances), that would be something.
Unfortunatly, I haven't found a way around their paywall (yet) to see what they are up to...
Slashdot Mirror
I think you missed my point. China is cutting supply just as alternative are ramping up. Once other folks are ramped up I'm pretty sure they will flood the market and bomb the price. This will kill these upstarts by destroying their financing model as most mining companies borrow money for development of production facilities and need the ongoing revenue stream to support their debt payments.
Flooding the market to keep competitors out of the market before the companies are ramped up means you don't get all the value from your commodities. Better to have your adversary commit resources and then cut them down (if you can) because then it deters your adversaries from trying again the next time (or at least makes their financing more expensive in the future).
Of course the governments could step in and bail out these upstarts, but for a $1B/year, they don't have the political muscle to do that. Oil production startups that get financed when oil is >$100/barrel, routinely get crushed when oil dives back under $40/barrel (this has been a recurring theme in Colorado and Wyoming where my family is from). Governments never seem to step in and bail out these oil startups either, so why would it be different for rare earths?
Also, you mentioned that Japan has developed alternate sourcing for rare-earths, but that country has limited manufacturing capability that uses these materials (mostly just capacitor manufacturing, not much in batteries/solar panels). Where is the bulk of that manufacturing capability today? Well China. And they want to keep it that way, not export the minerals to say Vietnam or Malaysia and have the manufacturing jobs and companies that capture more of the value chain migrate off China's shores.
The headline is slighly misleading. It's not MSFT's spec, it's the Trusted Computing Group (TCG) and their TPM spec.
One of the goals of the new TPM spec was to allow a better way to replace some algorithms because the original TPM spec entangle SHA1 hash in such a way (with the PCR extension mechanism) that it was difficult to replace that hash algorithm when weakness was discovered that algorithm and people wanted to replace it. Once you change the design and open that up you should probably include the usual suspects.
Some interesting additional algorithms added to the support library were SM3_256 and SM4 (the hash and symmetric key algorithms mandated for use in chinese DRM), WHIRLPOOL512 (hash function from NESSIE). In addition of the normal RSA public key stuff, they've also added ECC, ECDSA, ECDH, ECDAA, ECSCHNORR (a smattering of ellipitic curve based standards) to the mix in order to help gain acceptance in those markets that want/need shorter key lengths that are available to EC-derived algorithms that presumably have similar security to their RSA counterparts with longer keys.
Interestingly, although they include the SHA2 family of hash functions as an SHA1 upgrade, the newly minted SHA3 was strangely absent. Also, I don't think they have included SM2 (the chinese ECC signature technique), but that's probably just an oversight. I expect both of these omissions to be remedied with the next release.
Sounds short-sighted. Since [oil is] a commodity, this will just drive prices up and thus other people will [drill for it]. Businesses may even prefer these new sources for stability. Then prices will crash as a glut of supply hits the market, and the unreliable producer will command an even lower price.
Or the market could do something totally unpredictable :)
How did that work out for the oil cartel? Sure short term supply constriction driving up prices will enable other sources to come on line (as they become profitable at the new price), but later on the cartel cashes in the the increase (or in the case of oil, the cartel member either increase production or just plain cheat on quotas). This causes the price to crash and drives all of those companies into bankrupcy (just after they borrowed big to invest in production capability assuming a higher commodity pricing level) this creates a situation where alternate sources are small or unstable allowing the oil cartel monopoly to remain.
You don't think China can figure out a similar way to play the game as well as OPEC?
There is no such thing as unearned arrogance. If you're arrogant, you've been successful at something, and you have every right to think highly of yourself. It's a trait to be celebrated, not scorned.
Oye... where do I begin...
1. Arrogant != successful (these are orthogonal things)
2. Although you have every right to think highly of yourself, others have the right to scorn you. No particular reason, that's just their right.
If there is something to be gained by cooperation (and there usually is) an evolutionary stable strategy is one that cooperates more than not, but punishes folks for being non-cooperative (think a tit-for-tat). If practicing continued arrogance is considered by people to be non-cooperative, it could potentially be out-competed by other strategies (e.g., being humble until confronted with someone that is arrogant). No need to toss religion in there: that's a red herring...
Of course you also have the right to follow a non-optimal strategy in social interactions, but as with all choices, there are potential consequences.
I'm gonna generally agree with you on this, although I wouldn't call it so much a coping strategy, but a defense mechanism. Instinctively, most folks want a turf to own as it feed their ego and sense of self worth. How you learn how to defend that turf is really a learned mechanism.
It's sort of like commanding by yelling, or commanding by whispering. You can't usually do the later, unless there is some amount of built-in respect for your command, so in a new situation, you do the former. Yelling commands is basically a form of arrogance. It attempts to convey a sense of importance when there is no other social context: e.g, I can yell because I have the authority to yell at people.
Of course it is possible to for people to apply learned behaviours in inappropriate circumstances or develop bad habits or fail to learn new defense strategies (e.g., applying an arrogant stance when confidence is low), but that is basically a learning deficit (or perhaps in the case of someone with ASD, a learning disability). As with most learning deficits (disabilities), additional training can probably help. Usually friends that are willing to put up with your bullshit and call you on it are most helpful training partners.
Or we can just throw people into the deep end of the pool and see who can swim (as suggested by many postings in this thread).
The way they describe it, it appears to be a simple point-to-point adaptive error correction which is like FEC.
A simple way to think about this is to think about a trivial code. Consider the situation where a transmitter batches up 10 TCP packets and the receiver receives 9/10. If the transmitter thinks that any of those 10 packets weren't received (say because of a timeout), it could just send the parity of all 10 packets. In a pure FEC system, it would always send that parity packet. In an adaptive system, it would only send that packet if it thought any 1 of 10 was lost. Of course you can replace parity with more sophisticated coding schemes that can more easily correct for more than 1 lost packet out of 10, and you can look at the packet loss statistics and speculatively send some of the "parity" packets in anticipation. Of course if all 10 packets are lost, you'd have to send all 10 new "parity" packets (can't avoid that).
Contrast this with normal TCP where if you lost the 1st and the 10'th packet, you'd probably have to wait until the transmitter sent all 10 packets (because the receiver can't communicate this back to the transmitter using standard TCP). With an adaptive FEC-like scheme, as soon as 2 packets were recieved, you could correct both the 1st and the 10th packet (not have to wait for packets 2-9 which you already got). I'm sure the scheme is a bit more sophisticated than this, but I'm pretty sure that's the general idea. They are probably are using a simple punctured convolution code instead of basic parity packets, but the idea is the same.
The Linear Network Coding idea is slightly different. It attempts to optimize the multi-cast scenario (not the point-to-point scenario). As I understand LNC, you take advantage of looking at broadcast packets and reconstructing your stream out of the ones you receive (kinda like how CDMA works over the shared air medium).
Hopefully, for you and many other folks, we won't discover some day that Adderall has an unforseen side effect (say like that miracle diet drug Fen-Phen)... As I understand it, Adderall basically a stimulant that works similarly to meth and coke in the body and (like Fen-Phen) has a potential for causing cardiac problems.
So, according to you somehow purchasing adderall off the street is "possibly depriving someone of their needed prescription"...
Q: When has purchasing prescription drugs off the street ever made this statement true?
Also, your plan seems to only make it available for people rich enough to afford to buy off a physician to manage it. Basically if you are too poor to afford it, you get left in the dust. A modern day quaint extension of the idea that only rich kids get to go to college...
...they will always have a market...
That may be true, but can the company that produces these products survive with a small sliver of a market like that? I'm sure that argument was made by many companies (e.g., say Kodak, Blockbuster, AOL, Altavista, Godrej & Boyce, Newsweek, ...). They really need to figure out a new game plan, though. At some point, they won't have enough revenue/capital to do their own development anymore and they'll just be buying phones from other companies, writing a captive BBAPP and pasting their label on them and selling them.
Perhaps there is an outside chance they can survive as a niche player even if they don't figure out a new game plan like the last remaining buggy whip manufacturer. However, survival like that means just like the Westfield Whip Company, they'll just be catering to the rich and sentimental audience, not making something that is deployed to Disney's theme parks (unless they open up a noughties-land)... I think the better bet is for them to figure out a new game plan...
Does anyone else think that the game of baseball survived the 50's and 60's simply because math and science could utilize it to teach their subjects? I don't see baseball as a game, but of a boatload of data and statistics.
No. The reason that Baseball thrived in the 50's and 60's was because the expansion teams in the west coast, the breaking of the black barrier and televised games and the press surrounding the "home-run" battles.
I doubt in the 50's and early 60's, many math and science teachers used baseball to teach their subjects . For math at that era, all the rage was "new-math" which emphasized stuff like set-theory and alternate number bases (not statistics). The physics in baseball is more about complex "pitching" and ball transport physics which is above what most people studied. Applying occam's razor, the simpler explanation that baseball's success was more likely due to tv and news-cycles (and a lesser extent local west-coast teams to cheer for).
FWIW, actual sabermetrics didn't really take off until after this book Percentage Baseball. Although it was published in 1964, it wasn't until early '70s and the use of computers that sabermetrics was really going enough to dribble down to the masses...
Contrary to multiple postings on this thread, Qualcomm designs it's own ARM compatible CPUs (they call the latest version Krait) via an architecture licence from ARM. That's pretty make Qualcomm somewhat like the old-AMD designed it's own x86 compatible CPUs via an architecture license from Intel. However, the new-AMD licences their x86-64 architecture to Intel which designs it's own CPUs (arguably better than AMD).
On the other hand, Qualcomm acts alot like Intel in the cell-phone space. They use their patents on CDMA and other wireless communications and their first generation 4G-LTE modem/radio to bully cell-phone manufactuers into using Qualcomm SOC chipsets very similar to they way that Intel uses their CPUs to bully computer manufacturers into using Intel chipsets. They have been known to threaten to use bundling, bulk pricing, and even limited availability tricks on other low-end high-volume phone product lines to convince cell phone designers to use their chipsets. Thus you see even Samsung is forced to use Qualcomm SOC chipsets even though they make their own Exynos SOC. This makes them definitey not-like the new AMD in this sense.
In this case Google requested that the Nasdaq halt trading for a "news-pending" reason. The general theory behind allowing a company to halt it's own stock is so to give time for investors to evalute potentially material financial information (or in this case accidential financial information).
There is also a regulatory pause (called a circuit-breaker) if a stock moves more than 10% in five minute window. The primary reason for this type of halt trading is that there is a large imbalance between buyers and sellers (much larger than the market makers can absorb). In these types of situations, it is essentially impossible to fairly price (and thus report) a stock trade which can cause the instability in automated trading programs that you are referring to.
I believe that the erroneous report was released @12:30EDT and by the time GOOG was halted @12:50, it was only down about 9%, and it resumed trading @3:20 and finished only about 8% down. I don't think that was enough to trigger an automatic circuit-breaker. The stock was halted because GOOG requested it (when it realized what had happened).
Wouldn't it be better for schools to assess kids to see what their strengths/weaknesses are and then have them take courses that are more suited to their abilities?
Wouldn't it be better for schools to assess kids to see what their strengths/weaknesses are and then have them take courses that help them address their weaknesses?
Education (at the HS level and below) shouldn't be about specialization, but about exploration. Many people that age don't know what they want to do or even what their abilities might be. I understand that most of the world doesn't see it that way (in many countries, you are tracked into an educational eventuality at a very early age with a series of high-stakes testing), but I see the exploration part as one of the real (remaining) strenghts of the US system. It would be a pity that in the face of parental pressure we morph into another system...
There is a system for national bankrupcy. It's called war (either civil or external). Currently, that is the only estalbished way for a country to free itself of international debt. Look what happened to Argentina in 1999...
The pre-BK system we have today, however, is called the IMF. This is analogous to credit counseling before BK. Assuming the IMF is somehow a-politicial is absurd in the extreme.
The typical prescription that the IMF had a country follow is to cut their budget, force a country to open up to (more) global trade, and divest their state owned corporations to private capital interests around the world. However, this credit-counseling prescription is predicated on the idea that a country is "too-big-to-fail" and that if it were to go into default (or BK), private capital interests would get damaged and cause global economic chaos. Thus the IMF prescription is heavily tilted to global economic interest, often at the expense of the state's best interests. This means the IMF is essentially like a credit-counseling service working for the creditors. They carrot they hold out is so that your country can get credit.
Having the IMF handle a state BK (if there were an organized way to do such a thing) would be like having a credit counselor who works for your creditors handle you BK. Can you say serious conflict of interest?
On the other hand, when a country takes things into its own hands instead of the IMF...
as long as their government needs insane amounts of money
Okay, what government doesn't want an insane amount of money?
In mathematics, I think they call that making a theory about an empty set. It may be interesting or even aesthetic from some people's point of view, but it doesn't apply in real life, so people don't spend to much time thinking about them.
I guess this puts to rest the myth of the Iranian source for those $100 superbills from the late '80s...
If they had the printing presses to make those superbills, they could probably print their own money now.
Maybe if they can just hold out till next year. That's when they will be able to start spending that plane load of new unreleased $100 bills they stole in Phily last week ;^)
Somehow, that's what comes to mind when I think about this...
Of course the reality is that it requires some sort of symmetry breaking field (where the mathematics work out like an oscillating soliton).
The problem of course is that if such a minimum energy oscillating system existed, you would likely not be able to use it like a clock since once you attempted to measure it somehow, you would likely disturb in a way where it would no longer be accurate going forward.
Maybe this could be used in some weird thought experiment as a timer in along with Schrödinger's cat? If you look at the timer before it expires, the cat is dead, if you wait until the timer expires, the cat is alive, but if you don't look at the timer, the cat is still in a superposition between alive and dead? Okay, maybe that's just silly ;^)
I doubt there's much Intel could do to keep AMD alive at this point (even if they wanted to).
If they had a fab perhaps Intel could allow them to second source parts (but they spun out Global Foundaries)
If they had something Intel didn't have they could license it (like a mobile GPU which they sold to Qualcomm)
If they had an ARM licence (which they don't and Intel sold theirs to Marvell, so they probably don't really want it anyhow)
If they just gave them money (they already gave them $1B, about 50% of their current market cap)
I don't think at this point Intel can legally do much to keep AMD alive (without violating Anti-trust, and/or their shareholder fiduciary duty)... If you recall several years ago Google was trying some manuvers to keep Yahoo from falling into Microsoft's hand, and they realized there was little they could do for them w/o violating Anti-trust and/or their shareholder fiduciary duty...
Given that the PC market is in freefall right now, there's about 0% chance that there will be any consequence from regulators of being a monopoly in that space. In the server space, they are likely to become a strategic resource to the government (not unlike Boeing or Micron), so they probably can breathe easy in this area as well.
The only remote danger they probably face is someone proposing they get broken up (like AT&T) into a fab business and a chip design business, but given the state of the economy, I don't see anyone in government pushing for that anytime soon.
This is totally off topic, but under the Outer Space Treaty, mining is not a prohibited activity, but if you read closer, you don't get to escape all jurisdiction by simply going into space. You are still under the jurisdiction of the place where you launched from.
Article VIII
A State Party to the Treaty on whose registry an object launched into outer space is carried shall retain jurisdiction and control over such object, and over any personnel thereof, while in outer space or on a celestial body.
No, but when the US starts planting flags on more heavenly bodies, they may be able to define them as "Federal Land", subject to BLM regulation.
Not likely, the US is a signator to the Outer Space Treaty...
Article II
Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.
I imagine a practical system will be somewhat similar to the techique they use to safeguard currency. In case people aren't aware of this, I put a couple links below. The basic idea is that embedded in the design of modern currency is a robust signature (created by Digimarc) which is steganographically hidden in the data.
In the case of currency, when you scan in something, programs (like Adobe Photoshop) run some code that looks for steganographic the currency signature in the image and if it finds it, then refuses to let process it. It is estimated, but not known, how this works, but empirically, a crop as small as 10% of the image a banknote can currency contains enough information to trigger the detection of the currency signature.
I imagine something could be done similarly with 3d printers. The carrot that will make the manufacturers of printers put this in will probably be legislation that shields them from legal reprecussions (sort of a safe harbor against enabling copyright infringement). As an example, color photocopiers have been convinced to include yellow ID dot codes...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Bank_Counterfeit_Deterrence_Group
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sjm217/projects/currency/
Apparently things are a bit more complicated in the air...
Drafting helps by reducing air resistance (drag) and requires you to be really close, this technique is a bit more subtle in that it involves using trailing air vortices to get free "lift". The article had a handy link to explain this... http://www.av8n.com/fly/vortex.htm
Of course I'm sure that someone will draw such an analogy in a pop-science article...
Does anyone know why two American companies are suing each other in Germany? Are these German patents?
Two reasons that I can think of...
1. The patent in question is european (although it appears to be also filed as a US patent as well).
2. The law firm they are using, Bardehle Pagenberg, has apparently won more injunctions against Android than any other law firm in the world.
AFAIK, the patent in question actually came into Microsoft's possession after it purchased Multimap.com (a UK based company) back in 2007, which jives with the european flavor of this dispute.
I don't think there is much new here, several tachyon papers have trodden down this road before (e.g., http://arxiv.org/pdf/1112.4187v2.pdf).
If they somehow have figure out how to extend the lorentz transform for v > c in 4 dimensional space (vs 6 dimensional space as asserted in the above reference paper to void imaginary distances), that would be something.
Unfortunatly, I haven't found a way around their paywall (yet) to see what they are up to...
It's Physiology or Medicine (there aren't separate categories for Medicine and Physiology)...
Also, in 1994, the winners for Physiology or Medicine got their award for their discovery of G-proteins and the role of these proteins in signal transduction in cells (as opposed to studies of G-protein-coupled receptors for the 2012 winners). That's a pretty subtle difference for categorization if you ask me...