So if we are to inform the public about chemistry, we should make sure everyone is talking about the same chemical. Perhaps we should be referring to chemicals using its chemical hashkey identifier like InChIKey=XLYOFNOQVPJJNP-UHFFFAOYSA-N. I'm sure that'll make things more clear for everyone...;^)
Perhaps if the Yahoo Board would have fully vetted Ms Hart's CV, the result might have been that the Yahoo board would have still hired her as a director.
In case you didn't know Ms Hart is currently the CEO of IGT and claimed to have a Economics and Marketing Degree, but actually only had a generic Business Administration degree. So given that she fudged it on her own resume, she likely didn't put much weight into checking out the degree situation when vetting a job candidate (e.g., she was blinded by her own perspective).
In any case, I'm guessing the behind the curtain situation is that the IGT board basically told her, we don't care how much money you are getting from moon-lighting job at Yahoo, but if you don't stop wasting your time with that Yahoo mess and pay attention to your day job, you might find that if/when the spotlight starts to point at our backyard, we'll end up having to do something with your situation here and that'll suck for everyone at IGT.
Single payer legal is probably even worse than single payer medical. The biggest problems with single payer medical is manyfold, but mostly over-use/fraud and rationing.
Even though perhaps some wacko wants every diagnostic test known for imaginary conditions or perhaps someone helps a doctor friend (or some friendly doctor that is giving kickbacks) to overuse (or just overbill) some unneeded or fictitious medical procedure, there is a quantifiable physical upper limit on the amount of overuse/fraud one individual patient can abuse and ways to limit this (although perhaps unpopular). This make it easy to apply statistical law-of-large numbers to the problem of wacko patients and money grubbing doctors (assume there is some distribution) and at least come of with a workable solution as many countries have. On the legal front, there is probably no practical upper limit (lawyer can sue other lawyers, but perhaps there is some universal physics limit of physical paper and motions that can be field per nanosecond).
Then there's the rationing side. Although it may not seem like it, there's probably a limit of legal resources and just like doctors, not all lawyers are interchangeable. Who gets the good lawyers? Who decided what cases are not worth defending? With medical at least there are scientific boards that are supposed to look at medical outcomes. Who would do the lawyer rationing?
Perhaps we can make legal coverage somewhat like worker's comp insurance. You pay into the system depending on your rating, and you are somewhat covered for legal expenses to address some of the short comings of the current system (people object to this type of price based rationing scheme in the general individual medical insurance premium world, but apparently tolerate this in the business world). But those that are dig down in that area tend to see that most worker's comp insurance schemes are full of fraud and waste and are sink-holes of money as well that mostly serves to enrich the "tool-makers" the worker's comp medical provider organizations and the shady businesses that contract with them, and not as much for the workers.
Maybe there's some way to do all this, but it isn't apparent in any of the institutions that we currently have set up to date.
So either the state is ordering the university to pay or the bank is ordering the university to pay...
But in neither instance is it actually the university's idea?
You can argue that it isn't the university's idea to withhold transcripts when the state is threatening to ban a universoty from a source of low cost student loans for their prospective students, but universities have a choice (as a silly example, I'm guessing say Stanford's endowment is big enough to drop out of a state student loan program, if they wanted to) and they chose the path that they are on.
Are you somehow insinuating that it's like that whole thing about "just-following-orders"? So are you suggesting that we let universities off the hook for responsibility for doing this (blaming it on the evil state or the evil banks)? I imagine that in actuallity the universities don't really care that much either way (former students that don't pay their student loans probably aren't good targets for future fund-raising activities), so why bother with them and just go with the flow. In any case, the universities made their bed (by charging so much that many students need low-cost loans to attend), and they really need to be sleeping in that bed, and they don't have much ground to stand on anyhow even if they wanted to somehow buck the establishment. Their business model is the establishment and thus they have a vested interest in keeping the status quo and doing their part to avoid the collapse of the low-cost student loan business...
It's like all the people out there policing the GPL violations. Are they just following orders from Mr R Stallman? No, these people have a vested interest in the GPL "business model" and they don't want to see it collapse so they self police it to the level that they individually care to (some more than others), but it's their individual choice.
AFAIK, although there are no federal laws that require a university to withhold transcripts of students that are in default of their student loans, it is apparently highly encouraged by the department of education to withhold the transcript if a Title IV loan is in default.
However, some states have actual laws that require institutions to withhold transcripts. For instance, California Section 66022 of the California Education Code provides that...
The governing board of every community college district, the Trustees of the California State University, the Regents of the University of California, and the Board of Directors of the Hastings College of the Law shall adopt regulations providing for the withholding of institutional services from students or former students who have been notified in writing at the student's or former student's last known address that he or she is in default on a loan or loans under the Federal Family Education Loan Program. The regulations shall specify the services to be withheld from the student and may include, but are not limited to, the following: (1) The provision of grades. (2) The provision of transcripts. (3) The provision of diplomas.
Also, many states (incl CA), penalize institutions that have high default rates (for instance by not making them eligible for state student loan programs like Cal Grants), so even private institutions have an incentive to help get the default rates down so they can continue to offer those loan sources to future students even if they aren't required by law to do so.
Although I'm sure that many introductory physics students might love it if somehow time was somehow independent of distance so you could just easily convert light-years to distance, but it is not. As explained by numerous posters on this thread, there are a couple of big issues with this simplification.
First, the distance to the clusters in question is infered from its red-shift (which it gets from the actual fabric of space itself expanding). The actual paper implies the cluster is approximatly z=6 (where z = (wavelength_observed-wavelength_theory)/wavelength_theory). Using some typical cosmological constants, we can estimate the approximate age *after* the big bang, and our current estimated age and figure out how long ago the light would have taken to get here relative to our reference frame and come up with a "distance of 12.7 billion light years". Ignoring other issues, this can imply that the cluster was actually closer to us than 12.7 billion light years distant when the light was emitted or farther away, but this ignores the expansion of the universe itself which makes this distance vary over time (in a currently unknown way, but distance is assumed to be accellerating over time).
Second, the concept of "now" is not absolute, but depends on the observer's reference frame. The concept of "now" for an object travelling at the speed of light (like a photon which left this cluster) is literally always just now (effectively infinite time dilation) means from the photon's reference frame, things that happened at the cluster when the photon left and here on earth as I am typing are happening simultaneously (from the photon's point of view, it just left the cluster). From the earth's reference frame, things that are happening on earth (like my typing) are not happening simultaneous with when the photon left and to other observers travelling at different velocities (say a person travelling to the cluster from earth), now to us isn't now to them or now to the cluster either.
A curiosity that happens because of this is a close relative to the so-called "twin-paradox" issue. If from the photon's point of view, it just left the cluster, if we somehow turn-it-around and send it back to the cluster, to an observer at the cluster when it "just arrives", the photon will think it has just left, but how long will have elapsed since the first photon left from the cluster's point of view In many respects, this two-way communication is the true time-machine distance operation, not the one-way description in your post, but it too is complicated by the expansion of the universe.
So although in principle, the cluster that we are receiving the light from right now is certainly *older* than when it left, the age that it is *now* is wholy dependent on the observer's frame of reference and complicated by the expansion of the universe.
Kinda makes your head hurt when you think about it.
I you trust no one you can never form any groups. You eventually have to trust someone. Again, it's quite easy for you to criticize from your comfortable life in a country thousands of miles away.
Of course, you have to trust someone, but in a properly designed covert operation, that set of people is small (a so called "cell") or hierarchical (like a "handler") and you don't fully trust them either. If the cell is that small and the handlers only handle a few folks, the damage caused by misplacement of trust is limited. In this situation, if the cell or the cell's handler was compromized (e.g., arrested in this case), the other members of the cell might have known about it, or if they did not, the damage would be limited to their cell and not a large group.
This kind of stuff is covert operation 101. Even conventional forces have used it. For example, in WWII, the US and France used this Operation Jedburgh. And if you are a Star Wars buff, Jedi is surprisingly similar to what they used to call these special force "Jeds"... Hmm...;^)
I think the idea might be to create something which can be inherited, rather than something that has to be implanted.
If you are willing to modify the genetics to make whatever this "thing" is, why not just modify the genetics to fix whatever protien regulation problem you have? They seem to be talking about theraputic uses, not GM stuff (unless you are thinking of some sort of super soldier/athelete).
As they seem to be deliberatly growing tumours in the subject (albeit calcium sensitive insulin producing tumors), I can't imagine this technique will be used in people for quite a while (as the abstract states, "because it is not ethical to grow tumours in humans").
Also, sounds like nanoparticles don't technically switch on the genes in their experiment, calcium ions did. This rube-goldberg technique used localized heat generated by stimulating the nanoparticles in a tumor inserted in a mouse with radio waves to open up an ion channel that allowed calcium ion already in the body to trigger the gene in the tumor. However, temperature sensitive ion channels aren't the only way to do this, there are also voltage sensistive calcium ion channels too (which is how I remember insulin production is normally triggered in the pancreas). If you have to stick something in your body anyhow (like a tumour), perhaps just using voltage control rather than heat control is probably gonna be just as good.
Noting the "get-of-my-lawn" comment, perhaps the OP was thinking about Solaris.
A long time ago (>10 years), Sun (now Oracle) unbundled the C-compiler from the standard Solaris 2.x package and they started charging extra for their Ansi C-compiler (and it might have been $100 come to think about it)... The theory was that you didn't need the compiler if you were just using Solaris for a workstation running pre-compiled apps (there was an old BSD cc around to recompile the kernel, but it was K&R only), but if you were a Wall-street Quant, you had the money to pay extra for the privilage of writing your own code so they were gonna charge you for the privlage. Of couse the pre-compiled GCC binaries worked just fine on Solaris, so it didn't bother most folks who were tinkering with their own code.
Maybe Microsoft has learned something over time. When Microsoft first bought hotmail, all the front end servers were running on FreeBSD, and the backend servers were running Solaris. The first thing they tried to do was convert everything to Win2K to show the world it could be done. Didn't start out so great and they learned that somethings were best left alone (even though they eventually pushed them all through to show that it could be done**). Now they have another chance with another high-value web property and they decided to be learn from their own experience (since they don't have the goal to make this a showcase).
There are only 18 smelters worldwide that can transform coltan into tantalum. In fact, they've all agreed to not purchase conflict minerals.
The problem for everyone else is there's a LOT of recycling of electronics - the tantalum is re-smelted from recycled electronics (mining recycled electronics is far easier and more productive than trying to extract it out of the earth).
The problem is that previous tantalum caps were made with conflict minerals, so it's technically impossible to say if the cap you're using is completely free of conflict minerals. Short of throwing away all the recycled electronics, that is.
So a manufacturer really cannot say if their product was conflict-free. They can say that no NEW conflict mineral was added, but recycled content may very well be conflict.
Actually, there is ONE industry that might be able to trace all the way back - aviation. Given the strict tracability demands (they can trace screws back to the smelter and maybe the mine that dug it out), it's possible a similar amount of paperwork exists for the avionics. (It partially explains the cost of aviation parts - just having someone file paperwork all day).
A few things...
So, if the large smelters of the world claim they don't buy conflict coltan, then who buys it? If you believe the local reporters, it's the Chinese companies like NingXia Non-ferrous Metal Smeltery (NNMS) via shell companies in neighboring countries to the Congo. After a big crackdown on Belgian, German, UK, and US companies 10 years ago, the Chinese apparently have come in to take up the slack.
I'd also like to see a pointer to where it's easier and more productive to recycle tantalum rather than process coltan into tantalite and then tantalum. Although I've heard that about 30% of tantalum is recycled, I've mostly read that is from industrial scrap (rather than consumer scrap) which is kinda the situation with cardboard.
If I remember correctly, one of the biggest problems with airborne lasers was that of fuel source...
One of the biggest problems with airborne lasers is power efficiency. Let's say your laser is 30% efficient (a pretty agressive number). You basically blow something up inside your plane to generate the power, 30% of it goes out as laser energy toward the target, and the other 70% of the energy you have to deal with in your plane (probably as heat). Whatever you use as a heat shield to keep your own plane from blowing up, you might only need half of that on your target as a defense, not a great ratio.
Of course if the target is a small number of warheads like say what a country like Iran or NK would send over, you can increase the dwell time (the amount of time the laser is focused on the target) on each target, so maybe you don't need too much efficiency and still be able to deal with the rogue warhead or two. Of course with a bunch of warheads from a country say like Russia or China, you've gotta try to shoot them down as fast as you can as they probably have countermeasures that make long dwell times hard. If we thought the rogue warhead is the real threat, maybe it makes more sense than it did in the past.
Silicene doesn't have to be used like bulk silicon-dioxide ingots. Silicene could be used on silicon wafers like bi-layer graphene stacks as a gate material, or maybe similar use to silicides as low-resitance local interconnect (although it doesn't seem like it would be better than say a salicide or self-aligning silicide).
Anyhow, it appears that silicene has a very strong resistance to oxidation.
The targetted mineral in this analysis seem to be coltan (which is refined into tantalum for capacitors) used in the electronics assembly business. Unfortunatly, the electronics supply chain is so obtuse and full of counterfeits as lots of jelly bean components (commodity components like capacitors and resistors) are purchased on the spot-market by board assembly houses, and nobody seemed to care where the stuff comes from as long as the assembly house got a deal.
As an example of how messed up it can be, back in 1998, there was a terrible spike in bad electrolytic capacitors read the wiki about this. Nobody is sure where this stuff came from (although many suspect rogue suppliers that did industrial espionage). Tantalum capacitors tend to be physically smaller parts with even less labeling and counterfeits tend to be "mixed" in with real parts (or maybe the real parts are "cut" with counterfeits), so even lot identification is hard to do.
If people are serious about conflict materials like Coltan in the Congo, the real thing to do is to lower the demand for new electronic assemblies (just like people say reducing the new diamond demand is the only way to do anything about conflict diamonds). These are really just fungable commodities. If you don't buy the conflict version, someone will. As an example, I don't see people using laser spectroscopy on their gasoline to see if their crude oil was refined in Iraq, it's because it doesn't help.
Although folks may talk about labelling (e.g., like "free-trade-coffee" or "shade-grown") to inform consumers, people are just talking about the "beans" and rarely ask about the origin of the cloth "sack" holding the "beans". In a device like a iPhone the A5-chip and maybe the memory chips are the "beans" and the capacitor is sort of like the "sack". It holds the beans, but nobody thinks about it that much. Labelling doesn't get very far when you think of it like that.
I see all sorts of folks talking about reducing their footprint of other things (carbon, water, oil, etc), but I rarely see anyone saying that we shouldn't be buying the latest and greatest electronic do-hickys (kBlah8 just came out, I'm gonna to toss my kBlah7 and buy the new one). Maybe we should all be using our electronic whiz-bangs a bit longer to reduce the demand for these conflict minerals (and all the other environmental damage assembling new and disposing of old electronic do-hickys cause).
Of course you are free to find a piece of land you can take over and defend by force and build your house there and keep it w/o any taxes.
Eventually, the UN may even recognize your efforts, but then you may have to pay a tax (excuse me *dues*) to them to avoid a random country deciding to annex it back, so maybe that isn't such a great strategy after all.
It actually surprises me that so many folks seem to view owning property as some sort of natural law of nature. Ownership of property is merely a fiction of man that will disappear when our species dies out or eventually when the sun extinguishes our poor planet from the universe. As it is our own creation, it is whatever we make of it. No more, no less.
If you read the title to your house, you didn't really buy anything at all except a warranty deed from the previous owner that they bought it from someone that legally owned it and now give whatever their rights happened to be to you (it doesn't explicitly say what those rights are). If it weren't for general agreement of your neighbors and the government what those rights you just got from the previous owner were, you didn't really buy much except a piece of paper, right?
FWIW, Ben & Jerry's (the ice cream company) once tried to find a CEO that should be doing it for the love it, not the money. After a so-called "essay-contest" they got Bob Holland. Five years later (and after going through another CEO in the meantime), Ben & Jerry's finally sold-out to Unilever (a british and dutch megacorporation).
What lesson can we draw from this? Perhaps that sometime people (incl. CEOs, teachers and often people managers) you hire that "should be doing it for the love of it", sometimes aren't the best people for you to hire to do that job.
1. Datawidth: CPUs use one-channel 64-bit wide DIMMs (sometimes 2 if you are lucky), you can find high end GPUs with 12 to 16 32-bit channel to dram chips. Hard to find that many spare pins on a CPU package.
2. DIMMs: People that buy CPUs want to plug in memory modules and the physics of connectors and their electrical limitations limit the performance. For example, DDR3 DIMMs need read/write "leveling" per-bit-lane compensation for clock time-of-flight across the DIMM, GPUs tend to use soldererd-in DRAMs and can control clock skew on the board level and achieve more optimal electricals.
3. Specialized DRAM issues: DRAMs made for GPUs are designed by companies (like Samsung) to be bleeding edge in performance and price (sometimes 3x times the price for 25% more clock speed). These specialized DRAMs also tend to be have a wider native data interface than ones used in DIMMs (e.g, 32-bit vs 8 or 16-bit). That's not something that designers of CPU chipsets would target (back when there were chipsets), and now that CPUs are directly connected to DIMMs, that makes it even less economical to target something this specialized. The perf/$ ratio isn't that good, so it's only good for someone who wants perf.
There's no technical reason why it couldn't be done, but there hasn't been a *general* market for it though (you asked why *general* purpose CPU-memory interfaces don't have this bandwidth).
...But, unless it has terrestrial planets in the Goldilocks zone, it is unlikely to to be a real prospect for SETI.
If you actually read the paper, it appears from the spectral analysis, the authors conclude that HIP56948 should have about 1/2 the "rocky" material formed around it than our sun, and radial velocity measurements seem to exclude giant plants in the inner planetary region. So, although they cannot be sure there are or are-not rocky planets that are terran like in the Goldilocks zone (we don't have a reliable way to figure that out yet from ground based observations), the available evidence seems to indicate that at least the prerequisites are there this would have been a reasonably good bet for the Kepler planetary survey (but it's not part of the mission). However, they are looking forward to seeing more Kepler results to verify if their spectrographic measurements technique on stars that predict the amount of rocky material is consistent with actual Kepler planetary observations** which would increase the chance that there might be Goldilocks planets circling this star and make it possible to select really good candidate star that might have rocky planets from ground based telescope spectrographic data.
**FYI. The technique that the Kepler survey telescope uses is to actually look for photometric image of a planet transiting the star as viewed from the telescope to confirm actual planetary existance and infer it's size and distance from the star from the duration of the transit by Kepler's law (hence the name of the mission).
Unfortunatly, although this star is similar to our Sun, this star is quite a bit younger than our sun (by about 1 billion years and our Sun is about 4.5 billion years old). As a result, we may not have a really good chance with SETI on this system (even if planets exists). It's also really hard to tell which stars come from the same stellar nursery as stars drift quite a bit after formation, but there is apparently some evidence that our sun was part of a very large nursery by dating the remanents of supernova that hit our solar system when it was probably just formed, but a billion years is a long time...
FYI, SMIC (the largest foundary in china, probably larger than all the others in china put together) already has a ARM foundary partner license which allows companies using SMIC to use an ARM9 hard macro for a very nominal fee. I'm sure that the negotiation of the future fees and these CPU standardization talks are not unrelated (this is china after all).
Arm has been very aggressive in licensing in China (bulk pricing, bundling Mali-graphics cores for free, etc) much to the detriment of Mips. In fact there are many rumors going around that some chinese company will buy Mips and that negotiation and the CPU standardization talks are probably not unrelated as well.;^)
The Chinese government tends to help their local companies quite a bit and with the size of the Chinese market, they have quite a bit of leverage.
As yet another example, you may or may-not be aware that China has thier own wireless standards too: TD-SCDMA, TD-LTE. FWIW, if you wanted to "spy" on people in your country, it seems this is a bigger lever than an CPU ISA... If you don't put in a back-door, you can't hook to the local wireless network is a much bigger stick...
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So if we are to inform the public about chemistry, we should make sure everyone is talking about the same chemical. Perhaps we should be referring to chemicals using its chemical hashkey identifier like InChIKey=XLYOFNOQVPJJNP-UHFFFAOYSA-N. I'm sure that'll make things more clear for everyone... ;^)
Perhaps if the Yahoo Board would have fully vetted Ms Hart's CV, the result might have been that the Yahoo board would have still hired her as a director.
In case you didn't know Ms Hart is currently the CEO of IGT and claimed to have a Economics and Marketing Degree, but actually only had a generic Business Administration degree. So given that she fudged it on her own resume, she likely didn't put much weight into checking out the degree situation when vetting a job candidate (e.g., she was blinded by her own perspective).
In any case, I'm guessing the behind the curtain situation is that the IGT board basically told her, we don't care how much money you are getting from moon-lighting job at Yahoo, but if you don't stop wasting your time with that Yahoo mess and pay attention to your day job, you might find that if/when the spotlight starts to point at our backyard, we'll end up having to do something with your situation here and that'll suck for everyone at IGT.
Single payer legal is probably even worse than single payer medical. The biggest problems with single payer medical is manyfold, but mostly over-use/fraud and rationing.
Even though perhaps some wacko wants every diagnostic test known for imaginary conditions or perhaps someone helps a doctor friend (or some friendly doctor that is giving kickbacks) to overuse (or just overbill) some unneeded or fictitious medical procedure, there is a quantifiable physical upper limit on the amount of overuse/fraud one individual patient can abuse and ways to limit this (although perhaps unpopular). This make it easy to apply statistical law-of-large numbers to the problem of wacko patients and money grubbing doctors (assume there is some distribution) and at least come of with a workable solution as many countries have. On the legal front, there is probably no practical upper limit (lawyer can sue other lawyers, but perhaps there is some universal physics limit of physical paper and motions that can be field per nanosecond).
Then there's the rationing side. Although it may not seem like it, there's probably a limit of legal resources and just like doctors, not all lawyers are interchangeable. Who gets the good lawyers? Who decided what cases are not worth defending? With medical at least there are scientific boards that are supposed to look at medical outcomes. Who would do the lawyer rationing?
Perhaps we can make legal coverage somewhat like worker's comp insurance. You pay into the system depending on your rating, and you are somewhat covered for legal expenses to address some of the short comings of the current system (people object to this type of price based rationing scheme in the general individual medical insurance premium world, but apparently tolerate this in the business world). But those that are dig down in that area tend to see that most worker's comp insurance schemes are full of fraud and waste and are sink-holes of money as well that mostly serves to enrich the "tool-makers" the worker's comp medical provider organizations and the shady businesses that contract with them, and not as much for the workers.
Maybe there's some way to do all this, but it isn't apparent in any of the institutions that we currently have set up to date.
So either the state is ordering the university to pay or the bank is ordering the university to pay...
But in neither instance is it actually the university's idea?
You can argue that it isn't the university's idea to withhold transcripts when the state is threatening to ban a universoty from a source of low cost student loans for their prospective students, but universities have a choice (as a silly example, I'm guessing say Stanford's endowment is big enough to drop out of a state student loan program, if they wanted to) and they chose the path that they are on.
Are you somehow insinuating that it's like that whole thing about "just-following-orders"? So are you suggesting that we let universities off the hook for responsibility for doing this (blaming it on the evil state or the evil banks)? I imagine that in actuallity the universities don't really care that much either way (former students that don't pay their student loans probably aren't good targets for future fund-raising activities), so why bother with them and just go with the flow. In any case, the universities made their bed (by charging so much that many students need low-cost loans to attend), and they really need to be sleeping in that bed, and they don't have much ground to stand on anyhow even if they wanted to somehow buck the establishment. Their business model is the establishment and thus they have a vested interest in keeping the status quo and doing their part to avoid the collapse of the low-cost student loan business...
It's like all the people out there policing the GPL violations. Are they just following orders from Mr R Stallman? No, these people have a vested interest in the GPL "business model" and they don't want to see it collapse so they self police it to the level that they individually care to (some more than others), but it's their individual choice.
AFAIK, although there are no federal laws that require a university to withhold transcripts of students that are in default of their student loans, it is apparently highly encouraged by the department of education to withhold the transcript if a Title IV loan is in default.
However, some states have actual laws that require institutions to withhold transcripts. For instance, California Section 66022 of the California Education Code provides that...
The governing board of every community college district, the Trustees of the California State University, the Regents of the University of California, and the Board of Directors of the Hastings College of the Law shall adopt regulations providing for the withholding of institutional services from students or former
students who have been notified in writing at the student's or former student's last known address that he or she is in default on a loan or loans under the Federal Family Education Loan Program. The regulations shall specify the services to be withheld from the student and may include, but are not limited to, the following: (1) The provision of grades. (2) The provision of transcripts. (3) The provision of diplomas.
Also, many states (incl CA), penalize institutions that have high default rates (for instance by not making them eligible for state student loan programs like Cal Grants), so even private institutions have an incentive to help get the default rates down so they can continue to offer those loan sources to future students even if they aren't required by law to do so.
Although I'm sure that many introductory physics students might love it if somehow time was somehow independent of distance so you could just easily convert light-years to distance, but it is not. As explained by numerous posters on this thread, there are a couple of big issues with this simplification.
First, the distance to the clusters in question is infered from its red-shift (which it gets from the actual fabric of space itself expanding). The actual paper implies the cluster is approximatly z=6 (where z = (wavelength_observed-wavelength_theory)/wavelength_theory). Using some typical cosmological constants, we can estimate the approximate age *after* the big bang, and our current estimated age and figure out how long ago the light would have taken to get here relative to our reference frame and come up with a "distance of 12.7 billion light years". Ignoring other issues, this can imply that the cluster was actually closer to us than 12.7 billion light years distant when the light was emitted or farther away, but this ignores the expansion of the universe itself which makes this distance vary over time (in a currently unknown way, but distance is assumed to be accellerating over time).
Second, the concept of "now" is not absolute, but depends on the observer's reference frame. The concept of "now" for an object travelling at the speed of light (like a photon which left this cluster) is literally always just now (effectively infinite time dilation) means from the photon's reference frame, things that happened at the cluster when the photon left and here on earth as I am typing are happening simultaneously (from the photon's point of view, it just left the cluster). From the earth's reference frame, things that are happening on earth (like my typing) are not happening simultaneous with when the photon left and to other observers travelling at different velocities (say a person travelling to the cluster from earth), now to us isn't now to them or now to the cluster either.
A curiosity that happens because of this is a close relative to the so-called "twin-paradox" issue. If from the photon's point of view, it just left the cluster, if we somehow turn-it-around and send it back to the cluster, to an observer at the cluster when it "just arrives", the photon will think it has just left, but how long will have elapsed since the first photon left from the cluster's point of view In many respects, this two-way communication is the true time-machine distance operation, not the one-way description in your post, but it too is complicated by the expansion of the universe.
So although in principle, the cluster that we are receiving the light from right now is certainly *older* than when it left, the age that it is *now* is wholy dependent on the observer's frame of reference and complicated by the expansion of the universe.
Kinda makes your head hurt when you think about it.
As far as I can tell this guy did not actually do anything. He got 5 years for a thought crime.
Given this person is a theoretical physicist, perhaps thinking about, but not doing, is sufficient evidence of something? Just a thought ;^)
Still hard to get away from the TSA...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visible_Intermodal_Prevention_and_Response_team
I you trust no one you can never form any groups. You eventually have to trust someone. Again, it's quite easy for you to criticize from your comfortable life in a country thousands of miles away.
Of course, you have to trust someone, but in a properly designed covert operation, that set of people is small (a so called "cell") or hierarchical (like a "handler") and you don't fully trust them either. If the cell is that small and the handlers only handle a few folks, the damage caused by misplacement of trust is limited. In this situation, if the cell or the cell's handler was compromized (e.g., arrested in this case), the other members of the cell might have known about it, or if they did not, the damage would be limited to their cell and not a large group.
This kind of stuff is covert operation 101. Even conventional forces have used it. For example, in WWII, the US and France used this Operation Jedburgh. And if you are a Star Wars buff, Jedi is surprisingly similar to what they used to call these special force "Jeds"... Hmm... ;^)
I think the idea might be to create something which can be inherited, rather than something that has to be implanted.
If you are willing to modify the genetics to make whatever this "thing" is, why not just modify the genetics to fix whatever protien regulation problem you have? They seem to be talking about theraputic uses, not GM stuff (unless you are thinking of some sort of super soldier/athelete).
As they seem to be deliberatly growing tumours in the subject (albeit calcium sensitive insulin producing tumors), I can't imagine this technique will be used in people for quite a while (as the abstract states, "because it is not ethical to grow tumours in humans").
Also, sounds like nanoparticles don't technically switch on the genes in their experiment, calcium ions did. This rube-goldberg technique used localized heat generated by stimulating the nanoparticles in a tumor inserted in a mouse with radio waves to open up an ion channel that allowed calcium ion already in the body to trigger the gene in the tumor. However, temperature sensitive ion channels aren't the only way to do this, there are also voltage sensistive calcium ion channels too (which is how I remember insulin production is normally triggered in the pancreas). If you have to stick something in your body anyhow (like a tumour), perhaps just using voltage control rather than heat control is probably gonna be just as good.
Noting the "get-of-my-lawn" comment, perhaps the OP was thinking about Solaris.
A long time ago (>10 years), Sun (now Oracle) unbundled the C-compiler from the standard Solaris 2.x package and they started charging extra for their Ansi C-compiler (and it might have been $100 come to think about it)... The theory was that you didn't need the compiler if you were just using Solaris for a workstation running pre-compiled apps (there was an old BSD cc around to recompile the kernel, but it was K&R only), but if you were a Wall-street Quant, you had the money to pay extra for the privilage of writing your own code so they were gonna charge you for the privlage. Of couse the pre-compiled GCC binaries worked just fine on Solaris, so it didn't bother most folks who were tinkering with their own code.
Maybe Microsoft has learned something over time. When Microsoft first bought hotmail, all the front end servers were running on FreeBSD, and the backend servers were running Solaris. The first thing they tried to do was convert everything to Win2K to show the world it could be done. Didn't start out so great and they learned that somethings were best left alone (even though they eventually pushed them all through to show that it could be done**). Now they have another chance with another high-value web property and they decided to be learn from their own experience (since they don't have the goal to make this a showcase).
**Here's an (admittedly somewhat biased account) of what they did. http://www.securityoffice.net/mssecrets/hotmail.html
Otherwise, Government procurement policies would be called into doubt
I would think the recent GSA western region scandal put all doubt to rest about Government procurement policies, right?
There are only 18 smelters worldwide that can transform coltan into tantalum. In fact, they've all agreed to not purchase conflict minerals.
The problem for everyone else is there's a LOT of recycling of electronics - the tantalum is re-smelted from recycled electronics (mining recycled electronics is far easier and more productive than trying to extract it out of the earth).
The problem is that previous tantalum caps were made with conflict minerals, so it's technically impossible to say if the cap you're using is completely free of conflict minerals. Short of throwing away all the recycled electronics, that is.
So a manufacturer really cannot say if their product was conflict-free. They can say that no NEW conflict mineral was added, but recycled content may very well be conflict.
Actually, there is ONE industry that might be able to trace all the way back - aviation. Given the strict tracability demands (they can trace screws back to the smelter and maybe the mine that dug it out), it's possible a similar amount of paperwork exists for the avionics. (It partially explains the cost of aviation parts - just having someone file paperwork all day).
A few things...
So, if the large smelters of the world claim they don't buy conflict coltan, then who buys it? If you believe the local reporters, it's the Chinese companies like NingXia Non-ferrous Metal Smeltery (NNMS) via shell companies in neighboring countries to the Congo. After a big crackdown on Belgian, German, UK, and US companies 10 years ago, the Chinese apparently have come in to take up the slack.
Even in aviation, even with all that documentation, they have a problem with counterfeit parts.
I'd also like to see a pointer to where it's easier and more productive to recycle tantalum rather than process coltan into tantalite and then tantalum. Although I've heard that about 30% of tantalum is recycled, I've mostly read that is from industrial scrap (rather than consumer scrap) which is kinda the situation with cardboard.
If I remember correctly, one of the biggest problems with airborne lasers was that of fuel source...
One of the biggest problems with airborne lasers is power efficiency. Let's say your laser is 30% efficient (a pretty agressive number). You basically blow something up inside your plane to generate the power, 30% of it goes out as laser energy toward the target, and the other 70% of the energy you have to deal with in your plane (probably as heat). Whatever you use as a heat shield to keep your own plane from blowing up, you might only need half of that on your target as a defense, not a great ratio.
Of course if the target is a small number of warheads like say what a country like Iran or NK would send over, you can increase the dwell time (the amount of time the laser is focused on the target) on each target, so maybe you don't need too much efficiency and still be able to deal with the rogue warhead or two. Of course with a bunch of warheads from a country say like Russia or China, you've gotta try to shoot them down as fast as you can as they probably have countermeasures that make long dwell times hard. If we thought the rogue warhead is the real threat, maybe it makes more sense than it did in the past.
Silicene doesn't have to be used like bulk silicon-dioxide ingots. Silicene could be used on silicon wafers like bi-layer graphene stacks as a gate material, or maybe similar use to silicides as low-resitance local interconnect (although it doesn't seem like it would be better than say a salicide or self-aligning silicide).
Anyhow, it appears that silicene has a very strong resistance to oxidation.
You are probably alluding to discovery that bi-layer or tri-layer graphene stacks can be induced to have a tunable bandgap... http://www.lbl.gov/msd/assets/docs/highlights/09-9FengWang_bilayer_graphene.pdf
The targetted mineral in this analysis seem to be coltan (which is refined into tantalum for capacitors) used in the electronics assembly business. Unfortunatly, the electronics supply chain is so obtuse and full of counterfeits as lots of jelly bean components (commodity components like capacitors and resistors) are purchased on the spot-market by board assembly houses, and nobody seemed to care where the stuff comes from as long as the assembly house got a deal.
As an example of how messed up it can be, back in 1998, there was a terrible spike in bad electrolytic capacitors read the wiki about this. Nobody is sure where this stuff came from (although many suspect rogue suppliers that did industrial espionage). Tantalum capacitors tend to be physically smaller parts with even less labeling and counterfeits tend to be "mixed" in with real parts (or maybe the real parts are "cut" with counterfeits), so even lot identification is hard to do.
If people are serious about conflict materials like Coltan in the Congo, the real thing to do is to lower the demand for new electronic assemblies (just like people say reducing the new diamond demand is the only way to do anything about conflict diamonds). These are really just fungable commodities. If you don't buy the conflict version, someone will. As an example, I don't see people using laser spectroscopy on their gasoline to see if their crude oil was refined in Iraq, it's because it doesn't help.
Although folks may talk about labelling (e.g., like "free-trade-coffee" or "shade-grown") to inform consumers, people are just talking about the "beans" and rarely ask about the origin of the cloth "sack" holding the "beans". In a device like a iPhone the A5-chip and maybe the memory chips are the "beans" and the capacitor is sort of like the "sack". It holds the beans, but nobody thinks about it that much. Labelling doesn't get very far when you think of it like that.
I see all sorts of folks talking about reducing their footprint of other things (carbon, water, oil, etc), but I rarely see anyone saying that we shouldn't be buying the latest and greatest electronic do-hickys (kBlah8 just came out, I'm gonna to toss my kBlah7 and buy the new one). Maybe we should all be using our electronic whiz-bangs a bit longer to reduce the demand for these conflict minerals (and all the other environmental damage assembling new and disposing of old electronic do-hickys cause).
Of course you are free to find a piece of land you can take over and defend by force and build your house there and keep it w/o any taxes.
Eventually, the UN may even recognize your efforts, but then you may have to pay a tax (excuse me *dues*) to them to avoid a random country deciding to annex it back, so maybe that isn't such a great strategy after all.
It actually surprises me that so many folks seem to view owning property as some sort of natural law of nature. Ownership of property is merely a fiction of man that will disappear when our species dies out or eventually when the sun extinguishes our poor planet from the universe. As it is our own creation, it is whatever we make of it. No more, no less.
If you read the title to your house, you didn't really buy anything at all except a warranty deed from the previous owner that they bought it from someone that legally owned it and now give whatever their rights happened to be to you (it doesn't explicitly say what those rights are). If it weren't for general agreement of your neighbors and the government what those rights you just got from the previous owner were, you didn't really buy much except a piece of paper, right?
FWIW, Ben & Jerry's (the ice cream company) once tried to find a CEO that should be doing it for the love it, not the money. After a so-called "essay-contest" they got Bob Holland. Five years later (and after going through another CEO in the meantime), Ben & Jerry's finally sold-out to Unilever (a british and dutch megacorporation).
What lesson can we draw from this? Perhaps that sometime people (incl. CEOs, teachers and often people managers) you hire that "should be doing it for the love of it", sometimes aren't the best people for you to hire to do that job.
Three things:
1. Datawidth: CPUs use one-channel 64-bit wide DIMMs (sometimes 2 if you are lucky), you can find high end GPUs with 12 to 16 32-bit channel to dram chips. Hard to find that many spare pins on a CPU package.
2. DIMMs: People that buy CPUs want to plug in memory modules and the physics of connectors and their electrical limitations limit the performance. For example, DDR3 DIMMs need read/write "leveling" per-bit-lane compensation for clock time-of-flight across the DIMM, GPUs tend to use soldererd-in DRAMs and can control clock skew on the board level and achieve more optimal electricals.
3. Specialized DRAM issues: DRAMs made for GPUs are designed by companies (like Samsung) to be bleeding edge in performance and price (sometimes 3x times the price for 25% more clock speed). These specialized DRAMs also tend to be have a wider native data interface than ones used in DIMMs (e.g, 32-bit vs 8 or 16-bit). That's not something that designers of CPU chipsets would target (back when there were chipsets), and now that CPUs are directly connected to DIMMs, that makes it even less economical to target something this specialized. The perf/$ ratio isn't that good, so it's only good for someone who wants perf.
There's no technical reason why it couldn't be done, but there hasn't been a *general* market for it though (you asked why *general* purpose CPU-memory interfaces don't have this bandwidth).
anything to keep away unwanted... photographers! ;^)
...But, unless it has terrestrial planets in the Goldilocks zone, it is unlikely to to be a real prospect for SETI.
If you actually read the paper, it appears from the spectral analysis, the authors conclude that HIP56948 should have about 1/2 the "rocky" material formed around it than our sun, and radial velocity measurements seem to exclude giant plants in the inner planetary region. So, although they cannot be sure there are or are-not rocky planets that are terran like in the Goldilocks zone (we don't have a reliable way to figure that out yet from ground based observations), the available evidence seems to indicate that at least the prerequisites are there this would have been a reasonably good bet for the Kepler planetary survey (but it's not part of the mission). However, they are looking forward to seeing more Kepler results to verify if their spectrographic measurements technique on stars that predict the amount of rocky material is consistent with actual Kepler planetary observations** which would increase the chance that there might be Goldilocks planets circling this star and make it possible to select really good candidate star that might have rocky planets from ground based telescope spectrographic data.
**FYI. The technique that the Kepler survey telescope uses is to actually look for photometric image of a planet transiting the star as viewed from the telescope to confirm actual planetary existance and infer it's size and distance from the star from the duration of the transit by Kepler's law (hence the name of the mission).
Unfortunatly, although this star is similar to our Sun, this star is quite a bit younger than our sun (by about 1 billion years and our Sun is about 4.5 billion years old). As a result, we may not have a really good chance with SETI on this system (even if planets exists). It's also really hard to tell which stars come from the same stellar nursery as stars drift quite a bit after formation, but there is apparently some evidence that our sun was part of a very large nursery by dating the remanents of supernova that hit our solar system when it was probably just formed, but a billion years is a long time...
FYI, SMIC (the largest foundary in china, probably larger than all the others in china put together) already has a ARM foundary partner license which allows companies using SMIC to use an ARM9 hard macro for a very nominal fee. I'm sure that the negotiation of the future fees and these CPU standardization talks are not unrelated (this is china after all).
Arm has been very aggressive in licensing in China (bulk pricing, bundling Mali-graphics cores for free, etc) much to the detriment of Mips. In fact there are many rumors going around that some chinese company will buy Mips and that negotiation and the CPU standardization talks are probably not unrelated as well. ;^)
The Chinese government tends to help their local companies quite a bit and with the size of the Chinese market, they have quite a bit of leverage.
As yet another example, you may or may-not be aware that China has thier own wireless standards too: TD-SCDMA, TD-LTE. FWIW, if you wanted to "spy" on people in your country, it seems this is a bigger lever than an CPU ISA... If you don't put in a back-door, you can't hook to the local wireless network is a much bigger stick...