I once made a link from a mention of a leading kit car manufacturer to their web site.
As usual with Slashdot discussions about Wikipedia, there are many stories of people who got reverted and rarely any links to the edit history.
In this case, I suspect that this was your first and only edit on Wikipedia and that possibly you are affiliated with this "leading kit manufacturer". My experience is that if I bother to check out external links added as first-time edits, they look like link spam 99% of the time; that's why they are often reverted immediately.
In case you are curious about what makes something look like link spam: the same editor added links to the same website to 10 other articles, or the text with the links reads like an advert ("..is a leading manufacturer of high quality $product"), or the landing page is a web shop, or the landing page is a content-scraping farm plastered with ads.
I have done many such reverts myself (no, not an admin), although I am not very active anymore, for exactly the reasons mentioned in TFS: got older, got married, too many other things to deal with in life.
I'm a long-time emacs user, but I'm not too enthusiastic about emacs's support for html syntax. I haven't found a convenient way to deal with mixed html, javascript, php, and css, each with different indentation and syntax highlighting requirements. How do you deal with those?
Some of the pollutants that burning coal dumps into the air? Radioactive uranium.
Someone else already mentioned that this statement is about nuclear plants under normal operation, not ones that have a failure.
But moreover: it was about uranium and thorium, which have half-lives of billions of years, which means a very low level of radioactivity and therefore hardly a radiation hazard.
And the uranium and thorium are in the fly ash. In a decent modern coal plant, fly ash is removed from the exhaust gases. Yes, disposing of the ash is a problem, but I dare say, less problematic than disposal of nuclear waste. See Wikipedia, fly ash.
Try AvantSlash. It is a CGI script to be installed on your own web server that will reduce an article (100-200 kB of bloated HTML) to 20 kB of lightweight HTML that even my 2008'ish smartphone can handle. It supports dynamic comment expansion and new features are on the way in the beta version that I'm working on.
I also use it on my netbook these days, although not for posting.
in fact we use more energy each year than is delivered by sunlight!
is not correct. From World energy consumption at Wikipedia: total energy consumption (oil, coal, etc.) is 1.5e13 W, while solar irradiation is 1.7e17 W. That's about a factor 10,000.
And none of those algorithms has ever been broken. The same is true for the various Internet cryptographic protocols: SSL, S/MIME, IPSec, SSH, and so on.
I'm replying here because this is the first post I found mentioning the name of the OP.
This story screams: "TROLL TROLL TROLL!" to me. The alleged original poster Dr. John Michael Dorian is a fictional character from a tv series.
if there were two artists, A and B, and A has 1 million recent fans and B has 10 thousand recent fans, and there's $1m to go around, a linear distribution would say that A gets $999,010, and B gets $9,990. Under the above formula, A gets 1000 shares and B gets 100 shares, meaning A gets $909,090 and B gets $90,909.. Artist A hardly suffers, but artist B can now live on their work.
But if there were a 100 'B-class' artists for every 'A' class artist, then artist 'A' gets $500 k and each 'B' gets $50 k. And if, in addition there is a class 'C' consisting of everyone who has rudimentary musical skills (10 million videotaped children performing for their parents) have 2 fans, they can claim 1.4 M shares; the royalties will be distributed as $71 for artist A, $7 for each artist B, and $0,10 for each artist C.
if I wake up on a weekend and don't shower until noon for example (whereas normally I shower before work a few hours earlier than that), I will without fail be starting to develop a bad headache.
dissolving sodium hypochlorite in the water or by dissolving salt (NaCl) and producing the chlorine in situ by electrolysis. Either practice makes the water sufficiently conductive to carry lethal currents.
From some quick googling, I find that chlorine concentrations are typically 1--5 mg/L. (ref). Given that dissolved salts in tap water are typically 100 mg/L (water hardness on wikipedia), I doubt that a bit of chlorine makes a lot of difference.
That said, the conductivity of drinking water is (much) lower than 0.05 S/m. With 100 volts over 2 meters, you get a current density of 2.5 A/m2. If you put a human body in that water (surface area 1 m2), that is certainly enough to kill. With very pure water, the current is a factor 100 lower, but I think 25 mA through the body is enough to kill.
You have entries in a list, each item should map to an object which contains the number AS IS. There's no need to fudge about with names and numbers,
When you're abroad, you have to modify phone numbers by an international prefix. For example, a Dutch phone number 020-1234567 becomes 003120-1234567: a zero is dropped and replaced by the prefix 0031. It makes sense to do pattern matching on the last part of the phone number, although it is debatable whether that is a good thing for other things than incoming calls.
They synthesized something enough to see it in a mass spectrometer. Note that mass spectrometers need less than a nanomol or so (0.1 micrograms), and the compound was probably in a solution, mixed with a lot of other compounds.
Then it is being speculated that (a) the synthesis can be scaled up to produce a few hundred tonnes in a cost-effective way, (b) the stuff is stable enough to not decompose explosively if you shake it too hard, and (c) can be burnt in a controlled way to make it suitable as a rocket fuel.
A long shot. Unfortunately, it seems to be necessary nowadays to speculate about far-fetched applications in fundamental research, since the fact that a new compound consisting of just 4 nitrogen and 6 oxygen atoms is synthesized that has never been seen before, is not considered to be interesting by itself.
Because he's not really adding value, only a markup for selling in a different place.
The added value is that customers looking for a specific book can find a second-hand seller online. I sometimes buy 2nd hand scientific books (the kind that costs $200 new) online; no way that I would consider visiting 20 second-hand stores around here for the faint chance that one of them happens to have that book on the shelf.
The smart thrift store owner would scan the books by themselves and increase the price and/or put them online.
The first is the "sweet spot" problem. [...] The picture becomes squashed or flattened if you sit too close to the screen, elongated with exaggerated depth if you set too far away.
It turns out that the brain cannot determine absolute depth from stereoscopic cues alone. If you watch a stereoscopic image without other cues (edge of the screen, prior knowledge about the exact shape), it turns out to be impossible to estimate the dimensions, only relative (one object is behind the other one.) So, this sweet-spot problem is less problematic than you make it appear.
As you pointed out, the equilibrium point is high up in the atmosphere, where the gas is very dilute and can heat to a thousand degrees or more (solar UV heating and some contribution from solar wind). When you plug that temperature into the M-B thermal distribution, the fraction of atoms exceeding the escape velocity of Earth is much larger! In absolute terms, it's still a small number but enough to leak the helium out of the atmosphere over many millions of years.
Let's say T = 1500 K and E0 is the kinetic energy corresponding to the escape velocity. Then E0/kT=19, which is still the very far tail of the M-B distribution.
Another poster referred to Atmospheric escape on Wikipedia, which seems to agree with you. I guess that millions of years are a long time.
So high, in fact, that they exceed Earth's escape velocity;
No; the thermal velocity of a molecule is srqt(<v^2>) = sqrt(3kT/m), with k Boltzmann's constant and m the molecular mass. At room temperature (293 K), this velocity is 1.35 km/s, while the escape velocity is 11 km/s. (By the way, for nitrogen, the thermal velocity is 0.51 km/s). Statistical mechanics predicts that only one molecule in 10^29 has a velocity exceeding the escape velocity of the earth.
However, it is true that helium will reach farther than nitrogen and oxygen; the gravitational potential energy is comparable to the thermal energy at an altitude of 62 km (compare 9 km for nitrogen).
I'm not sure what does cause the helium loss; maybe the helium gets blown away by the solar wind?
Like Intel and others buy lithography machines from ASML and competitors, we buy our (E)UV sources from other companies as well; Cymer, Ushio, and Gigaphoton are producers of such sources. (source). The idea is that you hit a suitable material with a gigantic laser pulse or electrical discharge, thereby heating it to something like 10^5 kelvins such that it starts emitting EUV radiation, along with loads of other wavelengths that you have to filter out. (at 10^5 K, the thermal radiations peaks at about 25 nm). Here is an old (2006) article about EUV sources.
and what optical elements are you using. Its it mostly reflective or are there materials sutable for deep UV?
Deep UV usually means 190 nm, for that there are lenses. In EUV (13 nm), mirrors are used. The reason for the large jump in wavelength is that inbetween, there are neither suitable mirrors, nor lenses; at least so I believe.
the website is the typical marketing tripe.
I think the ASML website has white papers with more technical background, but you can find more information in patents and proceedings from semiconductor-industry conferences. I'm not allowed to tell you anything here that is not already published.:-)
I have to admit I'm a little surprised to see Canon on that list though. I've heard so little about Canon lately they were sort of pushed into the back of my head towards the list of "tech companies circling the drain"
I wasn't aware of someone succeeding where intel failed. I assumed that intel would have simply licensed the tech from anyone that had by now.
IMEC is not the only ASML customer who has played with one of the two EUV Alpha tools, but it's the only one I could find with a quick Google search that has published the results. IMEC is a research institute. Other customers (actual chip manufacturers) have little to gain by disclosing to the competition exactly how much progress they have made.
Then again, just last year means that the licensing talks could easily still be going on. I'm going to keep an eye on this from now on.
Licensing is not the business model. The article suggests that Intel develops these machines ("fancy camera's") themselves, but in reality, they simply buy the machines from one of the three manufacturers (ASML, Nikon, and Canon). We spend an R&D budget of 500 M€ per year to develop these machines; Intel's R&D costs are likely mostly in the design of their chips and optimizing process parameters to squeeze as much as possible out of their fabs.
I deal with EUV lithography for a living. Not at Intel, but at ASML, the world's largest supplier of lithography machines and the only one that has actually manufactured working EUV lithography tools.
Something thats been in development for even 5 years and doesn't show any concrete signs of success should at least have alternatives developed for it. After 5 years if you still can't say for certain if its ever going to work, you definitely need to start looking in different directions.
You are misinformed. On our Alpha development machines, working 22 nm devices were already manufactured last year. (source) We are shipping the first commercial EUV lithography machines in the coming year (source, source) A problem for the chip manufacturers is that the capacity on the alpha machines is rather low and needs to be shared among competitors.
There is a temporary alternative; it is called double patterning (and triple patterning, etcetera). The first problem is that you need twice (thrice) as many process steps for the small features, and also proportionally more lithography machines that are not exactly cheap. The second problem is that double patterning imposes tough restrictions on the chip design; basically you can only make chips that consist mostly of repeating simple patterns. That is doable for memory chips, but much less so for CPUs. Moreover, if you want to continue Moore's law that way, the manufacturing cost will increase exponentially, so this is not a long-term viable alternative.
You can bet that the semiconductor manufacturers have looked for alternatives. But those don't exist, at least not viable ones.
There is a system that is currently (AFAIK) uncrackable. Details of the transaction you sign are sent back to you through SMS with authorization code.
In Netherlands, ING uses this system, but for some reason, the SMS includes only the total amount and not the recipient's identity. A trojan could simply wait until you try to transfer a large sum, and then make you sign for the same amount to the money mule.
Apart from that, if your phone gives you access to your bank account, then you have to treat it as a credit card: never lend it out, always immediately have the SIM card blocked if you lose the phone.
As far as I can tell, there are two problems with this:
A Trojan could intercept enough data to reconstruct the mask. The whitepaper claims that you need to capture between 30 and 1000 transactions. That doesn't account for the fact that the trojan does not need to be 100% sucessful (probably the user can try 3 times).
Unlike an embedded EMV chip, the mask is trivial to copy; the owner will not notice that his passwindow card is missing. With a telephoto lens, an attacker could photograph you from a distance while you use an ATM. This means that you still need a password or cryptographic authentication.
every multi-lingual person on the planet hates English. It's a pain in the ass to learn because there are too many exceptions to the rules or the rules aren't well defined.
You forget to mention the completely irregular pronunciation:
'Though' and 'tough' don't rhyme.
The 'o' in 'women' is not pronounced as one.
The pronunciation of 'lead' depends on whether it's a verb or a noun.
Slashdot Mirror
As usual with Slashdot discussions about Wikipedia, there are many stories of people who got reverted and rarely any links to the edit history.
In this case, I suspect that this was your first and only edit on Wikipedia and that possibly you are affiliated with this "leading kit manufacturer". My experience is that if I bother to check out external links added as first-time edits, they look like link spam 99% of the time; that's why they are often reverted immediately.
In case you are curious about what makes something look like link spam: the same editor added links to the same website to 10 other articles, or the text with the links reads like an advert ("..is a leading manufacturer of high quality $product"), or the landing page is a web shop, or the landing page is a content-scraping farm plastered with ads.
I have done many such reverts myself (no, not an admin), although I am not very active anymore, for exactly the reasons mentioned in TFS: got older, got married, too many other things to deal with in life.
I'm a long-time emacs user, but I'm not too enthusiastic about emacs's support for html syntax. I haven't found a convenient way to deal with mixed html, javascript, php, and css, each with different indentation and syntax highlighting requirements. How do you deal with those?
Someone else already mentioned that this statement is about nuclear plants under normal operation, not ones that have a failure.
But moreover: it was about uranium and thorium, which have half-lives of billions of years, which means a very low level of radioactivity and therefore hardly a radiation hazard.
And the uranium and thorium are in the fly ash. In a decent modern coal plant, fly ash is removed from the exhaust gases. Yes, disposing of the ash is a problem, but I dare say, less problematic than disposal of nuclear waste. See Wikipedia, fly ash.
I also use it on my netbook these days, although not for posting.
is not correct. From World energy consumption at Wikipedia: total energy consumption (oil, coal, etc.) is 1.5e13 W, while solar irradiation is 1.7e17 W. That's about a factor 10,000.
The ssh 1.x protocol had several notable vulnerabilities which could only be fixed by changing the protocol. One of those was discovered in 1998, before the above statement was made.
I'm replying here because this is the first post I found mentioning the name of the OP. This story screams: "TROLL TROLL TROLL!" to me. The alleged original poster Dr. John Michael Dorian is a fictional character from a tv series.
But if there were a 100 'B-class' artists for every 'A' class artist, then artist 'A' gets $500 k and each 'B' gets $50 k. And if, in addition there is a class 'C' consisting of everyone who has rudimentary musical skills (10 million videotaped children performing for their parents) have 2 fans, they can claim 1.4 M shares; the royalties will be distributed as $71 for artist A, $7 for each artist B, and $0,10 for each artist C.
I don't think that is what you want.
Sounds more like caffeine withdrawal symptoms.
From some quick googling, I find that chlorine concentrations are typically 1--5 mg/L. (ref). Given that dissolved salts in tap water are typically 100 mg/L (water hardness on wikipedia), I doubt that a bit of chlorine makes a lot of difference.
That said, the conductivity of drinking water is (much) lower than 0.05 S/m. With 100 volts over 2 meters, you get a current density of 2.5 A/m2. If you put a human body in that water (surface area 1 m2), that is certainly enough to kill. With very pure water, the current is a factor 100 lower, but I think 25 mA through the body is enough to kill.
When you're abroad, you have to modify phone numbers by an international prefix. For example, a Dutch phone number 020-1234567 becomes 003120-1234567: a zero is dropped and replaced by the prefix 0031. It makes sense to do pattern matching on the last part of the phone number, although it is debatable whether that is a good thing for other things than incoming calls.
Then it is being speculated that (a) the synthesis can be scaled up to produce a few hundred tonnes in a cost-effective way, (b) the stuff is stable enough to not decompose explosively if you shake it too hard, and (c) can be burnt in a controlled way to make it suitable as a rocket fuel.
A long shot. Unfortunately, it seems to be necessary nowadays to speculate about far-fetched applications in fundamental research, since the fact that a new compound consisting of just 4 nitrogen and 6 oxygen atoms is synthesized that has never been seen before, is not considered to be interesting by itself.
The added value is that customers looking for a specific book can find a second-hand seller online. I sometimes buy 2nd hand scientific books (the kind that costs $200 new) online; no way that I would consider visiting 20 second-hand stores around here for the faint chance that one of them happens to have that book on the shelf.
The smart thrift store owner would scan the books by themselves and increase the price and/or put them online.
The first is the "sweet spot" problem. [...] The picture becomes squashed or flattened if you sit too close to the screen, elongated with exaggerated depth if you set too far away.
It turns out that the brain cannot determine absolute depth from stereoscopic cues alone. If you watch a stereoscopic image without other cues (edge of the screen, prior knowledge about the exact shape), it turns out to be impossible to estimate the dimensions, only relative (one object is behind the other one.) So, this sweet-spot problem is less problematic than you make it appear.
As you pointed out, the equilibrium point is high up in the atmosphere, where the gas is very dilute and can heat to a thousand degrees or more (solar UV heating and some contribution from solar wind). When you plug that temperature into the M-B thermal distribution, the fraction of atoms exceeding the escape velocity of Earth is much larger! In absolute terms, it's still a small number but enough to leak the helium out of the atmosphere over many millions of years.
Let's say T = 1500 K and E0 is the kinetic energy corresponding to the escape velocity. Then E0/kT=19, which is still the very far tail of the M-B distribution.
Another poster referred to Atmospheric escape on Wikipedia, which seems to agree with you. I guess that millions of years are a long time.
No; the thermal velocity of a molecule is srqt(<v^2>) = sqrt(3kT/m), with k Boltzmann's constant and m the molecular mass. At room temperature (293 K), this velocity is 1.35 km/s, while the escape velocity is 11 km/s. (By the way, for nitrogen, the thermal velocity is 0.51 km/s). Statistical mechanics predicts that only one molecule in 10^29 has a velocity exceeding the escape velocity of the earth.
However, it is true that helium will reach farther than nitrogen and oxygen; the gravitational potential energy is comparable to the thermal energy at an altitude of 62 km (compare 9 km for nitrogen).
I'm not sure what does cause the helium loss; maybe the helium gets blown away by the solar wind?
So what is the UV source (Excimer laser?)
Like Intel and others buy lithography machines from ASML and competitors, we buy our (E)UV sources from other companies as well; Cymer, Ushio, and Gigaphoton are producers of such sources. (source). The idea is that you hit a suitable material with a gigantic laser pulse or electrical discharge, thereby heating it to something like 10^5 kelvins such that it starts emitting EUV radiation, along with loads of other wavelengths that you have to filter out. (at 10^5 K, the thermal radiations peaks at about 25 nm). Here is an old (2006) article about EUV sources.
and what optical elements are you using. Its it mostly reflective or are there materials sutable for deep UV?
Deep UV usually means 190 nm, for that there are lenses. In EUV (13 nm), mirrors are used. The reason for the large jump in wavelength is that inbetween, there are neither suitable mirrors, nor lenses; at least so I believe.
the website is the typical marketing tripe.
I think the ASML website has white papers with more technical background, but you can find more information in patents and proceedings from semiconductor-industry conferences. I'm not allowed to tell you anything here that is not already published. :-)
(Opinions are mine, not ASML's)
Canon had only 9% market share in 2009; indeed they don't seem to do well at the moment. However, 2009 numbers are probably distorted by the recession.
I forgot to add a disclaimer: the opinions expressed are mine and not necessarily my employer's, etcetera.
IMEC is not the only ASML customer who has played with one of the two EUV Alpha tools, but it's the only one I could find with a quick Google search that has published the results. IMEC is a research institute. Other customers (actual chip manufacturers) have little to gain by disclosing to the competition exactly how much progress they have made.
Licensing is not the business model. The article suggests that Intel develops these machines ("fancy camera's") themselves, but in reality, they simply buy the machines from one of the three manufacturers (ASML, Nikon, and Canon). We spend an R&D budget of 500 M€ per year to develop these machines; Intel's R&D costs are likely mostly in the design of their chips and optimizing process parameters to squeeze as much as possible out of their fabs.
I deal with EUV lithography for a living. Not at Intel, but at ASML, the world's largest supplier of lithography machines and the only one that has actually manufactured working EUV lithography tools.
Something thats been in development for even 5 years and doesn't show any concrete signs of success should at least have alternatives developed for it. After 5 years if you still can't say for certain if its ever going to work, you definitely need to start looking in different directions.
You are misinformed. On our Alpha development machines, working 22 nm devices were already manufactured last year. (source) We are shipping the first commercial EUV lithography machines in the coming year (source, source) A problem for the chip manufacturers is that the capacity on the alpha machines is rather low and needs to be shared among competitors.
There is a temporary alternative; it is called double patterning (and triple patterning, etcetera). The first problem is that you need twice (thrice) as many process steps for the small features, and also proportionally more lithography machines that are not exactly cheap. The second problem is that double patterning imposes tough restrictions on the chip design; basically you can only make chips that consist mostly of repeating simple patterns. That is doable for memory chips, but much less so for CPUs. Moreover, if you want to continue Moore's law that way, the manufacturing cost will increase exponentially, so this is not a long-term viable alternative.
You can bet that the semiconductor manufacturers have looked for alternatives. But those don't exist, at least not viable ones.
There is a system that is currently (AFAIK) uncrackable. Details of the transaction you sign are sent back to you through SMS with authorization code.
In Netherlands, ING uses this system, but for some reason, the SMS includes only the total amount and not the recipient's identity. A trojan could simply wait until you try to transfer a large sum, and then make you sign for the same amount to the money mule.
Apart from that, if your phone gives you access to your bank account, then you have to treat it as a credit card: never lend it out, always immediately have the SIM card blocked if you lose the phone.
My Passwindow method could have prevented this and cost practically nothing to implement too,
I suppose you mean http://www.passwindow.com/index.html ?
As far as I can tell, there are two problems with this:
You forget to mention the completely irregular pronunciation:
These are my favorites. Here is a web page with more of them: http://www.worsleyschool.net/socialarts/strange/strange.html
Obligatory: http://xkcd.com/202/