Unless we redefine "people" to mean those who cheat, and reserve some other word to describe those who don't. The Supreme Court has already redefined "people" to include corporations, so it's apparently fashionable to redefine key terms like this.
People don't go home because they "feel guilty" and "heard someone's argument". You give the idiots behind the megaphones too much credit.
Right-wing nutters outside abortion clinics have as much persuasive power in reasoning as a urine-soaked bum with Hep-C standing outside a Tiffany's jewelry store spewing about aliens implanting microchips beneath our skins.
No one is going to buy a $25,000 diamond ring when they have to cross a urine-soaked Hep-C bum, and it's not his "reasoning powers" that turned such customers away. You're delusional if you think everyone who doesn't shop at the store now believes aliens implant chips beneath our skin. Sane, normal people, like to stay away from the crazies.
I'm sure right-wing nutters would call it a DoS attack if 6'5" tall black men with black panther t-shirts stood by the entrances of all churches with megaphones blaring about white oppression. The church pews would empty out except for the die-hard churchgoers, and by your reasoning, it would be because they all 'agree' about white oppression, rather than just want to stay away from crazies.
The H1-B issue is somewhat moot because that visa transitions into a permanent residence and citizenship over the years. I've been reading Slashdot since 1998 and reading about those "evil H1-B workers" since the beginning -- guess what? Those very same H1-B workers from 1998 are now all citizens. So, at some point, the argument devolves into, "yeah those brown citizens are stealing our jobs!" Which, honestly, is a horrible racist argument.
Criticism over L-1 visas (does not lead to citizenship) or outsourcing is more valid, because that is money exiting the country. However, we, the U.S., have balanced trade with India (equal money flows out to India as money flows in from India). The largest trade imbalance is what we have with China (for a variety of reasons, mostly due to the China suppressing the value of the Yuan/Renminbi). For that reason, our economists and think tanks prefer industry and trade to move to India from China, because it will greatly reduce the American trade deficit.
What about denial-of-service attacks on abortion clinics? I've seen plenty of right-wing nutters with megaphones shooing away customers. How is making a website slow and unbearably inconvenient any different than making a visit to the abortion clinic slow and unbearably inconvenient?
Higher latency translates into higher spreads. People quickly forget that stocks used to have 25 cent spreads, and now mostly only have 1 cent spreads. Say Microsoft on Nasdaq is the "primary" (leading indicator) of the true stock price. Microsoft in Chicago Stock Exchange is effectively a copy. When MSFT on Nasdaq goes up, for whatever reason, the folks with active offers on CSX will lose money unless they can cancel. If the latency is too high and those with sell limit orders on CSX are guaranteed to lose money in this scenario, they'll quote at a larger spread to "make up the difference". Think of it like sales tax, the company "pays" it, but it's really passed on to you.
Why is there a spread at all? Why are there bids at $18.01 and offers at $18.02? Why not just have "one price" for a stock, and everyone buys and sells at this agreed upon price? For the same reason options charge a premium. You're not going to be able to buy cheaply a 1-year call option of Microsoft with a strike price a couple cents out of the money. Such an option is expensive because Microsoft could easily be worth more by a couple cents in a year's time. Similarly, a put option is also expensive, because Microsoft could easily be worth less by a couple cents in a year's time. Both are true. Similarly, with "high latency" exchanges, the stock could either move up or down. You might be thinking "but wait a minute, what's the chance the stock actually moves up or down in 120 microseconds?" But you're forgetting about conditional-probabilities. If no one executes the lingering bid or ask limit order, whether the stock moved or not is immaterial. The only scenarios that matter are those that are subsequent to the bid or ask limit order being executed. The thing is, limit orders are rarely executed until there is information that the stock is about to move. When a stock is about to move up, buyers whack the ask limit orders. When the stock is about to move down, sellers whack the bid limit orders. So the probability of the stock moving, _conditional_ on getting your limit order filled, is quite high. Liquidity providers need to quickly realize a stock is about to move up and cancel their ask limit orders before losing money. If high latency or regulations prevent them from cancelling their ask limit orders effectively, they'll no longer place them 1 cent away from the bid. They'll go back to the early '90s of bid-ask spreads that closer to 25 cents.
Liquidity isn't just about there being _someone_ willing to buy or sell; it's about the spread. Do you want to go back to 25 cent spreads from the early '90s? Most spreads today are 1 cent. If you're happy paying 25 cent spreads to get rid of automated traders, I'd say that's a bit like chewing off your arm to swat a fly. Most automated traders make anyways from 0.1 cents to 0.5 cents per share. Comparatively, retailers like E*Trade charge customers $9.99 for trades that average around 400 shares, which is 2.5 cents per share. Mutual funds like Fidelity often charge 1 to 2% management fees on investment, which is 30 to 60 cents per share on a $30 stock.
Trying to bend the rules of the market to wipe out a segment that makes 0.1 to 0.5 cents per share is silly when there's zero effort concerning E*Trade making 2.5 cents per share, or Fidelity making 30 to 60 cents per share. Professional services like Lime (a high-end version of E*Trade) charge 0.1 cents per share. No one is angry that E*Trade charges 2.5 cents per share while Lime charges 0.1 cents per share? Oh, that's right, because it's "only $9.99 !!"
That's the irony of all of this. The average person writes of $9.99 to E*Trade but the media tries to get them concerned about "costs" that are effectively 1/20th of that. I put quotes around "costs" because the spreads have come down from 25 cents per share in the early '90s to 1 cent nowadays. So the average person benefited 24 cents on the spread, and is angry that liquidity providers make 0.1 cents per share? Where was the anger in the early '90s when specialists (a cartel of liquidity providers) were raking it in, making 10+ cents per share? Where is the anger now at Fidelity _losing_ our money in 401ks _and_ charging management fees of 30 to 60 cents per share, annually?
The biggest to benefit from automated traders going away are the Larry Ellisons and other market manipulators who want to buy up companies without "moving the price up." It's all misdirection, trying to convince you and me that we're being hurt. It's the "death tax" all over again. The average person was never affected by estate tax, yet the media convinced us we should be against it, just so some rich jackasses can save money. The same deal is happening now. Rich folks want to buy out the public companies you and I are invested in, cheaply, and stealthily. They don't like automated traders sniffing their actions with pattern matching heuristics and raising the prices (benefiting long-term owners like us).
Not to mention it makes takeover bids cheap. Why punish shareholders of a company and benefit a billionaire like Larry Ellison in his appetite to buy companies?
The ability of the market to move up when it sniffs billionaires trying to buy up the stock cheaply is critical to giving the mom & pop (shareholders) the value they deserve.
All the brouhaha over automated trading is silly when considering a simple, fundamental question -- do you think the price of the stock is wrong? If you think it's too low, buy it, if you think it's too high, short it. If you think the price of the stock is perfectly fine, then why on earth is anyone complaining?
There are laws that say you must adhere to the Terms of Service of the content provider. If the content provider lists as one of those Terms of Service "you must be over 21 to watch" -- guess what, you're lying and committing a crime if you claim to be 21 when you're really 19. Is there a law prohibiting you from casual lying? No. You can lie to your girlfriend where you were last night, no problem. You can lie to your friends how old you are, no problem. But if you lie on a Terms of Service agreement, you're breaching a contract.
Similarly, you're free to spoof your User-Agent when the website's terms of service don't prohibit any user-agent. However, if the ToS _specifically_ says you are not authorized to access the content from browser XYZ, _and_ you spoof your User-Agent so they don't know you're using browser XYZ, _then_ you're breaking two laws, accessing unauthorized content, and using spoofing to do so.
Spoofing by itself isn't a crime. Spoofing to violate the Terms of Service is (in addition to the crime of violating the Terms of Service).
Device owners can already do that. It's called a web proxy. Privoxy is a decent app for windows that substitutes UserAgent strings (as well block ads and other features, at the web proxy level rather than at the browser level).
There's no law against spoofing the UserAgent for fun. The DMCA is a law, however, against spoofing for the _purpose_ of circumventing a security protection.
So, you can choose to have Firefox/Internet Explorer/whatever as your UserAgent for fun, or to make a site work that accidentally didn't work on your browser. But if the site _specifies_ that you are not allowed to access using browser XYZ, _and_ has a technological measure to block browser XYZ, _and_ you spoof to trick it into thinking you're not using browser XYZ, _then_ you're gaining unauthorized access and breaking the current laws. That doesn't mean you'll be caught, since it's difficult to detect UserAgent spoofing, but the current laws are so asinine that your actions would be criminal.
ABC, NBC, et al. could claim Google is spoofing its useragent to circumvent the ban on Google TV. That means they could sue Google under the provisions of DMCA. Blame your legislators for passing idiotic laws that forbid gaining "unauthorized" access through spoofing.
Established since decades? Um, you do realize that neutrons were discovered only in 1932. The discovery of fission was in 1938. The Manhattan project began in 1942. The Nobel Prize for the discovery of nuclear fission was awarded in 1944 for Hahn's discovery in 1938.
Theories need to be experimentally tested; if theories were never tested, we'd still have the theory that heavier objects fall faster than lighter objects, that the world is flat, that Newtonian mechanics explains planetary orbits, etc. Theories are constantly proven wrong, and that's how we end up with newer, better models for nature.
That's also why Nobel prizes aren't awarded the same year as discoveries. They wait to make sure it's experimentally repeatable and peer-reviewed.
I don't think they're suggesting more carbon atoms are being created out of thin air. It seems like they're saying it would have the same size and number of particles, but its mass would go up -- i.e. it would have more inertia. Lots of models in physics require "gaining mass" -- i.e. gaining inertia.
Einstein predicts as you accelerate to the speed of light, you gain mass in your reference frame -- i.e. it becomes harder and harder to accelerate yourself further because you appear to be getting infinitely massive. Einstein is not suggesting that your belly expands and you start generating more particles. He's using "mass" interchangeably with "inertia". Greater mass == greater inertia, when all else is kept constant.
Similarly, the experiment with graphene suggests that a proper configuration of it will yield something with greater inertia (i.e. greater mass) than its constituent masses imply.
All science predictions are math tricks. If the prediction holds up, our existing models are correct, otherwise, our existing models are broken. Creating mass from graphene is not a new theory, it is the _consequence_ of our existing theories that someone cleverly derived.
Point is, either way, Abdulaziz Alhaidari is now famous and has done the incredible. He's either famous for making a marvelous derivation of our existing theories, or he's famous for disproving our current models by explaining what our current models predict that would later be experimentally contradicted. Just as the Manhattan project was a test of atomic theory; if it worked, an amazing weapon was created; if it didn't work, it had profound ramifications on invalidating the the atomic theory of the day. Either it's a win for engineering, building something amazing, or a win for science, changing the models to more closely match reality.
Facebook, MySpace, Orkut -- everyone of these requires https for sending username and password. They switch back to normal http after the login because https puts load on their system.
You forgot to mention the most retarded part of the "spending" concerns. India's Fed. Govt. isn't increasing the Dept. of Atomic Energy's budget. It merely gave clearance to the DAE to build the facility using the DAE's existing budget. If the Fed. Govt denied clearance, the $270m stays with the DAE, and _cannot_ be spent by the Dept. of Transportation for roads or the Dept. of Education for schools or the Dept. of Agriculture for farm subsidies. If the DAE didn't build a nutrino detector, it would just spend that money on other nuclear research. That's what the whole freaking department is about, atomic research. If NASA saves some money by not doing a shuttle launch, its money doesn't get yanked and moved to Homeland Security. Once NASA has been budgeted, the money stays within NASA. The following year, NASA's budget can be reduced if the senate thinks it's wasteful.
Folks don't realize that budgets work like fractals, and on contract law. The Fed. Govt is only responsible on carving out the budget for its departments, it does not directly budget every single brick and peon. Moreover, once budgeted, the Govt. enters into a contract and has to fulfill it or risk default. Democracies operate on contract-law and rule of law; the Fed. Govt. would be acting like an asshat monarch if it just swooped in and stole money from one dept. and moved it to another mid-year.
If you read the original article, you'll learn that India's DoE is building it out of its own allocated budget -- it is _not_ requesting a budget increase from the Federal Govt. All the fed. govt has done is given _clearance_ (NOT _funding_) for the DoE to build it. It's up to the DoE to find out how to scrape together $270m from their budget.
To put it succinctly, if the nutrino detector isn't built, the DoE would have an extra $270m to spend on something else. You'd rather they build a nuclear reactor?
He gets an impressive resume and gains admission to any PhD program of his choosing? Becomes a professor, and... uses his teaching assistants as an endless supply of cannibalistic food?
Considering India's GDP growth rate is among the highest in the world, I'm not sure if they ought to be listening to advice from nations with stagnant GDP growth or negative GDP growth.
Fix your own economy first before preaching. And if you believe your own words, don't breathe, don't take bathroom breaks, until you get out of a recession.
Keep in mind that India's space program is a profit-center. It actually _earns_ more money than the govt. spends on it. That's because placing satellites into orbit is big business, and high-tech services like satellite launches sell for hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars.
South Korea and India were of similar economic situations in 1950, the difference being that S. Korea poured money into technology, and India did what you suggested. Guess what? Getting homeless people to fish just creates lots of poor fishermen instead of lots of poor beggars. Big whoop. The goal is to create more jobs for scientists, physicists, researchers, lab assistants, programmers, etc.
Plus, India's tax rate is far lower than in Western Europe, and 90% of people are not taxed. So the amount they spend is a tiny drop in the bucket of the annual income of people.
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_India#Tax_Rates "about 10 per cent of the population meets the minimum threshold of taxable income" So 90% of the population pays 0% taxes. And the progressive tax rates for the remainder of the population go from 10% to a maximum of 30% tax.
As for literacy, the "majority" of Indians are not illiterate, 32% are illiterate as of 2007, which is still a big number, but not a majority. Much of that illiterate population was born circa 1950. In the age group 7-15, literacy is 90% (10% illiterate).
Moreover, your presumption that they "prefer to spend their money being number 6, than cleaning up their house" is childish if not outright moronic. India's economy is $1.2 trillion dollars, and the project costs $270 million. That's 0.02% of the economy. To put that in perspective, that's equivalent to a 19 second bathroom break a day. And let's not forget that the project could be profitable, and in the very least provides good high-end jobs for their increasingly educated population.
Compare $270 million with the numerous welfare and social programs India provides to poor people. $13 billion to subsidize food for low-income families. $12 billion to subsidize fertilizer for poor farmers. $7 billion for education (at the federal level, states pay more). The list goes on for social programs that are all near $10 billion each.
In the end, they have a democracy and if folks don't like the budget, they'll elect other folks in. Every nation's budget is going to have cutting-edge R&D. It's ludicrous to suggest otherwise. Overall, their nation is doing fine, rapidly progressing with envious growth rates. It's not _your_ tax money being spent (and even for Indians, it's only the tax money of the upper 10%), so relax and let them build a nutrino research facility. If you're interested in nutrinos, I'm sure they'll love for you to pay them money to use their research center.
WindowsNT/WindowsXP has vastly better security than Windws95/WindowsME, even though they all run windows applications. The big difference is that Windows95/WindowsME lacked a memory model that sandboxed each application's memory. That meant one rogue application on Windows95/ME could start modifying kernel memory, or other applications' memory. Instead, under WindowsNT/WindowsXP, an application exits with a general protection fault.
There are stricter security models that go beyond merely sandboxing memory pages. Windows Vista introduced privilege escalation dialogue. It allows you to run applications with lower privileges (non-admin), and when the application attempts to do something that requires admin privileges, a dialog is brought up to prompt you for approval. I can imagine finer grained capabilities. E.g. your web browser should only have file access to its caching directory. If it attempts to read or write anywhere else, the operating system pauses the application and prompts the user for approval.
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You just defined a war. And, yes, killing during war is not considered murder.
Unless we redefine "people" to mean those who cheat, and reserve some other word to describe those who don't. The Supreme Court has already redefined "people" to include corporations, so it's apparently fashionable to redefine key terms like this.
People don't go home because they "feel guilty" and "heard someone's argument". You give the idiots behind the megaphones too much credit.
Right-wing nutters outside abortion clinics have as much persuasive power in reasoning as a urine-soaked bum with Hep-C standing outside a Tiffany's jewelry store spewing about aliens implanting microchips beneath our skins.
No one is going to buy a $25,000 diamond ring when they have to cross a urine-soaked Hep-C bum, and it's not his "reasoning powers" that turned such customers away. You're delusional if you think everyone who doesn't shop at the store now believes aliens implant chips beneath our skin. Sane, normal people, like to stay away from the crazies.
I'm sure right-wing nutters would call it a DoS attack if 6'5" tall black men with black panther t-shirts stood by the entrances of all churches with megaphones blaring about white oppression. The church pews would empty out except for the die-hard churchgoers, and by your reasoning, it would be because they all 'agree' about white oppression, rather than just want to stay away from crazies.
So you would support a DoS attack on an abortion clinic web-based appointment signup?
The H1-B issue is somewhat moot because that visa transitions into a permanent residence and citizenship over the years. I've been reading Slashdot since 1998 and reading about those "evil H1-B workers" since the beginning -- guess what? Those very same H1-B workers from 1998 are now all citizens. So, at some point, the argument devolves into, "yeah those brown citizens are stealing our jobs!" Which, honestly, is a horrible racist argument.
Criticism over L-1 visas (does not lead to citizenship) or outsourcing is more valid, because that is money exiting the country. However, we, the U.S., have balanced trade with India (equal money flows out to India as money flows in from India). The largest trade imbalance is what we have with China (for a variety of reasons, mostly due to the China suppressing the value of the Yuan/Renminbi). For that reason, our economists and think tanks prefer industry and trade to move to India from China, because it will greatly reduce the American trade deficit.
What about denial-of-service attacks on abortion clinics? I've seen plenty of right-wing nutters with megaphones shooing away customers. How is making a website slow and unbearably inconvenient any different than making a visit to the abortion clinic slow and unbearably inconvenient?
Higher latency translates into higher spreads. People quickly forget that stocks used to have 25 cent spreads, and now mostly only have 1 cent spreads. Say Microsoft on Nasdaq is the "primary" (leading indicator) of the true stock price. Microsoft in Chicago Stock Exchange is effectively a copy. When MSFT on Nasdaq goes up, for whatever reason, the folks with active offers on CSX will lose money unless they can cancel. If the latency is too high and those with sell limit orders on CSX are guaranteed to lose money in this scenario, they'll quote at a larger spread to "make up the difference". Think of it like sales tax, the company "pays" it, but it's really passed on to you.
Why is there a spread at all? Why are there bids at $18.01 and offers at $18.02? Why not just have "one price" for a stock, and everyone buys and sells at this agreed upon price? For the same reason options charge a premium. You're not going to be able to buy cheaply a 1-year call option of Microsoft with a strike price a couple cents out of the money. Such an option is expensive because Microsoft could easily be worth more by a couple cents in a year's time. Similarly, a put option is also expensive, because Microsoft could easily be worth less by a couple cents in a year's time. Both are true. Similarly, with "high latency" exchanges, the stock could either move up or down. You might be thinking "but wait a minute, what's the chance the stock actually moves up or down in 120 microseconds?" But you're forgetting about conditional-probabilities. If no one executes the lingering bid or ask limit order, whether the stock moved or not is immaterial. The only scenarios that matter are those that are subsequent to the bid or ask limit order being executed. The thing is, limit orders are rarely executed until there is information that the stock is about to move. When a stock is about to move up, buyers whack the ask limit orders. When the stock is about to move down, sellers whack the bid limit orders. So the probability of the stock moving, _conditional_ on getting your limit order filled, is quite high. Liquidity providers need to quickly realize a stock is about to move up and cancel their ask limit orders before losing money. If high latency or regulations prevent them from cancelling their ask limit orders effectively, they'll no longer place them 1 cent away from the bid. They'll go back to the early '90s of bid-ask spreads that closer to 25 cents.
Liquidity isn't just about there being _someone_ willing to buy or sell; it's about the spread. Do you want to go back to 25 cent spreads from the early '90s? Most spreads today are 1 cent. If you're happy paying 25 cent spreads to get rid of automated traders, I'd say that's a bit like chewing off your arm to swat a fly. Most automated traders make anyways from 0.1 cents to 0.5 cents per share. Comparatively, retailers like E*Trade charge customers $9.99 for trades that average around 400 shares, which is 2.5 cents per share. Mutual funds like Fidelity often charge 1 to 2% management fees on investment, which is 30 to 60 cents per share on a $30 stock.
Trying to bend the rules of the market to wipe out a segment that makes 0.1 to 0.5 cents per share is silly when there's zero effort concerning E*Trade making 2.5 cents per share, or Fidelity making 30 to 60 cents per share. Professional services like Lime (a high-end version of E*Trade) charge 0.1 cents per share. No one is angry that E*Trade charges 2.5 cents per share while Lime charges 0.1 cents per share? Oh, that's right, because it's "only $9.99 !!"
That's the irony of all of this. The average person writes of $9.99 to E*Trade but the media tries to get them concerned about "costs" that are effectively 1/20th of that. I put quotes around "costs" because the spreads have come down from 25 cents per share in the early '90s to 1 cent nowadays. So the average person benefited 24 cents on the spread, and is angry that liquidity providers make 0.1 cents per share? Where was the anger in the early '90s when specialists (a cartel of liquidity providers) were raking it in, making 10+ cents per share? Where is the anger now at Fidelity _losing_ our money in 401ks _and_ charging management fees of 30 to 60 cents per share, annually?
The biggest to benefit from automated traders going away are the Larry Ellisons and other market manipulators who want to buy up companies without "moving the price up." It's all misdirection, trying to convince you and me that we're being hurt. It's the "death tax" all over again. The average person was never affected by estate tax, yet the media convinced us we should be against it, just so some rich jackasses can save money. The same deal is happening now. Rich folks want to buy out the public companies you and I are invested in, cheaply, and stealthily. They don't like automated traders sniffing their actions with pattern matching heuristics and raising the prices (benefiting long-term owners like us).
Not to mention it makes takeover bids cheap. Why punish shareholders of a company and benefit a billionaire like Larry Ellison in his appetite to buy companies?
The ability of the market to move up when it sniffs billionaires trying to buy up the stock cheaply is critical to giving the mom & pop (shareholders) the value they deserve.
All the brouhaha over automated trading is silly when considering a simple, fundamental question -- do you think the price of the stock is wrong? If you think it's too low, buy it, if you think it's too high, short it. If you think the price of the stock is perfectly fine, then why on earth is anyone complaining?
Just to clarify, the crime of violating the Terms of Service isn't a serious one, it's usually a slap-on-the-wrist "breach of contract" violation.
The crime of spoofing to violate the Terms of Service, however, is a DMCA violation, a federal crime that may involve jail time and stiff penalties.
There are laws that say you must adhere to the Terms of Service of the content provider. If the content provider lists as one of those Terms of Service "you must be over 21 to watch" -- guess what, you're lying and committing a crime if you claim to be 21 when you're really 19. Is there a law prohibiting you from casual lying? No. You can lie to your girlfriend where you were last night, no problem. You can lie to your friends how old you are, no problem. But if you lie on a Terms of Service agreement, you're breaching a contract.
Similarly, you're free to spoof your User-Agent when the website's terms of service don't prohibit any user-agent. However, if the ToS _specifically_ says you are not authorized to access the content from browser XYZ, _and_ you spoof your User-Agent so they don't know you're using browser XYZ, _then_ you're breaking two laws, accessing unauthorized content, and using spoofing to do so.
Spoofing by itself isn't a crime. Spoofing to violate the Terms of Service is (in addition to the crime of violating the Terms of Service).
Device owners can already do that. It's called a web proxy. Privoxy is a decent app for windows that substitutes UserAgent strings (as well block ads and other features, at the web proxy level rather than at the browser level).
There's no law against spoofing the UserAgent for fun. The DMCA is a law, however, against spoofing for the _purpose_ of circumventing a security protection.
So, you can choose to have Firefox/Internet Explorer/whatever as your UserAgent for fun, or to make a site work that accidentally didn't work on your browser. But if the site _specifies_ that you are not allowed to access using browser XYZ, _and_ has a technological measure to block browser XYZ, _and_ you spoof to trick it into thinking you're not using browser XYZ, _then_ you're gaining unauthorized access and breaking the current laws. That doesn't mean you'll be caught, since it's difficult to detect UserAgent spoofing, but the current laws are so asinine that your actions would be criminal.
ABC, NBC, et al. could claim Google is spoofing its useragent to circumvent the ban on Google TV. That means they could sue Google under the provisions of DMCA. Blame your legislators for passing idiotic laws that forbid gaining "unauthorized" access through spoofing.
Established since decades? Um, you do realize that neutrons were discovered only in 1932. The discovery of fission was in 1938. The Manhattan project began in 1942. The Nobel Prize for the discovery of nuclear fission was awarded in 1944 for Hahn's discovery in 1938.
Theories need to be experimentally tested; if theories were never tested, we'd still have the theory that heavier objects fall faster than lighter objects, that the world is flat, that Newtonian mechanics explains planetary orbits, etc. Theories are constantly proven wrong, and that's how we end up with newer, better models for nature.
That's also why Nobel prizes aren't awarded the same year as discoveries. They wait to make sure it's experimentally repeatable and peer-reviewed.
I don't think they're suggesting more carbon atoms are being created out of thin air. It seems like they're saying it would have the same size and number of particles, but its mass would go up -- i.e. it would have more inertia. Lots of models in physics require "gaining mass" -- i.e. gaining inertia.
Einstein predicts as you accelerate to the speed of light, you gain mass in your reference frame -- i.e. it becomes harder and harder to accelerate yourself further because you appear to be getting infinitely massive. Einstein is not suggesting that your belly expands and you start generating more particles. He's using "mass" interchangeably with "inertia". Greater mass == greater inertia, when all else is kept constant.
Similarly, the experiment with graphene suggests that a proper configuration of it will yield something with greater inertia (i.e. greater mass) than its constituent masses imply.
All science predictions are math tricks. If the prediction holds up, our existing models are correct, otherwise, our existing models are broken. Creating mass from graphene is not a new theory, it is the _consequence_ of our existing theories that someone cleverly derived.
Point is, either way, Abdulaziz Alhaidari is now famous and has done the incredible. He's either famous for making a marvelous derivation of our existing theories, or he's famous for disproving our current models by explaining what our current models predict that would later be experimentally contradicted. Just as the Manhattan project was a test of atomic theory; if it worked, an amazing weapon was created; if it didn't work, it had profound ramifications on invalidating the the atomic theory of the day. Either it's a win for engineering, building something amazing, or a win for science, changing the models to more closely match reality.
The judge must be a T-1000 sent here to prevent John Conner from becoming l33t.
Facebook, MySpace, Orkut -- everyone of these requires https for sending username and password. They switch back to normal http after the login because https puts load on their system.
He better not use a web-browser, they all support SSL. Oh, and he can't use banking websites, they all require https.
You forgot to mention the most retarded part of the "spending" concerns. India's Fed. Govt. isn't increasing the Dept. of Atomic Energy's budget. It merely gave clearance to the DAE to build the facility using the DAE's existing budget. If the Fed. Govt denied clearance, the $270m stays with the DAE, and _cannot_ be spent by the Dept. of Transportation for roads or the Dept. of Education for schools or the Dept. of Agriculture for farm subsidies. If the DAE didn't build a nutrino detector, it would just spend that money on other nuclear research. That's what the whole freaking department is about, atomic research. If NASA saves some money by not doing a shuttle launch, its money doesn't get yanked and moved to Homeland Security. Once NASA has been budgeted, the money stays within NASA. The following year, NASA's budget can be reduced if the senate thinks it's wasteful.
Folks don't realize that budgets work like fractals, and on contract law. The Fed. Govt is only responsible on carving out the budget for its departments, it does not directly budget every single brick and peon. Moreover, once budgeted, the Govt. enters into a contract and has to fulfill it or risk default. Democracies operate on contract-law and rule of law; the Fed. Govt. would be acting like an asshat monarch if it just swooped in and stole money from one dept. and moved it to another mid-year.
If you read the original article, you'll learn that India's DoE is building it out of its own allocated budget -- it is _not_ requesting a budget increase from the Federal Govt. All the fed. govt has done is given _clearance_ (NOT _funding_) for the DoE to build it. It's up to the DoE to find out how to scrape together $270m from their budget.
To put it succinctly, if the nutrino detector isn't built, the DoE would have an extra $270m to spend on something else. You'd rather they build a nuclear reactor?
He gets an impressive resume and gains admission to any PhD program of his choosing? Becomes a professor, and... uses his teaching assistants as an endless supply of cannibalistic food?
Considering India's GDP growth rate is among the highest in the world, I'm not sure if they ought to be listening to advice from nations with stagnant GDP growth or negative GDP growth.
Fix your own economy first before preaching. And if you believe your own words, don't breathe, don't take bathroom breaks, until you get out of a recession.
Keep in mind that India's space program is a profit-center. It actually _earns_ more money than the govt. spends on it. That's because placing satellites into orbit is big business, and high-tech services like satellite launches sell for hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars.
South Korea and India were of similar economic situations in 1950, the difference being that S. Korea poured money into technology, and India did what you suggested. Guess what? Getting homeless people to fish just creates lots of poor fishermen instead of lots of poor beggars. Big whoop. The goal is to create more jobs for scientists, physicists, researchers, lab assistants, programmers, etc.
Plus, India's tax rate is far lower than in Western Europe, and 90% of people are not taxed. So the amount they spend is a tiny drop in the bucket of the annual income of people.
Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_India#Tax_Rates
"about 10 per cent of the population meets the minimum threshold of taxable income"
So 90% of the population pays 0% taxes. And the progressive tax rates for the remainder of the population go from 10% to a maximum of 30% tax.
As for literacy, the "majority" of Indians are not illiterate, 32% are illiterate as of 2007, which is still a big number, but not a majority. Much of that illiterate population was born circa 1950. In the age group 7-15, literacy is 90% (10% illiterate).
Moreover, your presumption that they "prefer to spend their money being number 6, than cleaning up their house" is childish if not outright moronic. India's economy is $1.2 trillion dollars, and the project costs $270 million. That's 0.02% of the economy. To put that in perspective, that's equivalent to a 19 second bathroom break a day. And let's not forget that the project could be profitable, and in the very least provides good high-end jobs for their increasingly educated population.
Compare $270 million with the numerous welfare and social programs India provides to poor people. $13 billion to subsidize food for low-income families. $12 billion to subsidize fertilizer for poor farmers. $7 billion for education (at the federal level, states pay more). The list goes on for social programs that are all near $10 billion each.
In the end, they have a democracy and if folks don't like the budget, they'll elect other folks in. Every nation's budget is going to have cutting-edge R&D. It's ludicrous to suggest otherwise. Overall, their nation is doing fine, rapidly progressing with envious growth rates. It's not _your_ tax money being spent (and even for Indians, it's only the tax money of the upper 10%), so relax and let them build a nutrino research facility. If you're interested in nutrinos, I'm sure they'll love for you to pay them money to use their research center.
WindowsNT/WindowsXP has vastly better security than Windws95/WindowsME, even though they all run windows applications. The big difference is that Windows95/WindowsME lacked a memory model that sandboxed each application's memory. That meant one rogue application on Windows95/ME could start modifying kernel memory, or other applications' memory. Instead, under WindowsNT/WindowsXP, an application exits with a general protection fault.
There are stricter security models that go beyond merely sandboxing memory pages. Windows Vista introduced privilege escalation dialogue. It allows you to run applications with lower privileges (non-admin), and when the application attempts to do something that requires admin privileges, a dialog is brought up to prompt you for approval. I can imagine finer grained capabilities. E.g. your web browser should only have file access to its caching directory. If it attempts to read or write anywhere else, the operating system pauses the application and prompts the user for approval.