$100k is a great salary for the amount of work that guy did. I would be absolutely thrilled to get paid at that rate, and what I do is a hell of a lot more important than voice acting in a video game.
When are actors in other media going to start to be treated like video game actors?
You're essentially asking: what can I do with a graduate degree in computational biology that's not computational biology. If you haven't even started working on it yet, and you're already looking to work outside of the "obvious" areas for your graduate degree, I would bet you're not going to get that degree.
You need to find out fast whether you really want to specialize in computational biology, whether you're interested in scientific modeling in general, or if you really want to just go make money predicting the stock market. If you don't want to do computational biology (which is a great field to get into right now), don't go for a graduate degree in it, you're just going to be frustrated.
If you really do like computational biology, but you're worried that you'll be cut off from working on anything else, don't worry so much. In science, it's easy to have side projects and collaborations involving different fields. I wish I knew more computational biologists.
It's nice that this is finally getting published someplace it's going to get noticed. Talk at the conferences for years has been that multi-walled nanotubes kill mice if you inject them into the lungs (I actually met a guy who had done this experiment in Germany 5 years ago, and I don't think he was the first). For whatever reason, no one outside of the nanotube community had paid attention to those experiments, probably because they were done by physical scientists and not someone connected to the medical field.
The next thing we know is that single walled nanotubes do not cause asbestos-like effects, even when very long. It would be nice if someone outside of the nanotube community could confirm that.
I've worked with nanotubes of all types for several years (for electronics), and never worried about this stuff. They are very sticky, and if you don't purposefully try to suspend them in air, it is very hard to breathe in any measurable amount. There are some growth methods which do result in air suspended nanotubes (NASA uses this method to make their nanotube tethers), but it's easy to just pick a different growth method for most people. I don't know about nanotube reinforced materials, but for electronics, this is not a big deal.
Neutrino noise is smaller than electromagnetic (light, radio, etc) noise because light interacts much more strongly with matter, and also has a more intense background spectrum. Put another way, there are fewer sources of neutrinos than radio, light or microwaves.
Neutrinos are created in particle accelerators, it's not very hard.
The gravity waves question is really good (and not covered in the article). But we don't even know what gravity waves are yet, so we can't really answer that.
There definitely is value in getting different kinds of scientific people together to talk about specific problems. I've been to some conferences like that, and it's great.... but I won't patent the hoped for results of the experiments I'd like to do over the next ten years. Most of us in science can't get away with that kind of stuff, we can't afford it financially and we value the respect of our peers too much. Most of us can't afford to put a T. Rex skeleton in our living rooms, or have lawyers around to record our dinner conversations either.
You may want to look at what the republican party in SD is doing before you assume they're all gay-bashing. The republican mayor, Jerry Sanders, is basically running the local party, and he's been very progressive, supporting gay marriage and publicly calling for more gay rights in general. There are people who DO make a difference. Try being open minded, not so fanatical.
Would I make ethanol from plants in my yard (if I had a yard)? Absolutely! But, those rows upon rows of perfect corn or whatever used in commercial farms don't just happen. Those mega-farms in the midwest use irrigation, fertilizers and congressional subsidies to make that magic happen.
That plants build and repair themselves is utterly amazing, but it's the energy used in those very abilities which makes them poor energy storage devices. If we wanted to collect ALL the plants in the country every year and convert them into fuel, we could get rid of oil... or we could try something else.
There is a problem which many people have not looked at, which is the efficiency of converting solar energy into chemical energy in plants. They are not optimized to store chemical energy, they are optimized to reproduce. The efficiency of photosynthesis is around 5%. So a 100% (impossible) conversion of cellulose, starch, sugar and protein into fuel or electricity is equivalent to a 5% efficient solar cell system. Can such a low efficiency process be economical? We will see.
It's unfortunate that we have all jumped on this biofuel path, because generating fuel using photovoltaic-type materials directly from CO2 may be a much more effective and economical use of research time, money and space.
You're right about the poll. I was thinking about the original article which was last December. I'm very surprised they did an online poll and then published it.
I don't expect anyone reads all of the scientific articles in Nature. By reading, I meant looking through the news, summaries and commentary. I've found that information helpful in the past.
It seems in vogue these days for biologists to trash Nature and Science; my wife is a biologist, and she's expressed her ambivalence about those journals. I find the physics articles good.
Wow, you have no idea what you're talking about. Whomever sold you that line of BS you're repeating was playing a joke on you.
Nature and Science are the two most important scientific research publications around. Any scientist who does not make an effort to read those journals is removing himself from the scientific community.
To claim that the articles in Nature are not as important as in other journals is demonstrably wrong. The impact factor (a measure of journal importance) for Nature is one of the three highest in the world (Nature, Science and The New England Journal of Medicine). A good scientist may not produce important enough results to get even one publication in Nature during their career.
If you can make an STM capable of atomic resolution, or a good AFM, or a graphene transistor, you should be getting a paycheck or a degree for it. I'm not saying a degree is necessary to do that, just that this stuff is actually very hard, and many "professionals" have a hard time getting it to work. Get your credit from the establishment if you can do it.
If you were to spend some time in a "professional" lab doing this stuff, you would find that it is almost all DIY. One, if you can buy your experiment, you are not on the cutting edge. Two, how else would extremely clever people with a small budget do these things? Buy the raw materials and spend a lot of time in the machine shop and in front of a computer.
but for most people doing research, a $60,000 SEM is much more interesting. Not all of us can afford the millions it costs to buy automated systems. We can all afford to allow average students to work in our labs for free, doing what a robot would do. Those of us who are clever find talented students and get them to build the automation into one of these cheap systems from scratch.
In our lab, we've automated both a cheap AFM and SEM, saving a few million dollars and generating a few undergraduate honors projects in the process (although we can't do 50 samples in one night).
Excellent point, you will have to write a proposal, I'm sure. Also see the little teaser at the bottom: "If your research is non-proprietary and could help to solve a nano measurement problem that supports the production of nanobased applications you may be in luck. They may offer discounted fees or waive fees entirely."
That means you can get your research in there, but the cost may depend on how important the lab managers think the research is. It also answers one of your questions, there will be something approximating "open-nanotech" (maybe). I think the users will be who has funding, the national labs aren't flush with cash right now.
The larger Universities will definitely use these a lot. They all have their own labs, but they also have a ton of money. If there's something really important they need to do and their on-campus facilities are too slow or crowded, they'll be very willing to rent time (and people) somewhere else. It will be just like the regional micro-fab facilities, which are briefly mentioned in the article (being at a big university, I know people who have rented time at a regional micro-fab because ours was doing maintenance on some piece of equipment).
Graphene is certainly a lot like carbon nanotubes, but is much easier to work with. Where you have to hope to get a semiconducting crystal structure in a nanotube (or make crappy transistors based on defects), you can pattern graphene to make a transistor. Which directions you cut the 2D sheet determine whether it is metallic or semiconducting. There are some problems with this, and practically speaking any small channel (10 nm, I think) of graphene is semiconducting. Fuhrer has shown (along with other people) that graphene can make pretty good transistors (very fast switching, thermally stable and I'm sure I'm missing some stuff).
It can be doped. This is another thing Fuhrer has done (as well as other people... but this is his article we're talking about). You don't want to insert something into the crystal structure (that ruins it), but you can layer the top of it with potassium ions (about 1 per 1000 carbons), which dopes it just fine. This isn't a bulk semiconductor though, and the addition of charged impurities (dopants) decreases device performance (in bulk, it's a metal). You can very easily electrostatically gate graphene in any direction you want; transistors and PN junctions are easy to make this way.
It is not hard to make graphene. The "scotch tape" method from Manchester is widely used, but there are a number of other ways to do it which may be commercially viable: oxidizing graphite, ultrasounding graphite with special polymers (Dai's method), growing it from SiC wafers. Of course, none of these really work yet, and may never be economical.
Graphene is stable in air (almost all devices are measured in air at some point), and liquids. It's not going to spontaneously dissolve on you just because it's only 1 atomic layer thick. It's actually very robust.
It can be used with silicon processing techniques. People are using SiO2, HfO2 and all the usual silicon processing with it.
Big companies are looking at this material. IBM has already reported results on their work at physics conferences, I'm fairly sure that the more secretive companies (Intel) are also working with graphene... just like they worked with nanotubes.
I think you're missing the point. You're talking about CDs, isos and a bunch of stuff that has nothing to do with the business model Stardock has set up. Just having to install a game from a CD is a form of copy protection, and it's a pain in the ass. I don't doubt that copy protection at some level leads to more sales and potentially more profits, but so does making the game easy to find, install and use. Most of us aren't kids anymore and don't want to spend time mounting virtual drives on our laptops that don't have CD drives. They sell their games to an adult, educated market, and they've figured out that for that market, copy protection does not give them much return.
Stardock does have online verification and keys and all that, but it's transparent, and from a customer's point of view, not copy protection. They use that stuff to make sure that I, as a paying customer, am always able to get the game and any updates and free expansions. I can go to any computer I want, put in my e-mail address and download the games I have bought from them, as many times as I need to. I can put the install file on a USB drive and use it wherever I want. Once having bought it, I also have online access to the game's install files forever. I don't actually need to have any keys, just access to my e-mail address. I can also buy new games or expansions very easily. By focusing on making the game finding, purchasing downloading and installing process very easy for the paying customers, they've taken away the main reason to pirate games. By offering frequent updates and expansions, they've taken away more reasons to pirate the game. If they focused more on copy protection and making sure I couldn't send the install files to my friend, it would be harder for me to load a game on a new computer, and less likely that I would buy new games and expansions from them. For Stardock, the point of diminishing returns on copy protection was pretty low.
Somewhere, a sociologist just died when you tried to claim that because I don't know what a Higgs boson looks like, he doesn't know why a person acts the way they do.
Social scientists are scientists too. They're pretty good at "why".
The rest of your rambling sounds like a lot of justification for being an idiot. It's perfectly fine to not believe scientific ideas that can't be proven. I know physicists who don't think black holes or Higgs exist for good reasons. That doesn't mean you get to write off everything that can be proven. Just because we don't understand something does not mean it has not happened, or does not exist.
As a scientist with a similar view of the government, I have struggled over why the government supports science and not private industry (while it's true that some basic research is done by industry, the vast majority is government sponsored).
The answer I have come up with is that government funded scientific research really amounts to a subsidy of private industry. Rather than Bell Labs or IBM paying for the next generation of materials research (as was done in the past), it's being done by academics at very little corporate cost. The foundation of our nation's economy is no longer manufacturing nor natural resources, so this research is key. There is a huge difference between basic science and engineering in terms of financial risk, and the government has been funding the highest risk part of the national R&D budget almost completely.
Funding like this may be unconstitutional, and is definitely internationally anti-competitive. However, we've let the cat out of the bag and this very efficient system is now being used in Asia and Europe. Maybe we can come up with a better system, but to go back to the way things were done 100 years ago would put us at a huge international disadvantage. After we stop funding science, why would American companies stay and not have access to the best research, and the best scientists, for free?
There's also what the government takes away from me, as a scientist. It is legal and normal for any scientist to sign away their rights to gain employment. I find this morally wrong, but the government has been clear that I must allow this. Why should we alone be forced to sacrifice our rights for the financial well being of American companies?
If you wanted to provide multi-million dollar prizes for 20-something scientists working on revolutionary research, sign me up. I've obviously been under-paid. But if that money was really available, I would rather it be used to fund revolutionary research, not reward it. Prizes work in a corporate environment, where debt is acceptable. In academic and national lab research, you can't have debt; you can't fund research using loans or investments.
It is extraordinarily expensive to tackle the big problems, and the vast majority of scientists are not independently wealthy. Do they expect scientists to run up multi-million dollar personal debts on the off chance they get a prize? At my institution, we're trying to get a $20 million grant right now. That's not going to pad our pockets, but it will pay for lots of new equipment and materials. We need large amounts of money to do revolutionary research. Without funding, it doesn't matter it there's a prize out there, we simply can not do what we need to do.
Why would I, as a scientist, NOT work on the biggest problem I can find, award or no award? These guys suggest that the best scientists choose to work on lesser problems because of greater payoff. They say easier science leads to more papers, more citations and ultimately more peer-reviewed grant funding. They then suggest that we can use the same process to determine if revolutionary research has been done. So is the problem that grant giving institutions are not interested in hard research? That's not been my experience, but I'm in a different field than the authors.
I think they're complaining more about a culture specific to their specialty (medicine and biology) and less about the culture of science in general. A side effect of the doubling of biomedical research funding a decade ago is that a whole bunch of uncreative people were able to have success. Now that funding has decreased, those people (who perhaps should not be in leadership positions) are a drain on resources. Not having gone through recent turbulence in funding, other areas lack this problem.
Another response to my post (the one by Councilor Hart) gives a really good summary of the problems. You've got to clean/replace the reactor walls periodically if you want it to keep working (assuming you don't consume the walls). You also have huge superconducting magnets to buy.
It adds up to ~$1 billion to buy and you still have significant operating costs.
I worked for two years at General Atomics trying to model and understand the interaction of fusion plasmas with the reactor walls. I've seen people here who have done more.
Like many other people who have worked/are working on fusion, I don't think it's going to be commercially viable this century. The problem is materials. It's simply too expensive to build these things.
I'm a Jewish, republican scientist. That post blows my mind... it's also an excellent example of what TFA was talking about.
By not presenting the science behind global warming with enough marketing savvy, we have led Nova Express to believe that it is actually a giant conspiracy. How we could have done better (suggestions are addressed to scientists, not Nova Express):
In science, we're trained not to debate or take part in emotional arguments. To normal people that makes us look like jerks. Learn to listen and don't make people feel guilty about science. The less science is about them, personally, the more likely they are to believe it. Point out that verbal debates are for policy, not science. We write things. Conservative views on global warming have been published in top tier journals like Science and Nature. Some times we're seen as unfeeling killers, other times we're flaky hippies... oh well
There are many republicans, energy companies and Jews (really, where the hell did that come from?) working on new fuels and power sources. There will be much money to be made in these areas in the near future. Even if economy is what drives them, and not ecology, they're still on your side. As a republican, this one bugs me too.
Don't presume to know all the answers, you don't. It's hard for many scientists to act on this (including myself, evidently).
Don't let stupid people, who happen to agree with you, push bad science. How this could actually be accomplished is still unknown. There are far more stupid people than there are smart scientists, and we're busy.
This part's for Nova Express: Personally, I was convinced that global warming was real after listening to a talk by a rather conservative professor in my department who is an extremely good communicator: Greg Benford. Some of the solutions he proposed could only come from a SF author.
That's far easier said than done! It's just not easy to couple two excited systems in a stable way at the molecular scale.
Even in plants, which have had millions of years to evolve this, those systems last about 30 minutes before they're destroyed.
Far, far easier and more robust to use a conducting element to separate your two excited systems. Think of the battery as a remote photosystem II, it could easily be replaced with a photovoltaic cell.
I think scanning probe microscopy wins on "neatness" simply because it is a non-destructive measurement. APT is from the particle physics school of experimental design: blow the sample up and see what comes out, that's kind of messy.
I don't understand those who think science funding is a liberal cause.
The federal government funds basic scientific research so that companies don't have to. Economically, this has been a tremendously successful strategy, which is now being copied world wide. The way scientific funding is allocated is rather ingenious. Hundreds of proposals are sent in to the big three granting agencies (NIH, NSF and DOE), and are then re-distributed to past grant winners for evaluation. Only the best are selected. In biology around 10% are funded, in physical science around 5%. If you can't come up with something good and economical, no money. The competition for federal funding thus forces scientists to work hard, be creative and be frugal (much like the free market). There is no way corporate labs can compete with this system in basic research, because there are just so many ideas out there, and no way to know for sure which ones will work. There's simply too much risk in basic research. Plus a scientist who is happy to make $40K to $50 off of grants expects twice that in a corporate environment (because we don't like to wear suits, or something like that). The large corporate basic science labs have thus been driven out of business. Corporations and investors are free to select only the successful projects and people, without having to be weighed down by the failures.
Now, we could stop doing this, but that wouldn't mean corporations would start funding basic research again. Europe and China now use a similar system, so we would simply be putting US businesses at a disadvantage.
The current Democratically led Congress did not understand this, and cut science funding levels from what Bush had requested (wrap your mind around that for a second). They probably expected some feeble complaints from academics and were very surprised when they started hearing from big business (meaning donors).
This is one thing the government does pretty well. There is a good system set up, with minimal political interference (unlike NASA), healthy competition, and tangible economic results. It could be better, but it is hardly a liberal financial black hole.
The Federal government has spent decades out-competing business in the area of basic research to the point that most of the major corporate labs are shut down. Companies which do basic research generally do it in conjunction with academics who are partly funded by the government. The companies get cheap research and the government helps the economy. It's a great system, and that's why it's being copied world wide. We can cut public science funding here and hope companies invest in US research, but why would they do that when they can get government subsidized research in China and Europe?
That's why you find people like Intel Chairman Craig Barrett so upset over the lack of funding. It's not some philosophical battle, he's looking out for his bottom line. They simply can't afford to do all the basic research they need themselves and hope to compete internationally.
Americans can spend their tax rebates just as easily on European and Asian technology as they can on American. It does nothing special for our R&D.
Slashdot Mirror
$100k is a great salary for the amount of work that guy did. I would be absolutely thrilled to get paid at that rate, and what I do is a hell of a lot more important than voice acting in a video game.
When are actors in other media going to start to be treated like video game actors?
You're essentially asking: what can I do with a graduate degree in computational biology that's not computational biology. If you haven't even started working on it yet, and you're already looking to work outside of the "obvious" areas for your graduate degree, I would bet you're not going to get that degree.
You need to find out fast whether you really want to specialize in computational biology, whether you're interested in scientific modeling in general, or if you really want to just go make money predicting the stock market. If you don't want to do computational biology (which is a great field to get into right now), don't go for a graduate degree in it, you're just going to be frustrated.
If you really do like computational biology, but you're worried that you'll be cut off from working on anything else, don't worry so much. In science, it's easy to have side projects and collaborations involving different fields. I wish I knew more computational biologists.
It's nice that this is finally getting published someplace it's going to get noticed. Talk at the conferences for years has been that multi-walled nanotubes kill mice if you inject them into the lungs (I actually met a guy who had done this experiment in Germany 5 years ago, and I don't think he was the first). For whatever reason, no one outside of the nanotube community had paid attention to those experiments, probably because they were done by physical scientists and not someone connected to the medical field.
The next thing we know is that single walled nanotubes do not cause asbestos-like effects, even when very long. It would be nice if someone outside of the nanotube community could confirm that.
I've worked with nanotubes of all types for several years (for electronics), and never worried about this stuff. They are very sticky, and if you don't purposefully try to suspend them in air, it is very hard to breathe in any measurable amount. There are some growth methods which do result in air suspended nanotubes (NASA uses this method to make their nanotube tethers), but it's easy to just pick a different growth method for most people. I don't know about nanotube reinforced materials, but for electronics, this is not a big deal.
I hate to be cliched, but you should read TFA.
Neutrino noise is smaller than electromagnetic (light, radio, etc) noise because light interacts much more strongly with matter, and also has a more intense background spectrum. Put another way, there are fewer sources of neutrinos than radio, light or microwaves.
Neutrinos are created in particle accelerators, it's not very hard.
The gravity waves question is really good (and not covered in the article). But we don't even know what gravity waves are yet, so we can't really answer that.
There definitely is value in getting different kinds of scientific people together to talk about specific problems. I've been to some conferences like that, and it's great. ... but I won't patent the hoped for results of the experiments I'd like to do over the next ten years. Most of us in science can't get away with that kind of stuff, we can't afford it financially and we value the respect of our peers too much. Most of us can't afford to put a T. Rex skeleton in our living rooms, or have lawyers around to record our dinner conversations either.
You may want to look at what the republican party in SD is doing before you assume they're all gay-bashing. The republican mayor, Jerry Sanders, is basically running the local party, and he's been very progressive, supporting gay marriage and publicly calling for more gay rights in general. There are people who DO make a difference. Try being open minded, not so fanatical.
Would I make ethanol from plants in my yard (if I had a yard)? Absolutely! But, those rows upon rows of perfect corn or whatever used in commercial farms don't just happen. Those mega-farms in the midwest use irrigation, fertilizers and congressional subsidies to make that magic happen.
That plants build and repair themselves is utterly amazing, but it's the energy used in those very abilities which makes them poor energy storage devices. If we wanted to collect ALL the plants in the country every year and convert them into fuel, we could get rid of oil... or we could try something else.
It's unfortunate that we have all jumped on this biofuel path, because generating fuel using photovoltaic-type materials directly from CO2 may be a much more effective and economical use of research time, money and space.
You're right about the poll. I was thinking about the original article which was last December. I'm very surprised they did an online poll and then published it.
I don't expect anyone reads all of the scientific articles in Nature. By reading, I meant looking through the news, summaries and commentary. I've found that information helpful in the past.
It seems in vogue these days for biologists to trash Nature and Science; my wife is a biologist, and she's expressed her ambivalence about those journals. I find the physics articles good.
Wow, you have no idea what you're talking about. Whomever sold you that line of BS you're repeating was playing a joke on you.
Nature and Science are the two most important scientific research publications around. Any scientist who does not make an effort to read those journals is removing himself from the scientific community.
To claim that the articles in Nature are not as important as in other journals is demonstrably wrong. The impact factor (a measure of journal importance) for Nature is one of the three highest in the world (Nature, Science and The New England Journal of Medicine). A good scientist may not produce important enough results to get even one publication in Nature during their career.
If you can make an STM capable of atomic resolution, or a good AFM, or a graphene transistor, you should be getting a paycheck or a degree for it. I'm not saying a degree is necessary to do that, just that this stuff is actually very hard, and many "professionals" have a hard time getting it to work. Get your credit from the establishment if you can do it.
If you were to spend some time in a "professional" lab doing this stuff, you would find that it is almost all DIY. One, if you can buy your experiment, you are not on the cutting edge. Two, how else would extremely clever people with a small budget do these things? Buy the raw materials and spend a lot of time in the machine shop and in front of a computer.
oh, those exist too...
but for most people doing research, a $60,000 SEM is much more interesting. Not all of us can afford the millions it costs to buy automated systems. We can all afford to allow average students to work in our labs for free, doing what a robot would do. Those of us who are clever find talented students and get them to build the automation into one of these cheap systems from scratch.
In our lab, we've automated both a cheap AFM and SEM, saving a few million dollars and generating a few undergraduate honors projects in the process (although we can't do 50 samples in one night).
Excellent point, you will have to write a proposal, I'm sure. Also see the little teaser at the bottom:
"If your research is non-proprietary and could help to solve a nano measurement problem that supports the production of nanobased applications you may be in luck. They may offer discounted fees or waive fees entirely."
That means you can get your research in there, but the cost may depend on how important the lab managers think the research is. It also answers one of your questions, there will be something approximating "open-nanotech" (maybe). I think the users will be who has funding, the national labs aren't flush with cash right now.
The larger Universities will definitely use these a lot. They all have their own labs, but they also have a ton of money. If there's something really important they need to do and their on-campus facilities are too slow or crowded, they'll be very willing to rent time (and people) somewhere else. It will be just like the regional micro-fab facilities, which are briefly mentioned in the article (being at a big university, I know people who have rented time at a regional micro-fab because ours was doing maintenance on some piece of equipment).
Wish I had mod points, your post is relevant.
Graphene is certainly a lot like carbon nanotubes, but is much easier to work with. Where you have to hope to get a semiconducting crystal structure in a nanotube (or make crappy transistors based on defects), you can pattern graphene to make a transistor. Which directions you cut the 2D sheet determine whether it is metallic or semiconducting. There are some problems with this, and practically speaking any small channel (10 nm, I think) of graphene is semiconducting. Fuhrer has shown (along with other people) that graphene can make pretty good transistors (very fast switching, thermally stable and I'm sure I'm missing some stuff).
It can be doped. This is another thing Fuhrer has done (as well as other people... but this is his article we're talking about). You don't want to insert something into the crystal structure (that ruins it), but you can layer the top of it with potassium ions (about 1 per 1000 carbons), which dopes it just fine. This isn't a bulk semiconductor though, and the addition of charged impurities (dopants) decreases device performance (in bulk, it's a metal). You can very easily electrostatically gate graphene in any direction you want; transistors and PN junctions are easy to make this way.
It is not hard to make graphene. The "scotch tape" method from Manchester is widely used, but there are a number of other ways to do it which may be commercially viable: oxidizing graphite, ultrasounding graphite with special polymers (Dai's method), growing it from SiC wafers. Of course, none of these really work yet, and may never be economical.
Graphene is stable in air (almost all devices are measured in air at some point), and liquids. It's not going to spontaneously dissolve on you just because it's only 1 atomic layer thick. It's actually very robust.
It can be used with silicon processing techniques. People are using SiO2, HfO2 and all the usual silicon processing with it.
Big companies are looking at this material. IBM has already reported results on their work at physics conferences, I'm fairly sure that the more secretive companies (Intel) are also working with graphene... just like they worked with nanotubes.
I think you're missing the point. You're talking about CDs, isos and a bunch of stuff that has nothing to do with the business model Stardock has set up. Just having to install a game from a CD is a form of copy protection, and it's a pain in the ass. I don't doubt that copy protection at some level leads to more sales and potentially more profits, but so does making the game easy to find, install and use. Most of us aren't kids anymore and don't want to spend time mounting virtual drives on our laptops that don't have CD drives. They sell their games to an adult, educated market, and they've figured out that for that market, copy protection does not give them much return.
Stardock does have online verification and keys and all that, but it's transparent, and from a customer's point of view, not copy protection. They use that stuff to make sure that I, as a paying customer, am always able to get the game and any updates and free expansions. I can go to any computer I want, put in my e-mail address and download the games I have bought from them, as many times as I need to. I can put the install file on a USB drive and use it wherever I want. Once having bought it, I also have online access to the game's install files forever. I don't actually need to have any keys, just access to my e-mail address. I can also buy new games or expansions very easily. By focusing on making the game finding, purchasing downloading and installing process very easy for the paying customers, they've taken away the main reason to pirate games. By offering frequent updates and expansions, they've taken away more reasons to pirate the game. If they focused more on copy protection and making sure I couldn't send the install files to my friend, it would be harder for me to load a game on a new computer, and less likely that I would buy new games and expansions from them. For Stardock, the point of diminishing returns on copy protection was pretty low.
Somewhere, a sociologist just died when you tried to claim that because I don't know what a Higgs boson looks like, he doesn't know why a person acts the way they do.
Social scientists are scientists too. They're pretty good at "why".
The rest of your rambling sounds like a lot of justification for being an idiot. It's perfectly fine to not believe scientific ideas that can't be proven. I know physicists who don't think black holes or Higgs exist for good reasons. That doesn't mean you get to write off everything that can be proven. Just because we don't understand something does not mean it has not happened, or does not exist.
As a scientist with a similar view of the government, I have struggled over why the government supports science and not private industry (while it's true that some basic research is done by industry, the vast majority is government sponsored).
The answer I have come up with is that government funded scientific research really amounts to a subsidy of private industry. Rather than Bell Labs or IBM paying for the next generation of materials research (as was done in the past), it's being done by academics at very little corporate cost. The foundation of our nation's economy is no longer manufacturing nor natural resources, so this research is key. There is a huge difference between basic science and engineering in terms of financial risk, and the government has been funding the highest risk part of the national R&D budget almost completely.
Funding like this may be unconstitutional, and is definitely internationally anti-competitive. However, we've let the cat out of the bag and this very efficient system is now being used in Asia and Europe. Maybe we can come up with a better system, but to go back to the way things were done 100 years ago would put us at a huge international disadvantage. After we stop funding science, why would American companies stay and not have access to the best research, and the best scientists, for free?
There's also what the government takes away from me, as a scientist. It is legal and normal for any scientist to sign away their rights to gain employment. I find this morally wrong, but the government has been clear that I must allow this. Why should we alone be forced to sacrifice our rights for the financial well being of American companies?
If you wanted to provide multi-million dollar prizes for 20-something scientists working on revolutionary research, sign me up. I've obviously been under-paid. But if that money was really available, I would rather it be used to fund revolutionary research, not reward it. Prizes work in a corporate environment, where debt is acceptable. In academic and national lab research, you can't have debt; you can't fund research using loans or investments.
It is extraordinarily expensive to tackle the big problems, and the vast majority of scientists are not independently wealthy. Do they expect scientists to run up multi-million dollar personal debts on the off chance they get a prize? At my institution, we're trying to get a $20 million grant right now. That's not going to pad our pockets, but it will pay for lots of new equipment and materials. We need large amounts of money to do revolutionary research. Without funding, it doesn't matter it there's a prize out there, we simply can not do what we need to do.
Why would I, as a scientist, NOT work on the biggest problem I can find, award or no award? These guys suggest that the best scientists choose to work on lesser problems because of greater payoff. They say easier science leads to more papers, more citations and ultimately more peer-reviewed grant funding. They then suggest that we can use the same process to determine if revolutionary research has been done. So is the problem that grant giving institutions are not interested in hard research? That's not been my experience, but I'm in a different field than the authors.
I think they're complaining more about a culture specific to their specialty (medicine and biology) and less about the culture of science in general. A side effect of the doubling of biomedical research funding a decade ago is that a whole bunch of uncreative people were able to have success. Now that funding has decreased, those people (who perhaps should not be in leadership positions) are a drain on resources. Not having gone through recent turbulence in funding, other areas lack this problem.
Another response to my post (the one by Councilor Hart) gives a really good summary of the problems. You've got to clean/replace the reactor walls periodically if you want it to keep working (assuming you don't consume the walls). You also have huge superconducting magnets to buy.
It adds up to ~$1 billion to buy and you still have significant operating costs.
That's a great question!
I worked for two years at General Atomics trying to model and understand the interaction of fusion plasmas with the reactor walls. I've seen people here who have done more.
Like many other people who have worked/are working on fusion, I don't think it's going to be commercially viable this century. The problem is materials. It's simply too expensive to build these things.
By not presenting the science behind global warming with enough marketing savvy, we have led Nova Express to believe that it is actually a giant conspiracy. How we could have done better (suggestions are addressed to scientists, not Nova Express):
This part's for Nova Express: Personally, I was convinced that global warming was real after listening to a talk by a rather conservative professor in my department who is an extremely good communicator: Greg Benford. Some of the solutions he proposed could only come from a SF author.
That's far easier said than done! It's just not easy to couple two excited systems in a stable way at the molecular scale.
Even in plants, which have had millions of years to evolve this, those systems last about 30 minutes before they're destroyed.
Far, far easier and more robust to use a conducting element to separate your two excited systems. Think of the battery as a remote photosystem II, it could easily be replaced with a photovoltaic cell.
I think scanning probe microscopy wins on "neatness" simply because it is a non-destructive measurement. APT is from the particle physics school of experimental design: blow the sample up and see what comes out, that's kind of messy.
I don't understand those who think science funding is a liberal cause.
The federal government funds basic scientific research so that companies don't have to. Economically, this has been a tremendously successful strategy, which is now being copied world wide. The way scientific funding is allocated is rather ingenious. Hundreds of proposals are sent in to the big three granting agencies (NIH, NSF and DOE), and are then re-distributed to past grant winners for evaluation. Only the best are selected. In biology around 10% are funded, in physical science around 5%. If you can't come up with something good and economical, no money. The competition for federal funding thus forces scientists to work hard, be creative and be frugal (much like the free market). There is no way corporate labs can compete with this system in basic research, because there are just so many ideas out there, and no way to know for sure which ones will work. There's simply too much risk in basic research. Plus a scientist who is happy to make $40K to $50 off of grants expects twice that in a corporate environment (because we don't like to wear suits, or something like that). The large corporate basic science labs have thus been driven out of business. Corporations and investors are free to select only the successful projects and people, without having to be weighed down by the failures.
Now, we could stop doing this, but that wouldn't mean corporations would start funding basic research again. Europe and China now use a similar system, so we would simply be putting US businesses at a disadvantage.
The current Democratically led Congress did not understand this, and cut science funding levels from what Bush had requested (wrap your mind around that for a second). They probably expected some feeble complaints from academics and were very surprised when they started hearing from big business (meaning donors).
This is one thing the government does pretty well. There is a good system set up, with minimal political interference (unlike NASA), healthy competition, and tangible economic results. It could be better, but it is hardly a liberal financial black hole.
The Federal government has spent decades out-competing business in the area of basic research to the point that most of the major corporate labs are shut down. Companies which do basic research generally do it in conjunction with academics who are partly funded by the government. The companies get cheap research and the government helps the economy. It's a great system, and that's why it's being copied world wide. We can cut public science funding here and hope companies invest in US research, but why would they do that when they can get government subsidized research in China and Europe?
That's why you find people like Intel Chairman Craig Barrett so upset over the lack of funding. It's not some philosophical battle, he's looking out for his bottom line. They simply can't afford to do all the basic research they need themselves and hope to compete internationally.
Americans can spend their tax rebates just as easily on European and Asian technology as they can on American. It does nothing special for our R&D.