Combinatorial chemistry and rational drug design can still learn a lot from nature, and in fact the two can be combined. It is impossible (and will stay so even in the future) to examine all possible chemical structures for a desired activity. For instance, there are 10^62 different molecules of a molecular weight below 500, a typical cutoff for drug molecules. If you would synthesize one molecule of each, you'd make a ball of mass that covers the whole solar system. (quoting from a recent seminar by Prof. H. Waldmann).
Quite. What the present system of drug discovery aims to do is find compounds that have a biological effect--any biological effect--and then try to figure out how they work. They use the natural compounds as a starting point for future development. Such a trick usually shrinks dramatically the space you have to search to find useful drugs.
If you started out with completely random compounds, you'd be reinventing a lot of wheels. Nature already has developed compounds that do almost anything we would want a particular drug to accomplish.
Anyone remember the days when Microsoft just wrote software?
Search engines are software. Google makes money selling their technology to various partners. Why wouldn't other people--including Microsoft--want to try to get a piece of that pie?
Stallman basically told the the president of India that they could have and distribute programmers for free,
Um--I think this poster might have substituted programmers for programs in a couple of places...or did we sign away more than we thought when we turned over copyrights to the FSF?:D
Guys, the post is a joke--"terms of their release and distribution be kept in their chest pocket"--who modded it informative?
Fuel is cheap. With a rocket, all the energy you put into lifting and accelerating that fuel you gain back when you burn it.
Sure, the fuel has a positive ROI on its energy budget--but that's not the whole story. You also have to lift the tanks, insulation, and pumps.
You'll note that they accelerate the damn test article with a rocket.
Why is this a strike against scramjets? By definition, they only operate at supersonic speeds. If you're trying to prove the concept there's only a limited number of ways to get the engine up into that speed regime. Guess what--the Air Force isn't going to lend NASA an SR-71 so that they can blow it up when the test goes bad.
Designing a ramjet that can transition to scramjet operation would be a monumental accomplishment, but we're not there yet. NASA is doing the sensible thing by testing the engine that they've got--and consequently testing their engineering assumptions and theoretical models.
Michael Crichton's Prey is an excellent science fiction novel about nanotechnology and the possible problems with it.
Michael Crichton's Prey is an amusing fiction science novel about imaginary (and physically impossible) robots and the contrived problems with them.
Sheesh. The guy makes a lot of embarrassing lapses in both plot and science. (I am a physicist who does biology for a living. I confess, as a book critic I am an amateur.) Want a bio-thriller? It's been a while since I've read Andromeda Strain, but I seem to recall that it wasn't too bad. Try also Terminal Man; the amount of disbelief one has to suspend is not unreasonable.
hat's why the good guys have to "get there" first. If we don't in effect infest the people and the earth with an active artificial immune system before the bad guys let lose (or the good guys have an accident), we're screwed.
Gee, this reminds me of the "toner wars" from Neil Stephenson's Diamond Age. Airborne nanomachines would occasionally do combat using little tiny lasers. The corpses of dead nanobots would coat exposed surfaces with a fine black powder--like someone poured out a toner cartridge all over everything.
Cities would be surrounded by a net of slightly larger flying devices that attempted to screen out unwanted nanobots.
All are old and outdated power plants, with no new plans for any new plants to be built. Shame, it was killed due to people passing zoning laws, nobody wants a nuclear plant next door...
True in the United States.
Some jurisdictions--Germany, for one--are working actively to phase out the use of nuclear power. Others--France comes to mind--continue to rely on nuclear power for a significant fraction of their electricity. Still other places are reevaluating the merits of nuclear power with an eye to increasing capacity or phasing out other generating sources like coal. (The province of Ontario, Canada is looking at this.)
Most of the 'good' sites for hydroelectric power have been developed, oil and natural gas prices have been (to say the least) unstable over the last few years, and people are starting to have almost as much of a NIMBY reaction to coal as they do to nuclear. Public pressure can ease; zoning laws can be amended...this is going to be an interesting century for energy policy.
i like it when leftists complain about MS voilating human rights in china and not the Chinese communist gov.
Yep, those damned leftists who haven't put together an annual report every year since 1997 criticizing the Communist Chinese regime.
They couldn't be bothered to put up a page on their website linking to current reports of Chinese abuses of human rights, either.
It's trolls like you that give the right wing of the political spectrum a bad name. Yeah, Amnesty International may well be made up of bleeding-heart liberals, but they're pretty consistent on China--they're opposed to the regime, and they're opposed to the companies that sell products used to prop up the regime, and they're supportive of democratic reforms.
Come on--this is the Internet. Can't you come up with better leftist conspiracy theories than "AI is in bed with the Commies 'cause they hate Microsoft"?
As gun owners, we are. I haven't heard of a piece of gun legislation yet that didn't at least indirectly target owners of firearms who intend to use them only for legitimate purposes.
Well, yes. Any legislation aiming to restrict the sale or possession of firearms to those who should* be allowed to have them will necessarily inconvenience those poeple somewhat.
In attempting to secure any sort of system, there is always always a tradeoff between effectiveness and ease of use. Many of us on Slashdot accept the inconvenience of keying in an eight-character password (upper- and lower-case letters and numbers, no words please!) one or more times per day to control access ot our computers.
I spent some time in the United States as a student a few years ago. I had to make three trips to the local Social Security Administration office (and fill out copious amounts of paperwork) to acquire a Social Security Number so that I could report my scholarships correctly to Uncle Sam. Again, an apparently necessarily inconvenience to ensure that taxes are paid and that visiting students are legally in the country.
"Gun control" legislation has similar aims. The laws exist to restrict the sale of weapons to appropriate individuals (not insane, underage, or a known criminal; other restrictions may exist by state). Legitimate buyers are inconvenienced, but it is nominally the price of making the system more secure.
Whether this goal is achieved is another question, and whether the system is particularly efficient yet another. To abandon all attempt at gun control isn't the solution--it would be akin to the Social Security Administration giving up on checking ID when issuing SSN cards (because identification can be forged) or to Microsoft responding to exploits by announcing that they were removing all password-checking from their operating systems.
*I will leave the discussion regarding who should have access to firearms for another post.
If we want Wired, we can read Wired!:) Want some originality...
Right, and that's what Slashdot does--it tells you about interesting articles on Wired. And in the New York Times, and the Guardian, and on Groklaw. Slashdot produces very little of its own content. There are a few book reviews and interview, but the bread and butter of Slashdot is providing links to interesting and/or useful articles in other news sources...and providing a venue in which its readers can comment on those stories.
I think we may have already acheived and surpassed this kind of information density. Does anybody know how much mass is represented by the media layer on a hard drive?
Off the top of my head, I don't know the mass of the media layer on a hard drive, but it's easy enough to find the areal density of the data.
IBM's 'pixie dust' (AFC) technology promises densities of up to about 100 billion bits per square inch. That's (roughly) 1000 square angstroms per bit. In other words, about an order of magnitude more area than in the grandparent post's fanciful thought experiment. Not only that, but the layer of iron oxide used in hard drives--though very, very thin--is not monomolecular.
Note that the great grandparent poster was asking about an exabyte of storage--1000 petabytes, or a million terabytes. Shaving three orders of magnitude off of that makes the problem much more manageable--though RHIC has still done a heck of a job accumulating a petabyte of storage space.
Avogadro's number is approx 600,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms per mol. If you were to store an an exabyte of data in one mol of material then each byte would have a budget of about 600,000 atoms. That may be doable...
It's eminently doable. That's 75,000 particles (atoms or molecules, depending on the species used) per bit--a huge number, still.
The problem comes in storage and readout. If I have to flip bits manually using a scanning electron microscope, that's no good.
On the other hand, let's assume that the work can be done optically, using a scanning laser. Take something the size of a vitamin E molecule; it absorbs visible light readily. Lying flat on a substrate, it would have a surface area (*very* roughly) of about 75 square angstroms. 75,000 of those would cover an area of about five million square angstroms. If arrayed over a square, that's about 240 nanometers on a side, or the diffraction limited spot size of a 480 nm wavelength laser.
Yep, it could be done. A monomolecular layer on a flat substrate; about half a kilogram of molecule. Perfect--a petabyte for your laptop! But--that would cover a total square area of six or so square kilometers...somewhat awkward to scan with a single laser, and a bit clumsy to carry.
And back to the Scientists: We have a Scientific community with members who lie their asses off like a bunch of whores for money. No one "forces" them to lie, they do it of their own volition.
Ouch. While true in some cases, I don't necessarily believe that the article in question is a good example of this problem. First of all, Deborah Jin doesn't need the money--she's a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" recipient.
Second, the reporter noted "Jin stressed her team worked with a supercooled gas, which provides little opportunity for everyday application." That the reporter placed this tidbit at the end suggests the problem is one of sloppy or sensationalist reporting, not scientific grandstanding. The reporter also placed her own comment between two of Jin's quotes, possibly giving the impression that more was claimed.
"It is related to a Bose-Einstein condensate," Jin said. "It's not a superconductor but it is really something in between these two that may help us in science link these two interesting behaviors."
And other researchers may find practical applications.
"If you had a superconductor you could transmit electricity with no losses," Jin said. "Right now something like 10 percent of all electricity we produce in the United States is lost. It heats up wires. It doesn't do anybody any good."
Jin clearly states that though related (possibly) to superconductivity, her material is assuredly not a superconductor. The reporter then steered the discussion off on that tangent--and few solid state physicists can resist a talk about the applications of room-temperature superconductivity.
Perhaps you left off 'sloppy science reporters who are desperate to sell newspaper columns' from your list of individuals complicit in the 'broken system'.
Third, in addition to Jin's own obvious talents, she also works with Wieman and Cornell, who recently landed a Nobel prize for their work on Bose-Einstein condensates. Perhaps she actually is qualified to make predictions about where her discoveries might lead. She knows the field better than most of the people who work in it, and I daresay better than all the posters on Slashdot. Why is she lying when she makes not-unfounded guesses about the future of her own research?
One of the things about gold that makes it so valuable is it's relative scarcity. If anyone were to start growing gold (yes that's not quite what the article said but...) then the prices would come down due to abundance of supply and pretty soon gold is worthless. Same basic law of supply and demand that is affecting all the IT jobs heading to India, so I'd hope not....
Yes, it would have an economic impact; no, it's not necessarily appropriate to conclude that it would be a seriously negative one.
The major currencies of the world (US dollar, Euro, Yen, GB Pound, etc.) are not backed by gold as they would have been decades or centuries ago. Without question there are still individuals, corporations, and governments that maintain some of their wealth in the form of gold bullion or other precious metals, but most don't (or shouldn't have!) put all of their eggs in one basket.
Compare the inconvenience and hardship suffered as a result of these temporary economic dislocations with the industrial benefits of having large amounts of low-cost gold available. Gold is incredible stuff--nearly completely corrosion resistant, hypoallergenic, malleable, ductile, electrically conductive...
To take a historical example, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the world's largest supply of nitrates came from Chilean saltpeter. There were concerns about the supply running out--Chile supplied something like 60% of the world's nitrates, but those mines were not bottomless. Chilean mining cartels also felt no qualms about gouging the Allies in World War One. Highly unfortunate this was, because the nitrates sourced there were used to produce fertilizers and explosives--both staples of twentieth century life.
The development of the Haber process to generate ammonia directly from nitrogen and hydrogen gases changed that. Since the availability of nitrogen fertilizer was no longer limited by the availability of saltpeter deposits, modern agriculture became possible. Also, since any industrialized nation can build their own ammonia plants, the price of nitrates is no longer fixed by a mining cartel.
So--sometimes technological advances can have an economic effect. What does this have to do with jobs moving to India?
My personal expenses after cutting out A LOT of fat are $4000/month for a grand total of $48,000 for the first year. after taxes.
You ought to be able to cut that back some more. Try getting rid of your car and moving to a cheap apartment near public transit. A car (gas, maintenance, and insurance) is probably your second-largest (after rent/mortgage) or largest expense. Unlike mortgage payments, car payments don't even build equity for you.
I am one of the lowest of the low, one of the so-called serfs of science. As a graduate student at a Canadian university, I live in downtown Toronto on a stipend of $22,500 per year--from which I pay $6000 per annum in tuition. It is possible to live on $14,500 per year--that's $1200 per month. It just sucks.
So, the question is--how much of your lifestyle are you willing to sacrifice for your company? Living on $4000 per month? That's nearly fifty thousand after-tax dollars per year...Unless you're supporting a family, try to dredge up some memories of your student days, and recall all the ways to cut costs.
So at 10$ a day you would only have to do this 100 days a month to cover basic cost of living out in the real world.
I know the parent poster is probably kidding, but think about it--this kid is pulling in an extra $10 per day, every day of the year, from the three days of work he did two years ago. Ten bucks a day will comfortably keep him in groceries. Another such app will pay his rent as a student, as long as he goes to school outside of a major city.
He's not working for ten dollars a day--he's not working for ten dollars a day! This is a bonus on top of his regular day job, or a little pocket money to help out at college. At ten dollars per day for two years, that's more than seven thousand dollars for three days of coding. Assuming he's spent another four days on maintaining his website and shipping his product, he's down to earning only a thousand dollars per day for his actual labour. That's better than a hundred bucks an hour. Good show!
If we assume that he spends a full two hours per week shipping and advertising his product, that's still $35 per hour--not a bad wage, and it takes up less of his time than most hobbies.
It might be an idea for criminal cases -- having the Government pay you if you are cleared of the charges, but then, do we really want our tax dollars going to pay the millions of dollars of legal fees racked up by the likes of OJ Simpson just because he was found not-guility?
The problem is that there isn't enough precision in verdicts. In criminal cases, courts may only return "guilty" or "not guilty"--there is no such verdict as "innocent".
In Scottish courts, there are three verdicts--"guilty", which has the usual meaning; "not proven", which indicates that there is insufficient evidence to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt (analogous to the usual meaning of "not guilty" in most Western countries); and "not guilty", which means that the court believes the preponderance of evidence suggests the accused is genuinely innocent of the crimes.
The three verdicts might be incorporated into the American legal system as "guilty", "not guilty", and "innocent". Out-and-out guilty verdicts would lead to the penal system and the usual punishments. Not guilty verdicts indicate continued doubt as to the accused's innocence, but would still count as an acquittal--they fail the "beyond a reasonable doubt" test. Innocent verdicts would suggest that the evidence was in favour of the accused, and might require the payment of significant compensation by the state. I'm sure we can all think of cases where acquitted individuals, though not guilty, certainly were not innocent! I humbly suggest that the Simpson case might fall into this category.
Even today the interface is still significantly different and better than the alternatives. The concept of only a single window frame with a single menu bar at the top of the screen is easy for new users to grok. The reduction of mouse buttons to one makes such things as "Press the right-click... nono the button on the right... no, don't double click it, only click it once... no, press Control-Z to undo that... no, just stop touching the computer until I can come over, mom" a thing of the past. Who would have thought that a seemingly backwards step as the single mouse button would be such a revolutionary step forward for computing?
In any properly designed application, it should be possible to accomplish all tasks without using the right-click context menus. The left button is all that a beginning user needs. Mention that there is a right mouse button, but that they don't need to use it. Inform them if they do inadvertantly click it, they can press Escape and no harm will be done--this is useful in a number of situations, actually.
The right click is a useful feature for most users--it shouldn't be written off because it might complicate things slightly for neophytes. Actually, there's nothing that prevents you from giving a new PC user a mouse with only one button, if they are likely to have trouble with two.
Mind you, I agree with you about the ease-of-use benefits of a fixed menu bar.
Re:Another day, another batch of applications
on
Joel Rants About Resumes
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Don't apply for too many jobs. I don't think there's ever a reason to apply for more than three or four jobs at a time. Resumespam, or any sign that you're applying for 100 jobs, just makes you look desperate which makes you look unqualified.
That's horrible advice. People who are not constantly hitting the pavement when they are out of work will stay out of work. For every 200 jobs which you are perfectly suited to, you will be filtered out of even being considered by arbitrary HR decisions for 199 of them. Apply for three of four a month, and that one job that calls you in for an interview just might come up right away, if you are very, very lucky, but I would not reccomend counting on it.
I suspect that Mr. Spolsky might have poorly stated his case. Applying for dozens or hundreds of different jobs at the same large employer does look bad--or at least really, really desperate. Your resume is going to get binned becuase they figure if you're too lazy to figure out which positions at a company might be appropriate for you, they're certainly not going to do it for you.
If he did mean to suggest one should only apply for three or four jobs total at a time...yes, that's poor advice for most of us. If you're extremely senior or have very specialized skills that are genuinely in demand then you can afford to be picky--shotgunning resumes looks very unprofessional, even desperate. Besides, someone who is looking for work at that high a level probably shouldn't be doing it without professional help. Wannabe CEOs/CIOs/CFOs don't usually send a form letter out to hundreds of companies.
Still, it's certainly good form to appear to only be sending out a few resumes. Creating the appearance of confidence is good. A custom cover letter for each job at each employer can help tremendously, if only by drawing attention to the key points of your standard resume. Be short, sweet, and to the point. Construct it out out of a pool of boilerplate sentences if you like, but at least change more than the company name at the top. This is particularly important if you apply to more than one job at the same employer--identical cover letters for different jobs is poor packaging. It looks rather lazy if the same HR department screens both resumes.
The great-grandparent poster complained that his experiences have "led me to believe that spending a great deal of time on each application/resume/cover letter I send out for Yet Another Job Opening would consume an amount of time equivelent to a full-time job". Well, yes. Finding a job is a job! You have to work at it. It's a skillset that (hopefully) you don't use very often, so you have to work harder at it than you think! When you get a job, you're going to spend the bulk of your waking hours at it--why aren't you willing to invest the time in getting noticed by a worthwhile employer? Spending half an hour a day browsing Monster.com is a luxury to be enjoyed by the employed.
What we are surprised by is how many business that DIDNT have an incentive to look the other way obviously did so. Many of these lost money from their unconcern rather than made any.
You have to remember that the information was probably collected by a front line clerk who was working for minimum wage and planned to escape to college ASAP. Either...
the management was populated largely by psychotic trolls (an environment that doesn't breed staff loyalty--I worked in a 'mom & pop' grocery store where the owner was probably bipolar. The managers turned over almost as quickly as the frontline staff; I was the senior cashier there after less than two years; I had more experience than most of the management team);
the clerk was dumb as a rock (I visited a major chain video store--two different outlets of same, actually--and in both cases the clerk couldn't figure the change on a rental from a twenty-dollar bill. Are cash registers purely ornamental?)
or both.
I admit that out of sheer frustration I polluted the database with at least one fake individual--unless members of the Romanov dynasty actually did shop in our store...
It just makes good sense to start laying the groundwork for a mining opperation if it will take 10-15 years to get going.
The parent poster has it exactly correct. Helium-3 also has some other scientific uses, so even if fusion doesn't pan out, it's not a total loss to recover some. This being Slashdot, I don't need to point out all the corollary scientific benefits of building permanently manned space- and moon-based facilities.
Look at New York City. In 1954, they identified a probable future need for water in the city that would be unmet by the two existing water tunnels to the city. After sixteen years of discussion and planning, construction began on the aptly-named Third Water Tunnel. Completion is scheduled for 2020--a massive, fifty-year civil engineering project.
Parts of the project improve the existing water distribution system (somewhat analogous to improving general-purpose space infrastructure in a He-3 mining program) while Phase 4 of the project adds additional delivery capacity from reservoirs (comparable to actually mining He-3). If it turns out that we don't need He-3, we've still got space infrastructure and a moon base. It's a good thing.
My grandfather died of lung cancer (no, he didn't smoke) after working win a plant that used PCB's for 20 years.
I'm wondering if the two of you are talking about the same PCBs. I think the grandparent poster is talking about printed circuit boards, while the parent is talking about polychlorinated biphenyls. Of course, they're both nasty.
Slashdot Mirror
Quite. What the present system of drug discovery aims to do is find compounds that have a biological effect--any biological effect--and then try to figure out how they work. They use the natural compounds as a starting point for future development. Such a trick usually shrinks dramatically the space you have to search to find useful drugs.
If you started out with completely random compounds, you'd be reinventing a lot of wheels. Nature already has developed compounds that do almost anything we would want a particular drug to accomplish.
Search engines are software. Google makes money selling their technology to various partners. Why wouldn't other people--including Microsoft--want to try to get a piece of that pie?
Um--I think this poster might have substituted programmers for programs in a couple of places...or did we sign away more than we thought when we turned over copyrights to the FSF? :D
Guys, the post is a joke--"terms of their release and distribution be kept in their chest pocket"--who modded it informative?
Sure, the fuel has a positive ROI on its energy budget--but that's not the whole story. You also have to lift the tanks, insulation, and pumps.
You'll note that they accelerate the damn test article with a rocket.
Why is this a strike against scramjets? By definition, they only operate at supersonic speeds. If you're trying to prove the concept there's only a limited number of ways to get the engine up into that speed regime. Guess what--the Air Force isn't going to lend NASA an SR-71 so that they can blow it up when the test goes bad.
Designing a ramjet that can transition to scramjet operation would be a monumental accomplishment, but we're not there yet. NASA is doing the sensible thing by testing the engine that they've got--and consequently testing their engineering assumptions and theoretical models.
Michael Crichton's Prey is an amusing fiction science novel about imaginary (and physically impossible) robots and the contrived problems with them.
Sheesh. The guy makes a lot of embarrassing lapses in both plot and science. (I am a physicist who does biology for a living. I confess, as a book critic I am an amateur.) Want a bio-thriller? It's been a while since I've read Andromeda Strain, but I seem to recall that it wasn't too bad. Try also Terminal Man; the amount of disbelief one has to suspend is not unreasonable.
Gee, this reminds me of the "toner wars" from Neil Stephenson's Diamond Age. Airborne nanomachines would occasionally do combat using little tiny lasers. The corpses of dead nanobots would coat exposed surfaces with a fine black powder--like someone poured out a toner cartridge all over everything.
Cities would be surrounded by a net of slightly larger flying devices that attempted to screen out unwanted nanobots.
True in the United States.
Some jurisdictions--Germany, for one--are working actively to phase out the use of nuclear power. Others--France comes to mind--continue to rely on nuclear power for a significant fraction of their electricity. Still other places are reevaluating the merits of nuclear power with an eye to increasing capacity or phasing out other generating sources like coal. (The province of Ontario, Canada is looking at this.)
Most of the 'good' sites for hydroelectric power have been developed, oil and natural gas prices have been (to say the least) unstable over the last few years, and people are starting to have almost as much of a NIMBY reaction to coal as they do to nuclear. Public pressure can ease; zoning laws can be amended...this is going to be an interesting century for energy policy.
Yep, those damned leftists who haven't put together an annual report every year since 1997 criticizing the Communist Chinese regime.
They couldn't be bothered to put up a page on their website linking to current reports of Chinese abuses of human rights, either.
It's trolls like you that give the right wing of the political spectrum a bad name. Yeah, Amnesty International may well be made up of bleeding-heart liberals, but they're pretty consistent on China--they're opposed to the regime, and they're opposed to the companies that sell products used to prop up the regime, and they're supportive of democratic reforms.Come on--this is the Internet. Can't you come up with better leftist conspiracy theories than "AI is in bed with the Commies 'cause they hate Microsoft"?
Well, yes. Any legislation aiming to restrict the sale or possession of firearms to those who should* be allowed to have them will necessarily inconvenience those poeple somewhat.
In attempting to secure any sort of system, there is always always a tradeoff between effectiveness and ease of use. Many of us on Slashdot accept the inconvenience of keying in an eight-character password (upper- and lower-case letters and numbers, no words please!) one or more times per day to control access ot our computers.
I spent some time in the United States as a student a few years ago. I had to make three trips to the local Social Security Administration office (and fill out copious amounts of paperwork) to acquire a Social Security Number so that I could report my scholarships correctly to Uncle Sam. Again, an apparently necessarily inconvenience to ensure that taxes are paid and that visiting students are legally in the country.
"Gun control" legislation has similar aims. The laws exist to restrict the sale of weapons to appropriate individuals (not insane, underage, or a known criminal; other restrictions may exist by state). Legitimate buyers are inconvenienced, but it is nominally the price of making the system more secure.
Whether this goal is achieved is another question, and whether the system is particularly efficient yet another. To abandon all attempt at gun control isn't the solution--it would be akin to the Social Security Administration giving up on checking ID when issuing SSN cards (because identification can be forged) or to Microsoft responding to exploits by announcing that they were removing all password-checking from their operating systems.
*I will leave the discussion regarding who should have access to firearms for another post.
Right, and that's what Slashdot does--it tells you about interesting articles on Wired. And in the New York Times, and the Guardian, and on Groklaw. Slashdot produces very little of its own content. There are a few book reviews and interview, but the bread and butter of Slashdot is providing links to interesting and/or useful articles in other news sources...and providing a venue in which its readers can comment on those stories.
Off the top of my head, I don't know the mass of the media layer on a hard drive, but it's easy enough to find the areal density of the data.
IBM's 'pixie dust' (AFC) technology promises densities of up to about 100 billion bits per square inch. That's (roughly) 1000 square angstroms per bit. In other words, about an order of magnitude more area than in the grandparent post's fanciful thought experiment. Not only that, but the layer of iron oxide used in hard drives--though very, very thin--is not monomolecular.
Note that the great grandparent poster was asking about an exabyte of storage--1000 petabytes, or a million terabytes. Shaving three orders of magnitude off of that makes the problem much more manageable--though RHIC has still done a heck of a job accumulating a petabyte of storage space.
It's eminently doable. That's 75,000 particles (atoms or molecules, depending on the species used) per bit--a huge number, still.
The problem comes in storage and readout. If I have to flip bits manually using a scanning electron microscope, that's no good.
On the other hand, let's assume that the work can be done optically, using a scanning laser. Take something the size of a vitamin E molecule; it absorbs visible light readily. Lying flat on a substrate, it would have a surface area (*very* roughly) of about 75 square angstroms. 75,000 of those would cover an area of about five million square angstroms. If arrayed over a square, that's about 240 nanometers on a side, or the diffraction limited spot size of a 480 nm wavelength laser.
Yep, it could be done. A monomolecular layer on a flat substrate; about half a kilogram of molecule. Perfect--a petabyte for your laptop! But--that would cover a total square area of six or so square kilometers...somewhat awkward to scan with a single laser, and a bit clumsy to carry.
Ouch. While true in some cases, I don't necessarily believe that the article in question is a good example of this problem. First of all, Deborah Jin doesn't need the money--she's a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" recipient.
Second, the reporter noted "Jin stressed her team worked with a supercooled gas, which provides little opportunity for everyday application." That the reporter placed this tidbit at the end suggests the problem is one of sloppy or sensationalist reporting, not scientific grandstanding. The reporter also placed her own comment between two of Jin's quotes, possibly giving the impression that more was claimed.
Jin clearly states that though related (possibly) to superconductivity, her material is assuredly not a superconductor. The reporter then steered the discussion off on that tangent--and few solid state physicists can resist a talk about the applications of room-temperature superconductivity.Perhaps you left off 'sloppy science reporters who are desperate to sell newspaper columns' from your list of individuals complicit in the 'broken system'.
Third, in addition to Jin's own obvious talents, she also works with Wieman and Cornell, who recently landed a Nobel prize for their work on Bose-Einstein condensates. Perhaps she actually is qualified to make predictions about where her discoveries might lead. She knows the field better than most of the people who work in it, and I daresay better than all the posters on Slashdot. Why is she lying when she makes not-unfounded guesses about the future of her own research?
That depends--are you the Before or the After photo?
Yes, it would have an economic impact; no, it's not necessarily appropriate to conclude that it would be a seriously negative one.
The major currencies of the world (US dollar, Euro, Yen, GB Pound, etc.) are not backed by gold as they would have been decades or centuries ago. Without question there are still individuals, corporations, and governments that maintain some of their wealth in the form of gold bullion or other precious metals, but most don't (or shouldn't have!) put all of their eggs in one basket.
Compare the inconvenience and hardship suffered as a result of these temporary economic dislocations with the industrial benefits of having large amounts of low-cost gold available. Gold is incredible stuff--nearly completely corrosion resistant, hypoallergenic, malleable, ductile, electrically conductive...
To take a historical example, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the world's largest supply of nitrates came from Chilean saltpeter. There were concerns about the supply running out--Chile supplied something like 60% of the world's nitrates, but those mines were not bottomless. Chilean mining cartels also felt no qualms about gouging the Allies in World War One. Highly unfortunate this was, because the nitrates sourced there were used to produce fertilizers and explosives--both staples of twentieth century life.
The development of the Haber process to generate ammonia directly from nitrogen and hydrogen gases changed that. Since the availability of nitrogen fertilizer was no longer limited by the availability of saltpeter deposits, modern agriculture became possible. Also, since any industrialized nation can build their own ammonia plants, the price of nitrates is no longer fixed by a mining cartel.
So--sometimes technological advances can have an economic effect. What does this have to do with jobs moving to India?
You ought to be able to cut that back some more. Try getting rid of your car and moving to a cheap apartment near public transit. A car (gas, maintenance, and insurance) is probably your second-largest (after rent/mortgage) or largest expense. Unlike mortgage payments, car payments don't even build equity for you.
I am one of the lowest of the low, one of the so-called serfs of science. As a graduate student at a Canadian university, I live in downtown Toronto on a stipend of $22,500 per year--from which I pay $6000 per annum in tuition. It is possible to live on $14,500 per year--that's $1200 per month. It just sucks.
So, the question is--how much of your lifestyle are you willing to sacrifice for your company? Living on $4000 per month? That's nearly fifty thousand after-tax dollars per year...Unless you're supporting a family, try to dredge up some memories of your student days, and recall all the ways to cut costs.
I know the parent poster is probably kidding, but think about it--this kid is pulling in an extra $10 per day, every day of the year, from the three days of work he did two years ago. Ten bucks a day will comfortably keep him in groceries. Another such app will pay his rent as a student, as long as he goes to school outside of a major city.
He's not working for ten dollars a day--he's not working for ten dollars a day! This is a bonus on top of his regular day job, or a little pocket money to help out at college. At ten dollars per day for two years, that's more than seven thousand dollars for three days of coding. Assuming he's spent another four days on maintaining his website and shipping his product, he's down to earning only a thousand dollars per day for his actual labour. That's better than a hundred bucks an hour. Good show!
If we assume that he spends a full two hours per week shipping and advertising his product, that's still $35 per hour--not a bad wage, and it takes up less of his time than most hobbies.
The problem is that there isn't enough precision in verdicts. In criminal cases, courts may only return "guilty" or "not guilty"--there is no such verdict as "innocent".
In Scottish courts, there are three verdicts--"guilty", which has the usual meaning; "not proven", which indicates that there is insufficient evidence to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt (analogous to the usual meaning of "not guilty" in most Western countries); and "not guilty", which means that the court believes the preponderance of evidence suggests the accused is genuinely innocent of the crimes.
The three verdicts might be incorporated into the American legal system as "guilty", "not guilty", and "innocent". Out-and-out guilty verdicts would lead to the penal system and the usual punishments. Not guilty verdicts indicate continued doubt as to the accused's innocence, but would still count as an acquittal--they fail the "beyond a reasonable doubt" test. Innocent verdicts would suggest that the evidence was in favour of the accused, and might require the payment of significant compensation by the state. I'm sure we can all think of cases where acquitted individuals, though not guilty, certainly were not innocent! I humbly suggest that the Simpson case might fall into this category.
In any properly designed application, it should be possible to accomplish all tasks without using the right-click context menus. The left button is all that a beginning user needs. Mention that there is a right mouse button, but that they don't need to use it. Inform them if they do inadvertantly click it, they can press Escape and no harm will be done--this is useful in a number of situations, actually.
The right click is a useful feature for most users--it shouldn't be written off because it might complicate things slightly for neophytes. Actually, there's nothing that prevents you from giving a new PC user a mouse with only one button, if they are likely to have trouble with two.
Mind you, I agree with you about the ease-of-use benefits of a fixed menu bar.
Moderation: (-1, Didn't Get The Joke)
I suspect that Mr. Spolsky might have poorly stated his case. Applying for dozens or hundreds of different jobs at the same large employer does look bad--or at least really, really desperate. Your resume is going to get binned becuase they figure if you're too lazy to figure out which positions at a company might be appropriate for you, they're certainly not going to do it for you.
If he did mean to suggest one should only apply for three or four jobs total at a time...yes, that's poor advice for most of us. If you're extremely senior or have very specialized skills that are genuinely in demand then you can afford to be picky--shotgunning resumes looks very unprofessional, even desperate. Besides, someone who is looking for work at that high a level probably shouldn't be doing it without professional help. Wannabe CEOs/CIOs/CFOs don't usually send a form letter out to hundreds of companies.
Still, it's certainly good form to appear to only be sending out a few resumes. Creating the appearance of confidence is good. A custom cover letter for each job at each employer can help tremendously, if only by drawing attention to the key points of your standard resume. Be short, sweet, and to the point. Construct it out out of a pool of boilerplate sentences if you like, but at least change more than the company name at the top. This is particularly important if you apply to more than one job at the same employer--identical cover letters for different jobs is poor packaging. It looks rather lazy if the same HR department screens both resumes.
The great-grandparent poster complained that his experiences have "led me to believe that spending a great deal of time on each application/resume/cover letter I send out for Yet Another Job Opening would consume an amount of time equivelent to a full-time job". Well, yes. Finding a job is a job! You have to work at it. It's a skillset that (hopefully) you don't use very often, so you have to work harder at it than you think! When you get a job, you're going to spend the bulk of your waking hours at it--why aren't you willing to invest the time in getting noticed by a worthwhile employer? Spending half an hour a day browsing Monster.com is a luxury to be enjoyed by the employed.
You have to remember that the information was probably collected by a front line clerk who was working for minimum wage and planned to escape to college ASAP. Either...
the management was populated largely by psychotic trolls (an environment that doesn't breed staff loyalty--I worked in a 'mom & pop' grocery store where the owner was probably bipolar. The managers turned over almost as quickly as the frontline staff; I was the senior cashier there after less than two years; I had more experience than most of the management team);
the clerk was dumb as a rock (I visited a major chain video store--two different outlets of same, actually--and in both cases the clerk couldn't figure the change on a rental from a twenty-dollar bill. Are cash registers purely ornamental?)
or both.
I admit that out of sheer frustration I polluted the database with at least one fake individual--unless members of the Romanov dynasty actually did shop in our store...
"I don't care who does the electing as long as I get to do the nominating." -- Boss Tweed
Ah, delicious.
The parent poster has it exactly correct. Helium-3 also has some other scientific uses, so even if fusion doesn't pan out, it's not a total loss to recover some. This being Slashdot, I don't need to point out all the corollary scientific benefits of building permanently manned space- and moon-based facilities.
Look at New York City. In 1954, they identified a probable future need for water in the city that would be unmet by the two existing water tunnels to the city. After sixteen years of discussion and planning, construction began on the aptly-named Third Water Tunnel. Completion is scheduled for 2020--a massive, fifty-year civil engineering project.
Parts of the project improve the existing water distribution system (somewhat analogous to improving general-purpose space infrastructure in a He-3 mining program) while Phase 4 of the project adds additional delivery capacity from reservoirs (comparable to actually mining He-3). If it turns out that we don't need He-3, we've still got space infrastructure and a moon base. It's a good thing.
I'm wondering if the two of you are talking about the same PCBs. I think the grandparent poster is talking about printed circuit boards, while the parent is talking about polychlorinated biphenyls. Of course, they're both nasty.