They price to maximise profit, not to maximise revenue, so if costs go up, then that changes the equation.
Profit is revenue (price * demand at that price) minus expenses. For any given level of expense, profit is maximised by maximising revenue. A change in expense only changes the optimal price part of the equation if it affects what people are willing to pay -- which in most cases it doesn't.
You are right, it's really profits that they are maximising, but they do it by maximizing revenue based on what the market can bear. When that's not enough, and costs still outweigh income, then they take a loss, and the same optimal price provides optimal revenue and thus optimal losses.
Take for example petrol which has gone up in price in the last year from about £1 per litre to about £1.30.
That's a great example for showing when and why the rule doesn't apply. Gas stations are an exception because gas is fungible (gas is gas so it's largely irrelevant who you buy it from), and a commodity traded on an open market. So they can't charge significantly more than their competitors.
Gas is also largely inelastic, so the demand doesn't change much with the price. Obviously it's not completely inelastic, but gas used to be $1 here ten years ago and it went above $4 before recreational travel was significantly curtailed, and people still drove to work, and shipping trucks still made their deliveries. So, there's not much incentive to lower price either.
Neither of those things apply to Playstations. They aren't fungible, and demand is elastic with price. Nobody cares if blue lasers cost Sony a lot, if they raise the price then fewer people will buy them, if they lower it more will. The price of a PS3 wasn't enough to cover the cost of making one at first, much less also cover the fixed costs. If it costs them $10 more to make one all of a sudden, and they raise the price by that amount and cross a psychological barrier (like $299 to $309) then sales are going to drop and they won't make more money.
The fact that the cost part of the equation has changed doesn't change the revenue portion.
No your right, it isn't a short because it would (ideally) have no real (resistive) component , current would flow because a suitably selected (i.e. very large) capacitor would have a very low impedance.
So the energy in this case would be consumed in the resistive heating of the generators coils, no real power would be developed in an ideal capacitor because P=I^2R and in this case R=0 (the impedance Z however would not be equal to zero)
I gotta give you props, you almost know what you're talking about, kid.
Yes, the actual power lost in this case would be P=i^2R where R is the resistance in the generator and transmission lines.
Whereas for an AC circuit current flow is i = V / Z, where Z is the impedance. R is only the non-imaginary component of impedance, which is 0 for an ideal capacitor. Power consumed in such a circuit is not i*V.
Which means, like I've been saying all along, that when a capacitive or inductive load causes a low power factor, the only extra power that is burned -- and thus needs to be generated by the power plant -- is due to the extra resistive losses alone.
I suggest you learn some basic electrical engineering theory before calling me out on power factor mr burke.
Please. You need to get past EE 101 before you try to call me out. You need to actually learn what these things mean beyond knowing that a capacitor has 'impedance' which is like resistance but for RLC circuits. It just replaces resistance in Ohm's law and everything else is the same, right? Derp!
I'm surprised you didn't try to call me out by saying that a capacitor is a short but only at infinite frequency, as long as we're bringing up 'ideal' scenarios. Oh wait, that would have also required you to actually understand what you're talking about.
I don't know, I once thought that myself, but I simply couldn't ignore the evidence of animal research showing complex reasoning in a variety of animals, sometimes high-level abstract reasoning. First with chimps, then dolphins and parrots and crows and even some cephalopods.
On the other hand, it might not have had as much to do with respect for evidence as i would like to think, and more to do with growing up and out of the preconceived notions I'd held on to so dearly as a teen.
Good. Then they won't have to raise the price of their products.
So... you believe Sony is charging less for their products than the market would bear? They aren't seeking to seeking to optimize the equation Revenue = Cost * Sales at that Cost ? That if they thought they could charge an extra $10 today without hurting sales enough to negatively affect revenue, they wouldn't because they don't want the extra money?
Well, I don't believe that. I believe companies do try to optimize revenue irrespective of costs because they like money, and so if they suddenly accrue $10 extra costs, they accept $10 less margin. That makes more sense than applying an extra costs directly to the price at the expense of total revenue, seeing as that would defeat the purpose of defraying costs.
The only thing that worries me is if the "Intelligent Design" folks latch onto this. It seems like this guy is going to continue tweaking the experiment in hope of generating some self-replicating strain of his bubbles. (Heck, I would too.) But the ID crowd might see this as "proof" that life could only begin with "guidance" from above.
So what? They do that to anything whether it makes any sense or not. Digital cameras are as much "proof" that eyes can only be created by a "designer".
So what's the worry? That IDers will say "Ah ha!" and continue to think and say silly things? Oh noes! Science will as always press on without them.
And in the same strain of disappointing mainstream science reporting, basically everything I've read on this seems to focus on the "we made cats glow green" part, rather than the more serious part of the research, which is to protect against AIDS.
Weird, because the first 3 articles I read off of Google News were entirely focused on the AIDS part, mentioning the glowing part only in the headline, and then in passing towards the end of the articles where they said they fluorescent gene was used to track where the modified genes were being expressed.
Who the hell does things for science? It's not a sentient being, it's not even a non-sentient physical thing. Science is a process.
Who the hell does things for "the advancement of human knowledge, acquired and evaluated through the scientific method"? Which is what people mean when they say they're doing things "for science"?
Lots of people.
It's one of the greatest ways to have an impact on the future of humanity -- more so than through genes, which spread slowly and only via reproduction, ideas can spread rapidly through an entire population, enhancing that population.
If you want to be a pedant
Then you'll fail to understand the vast majority of human communication. "Science is not a sentient being" is a perfect example of missing the point through false linguistic precision.
the rate of growth [...] is expected to decline slightly over the next 10 years.
Yeah! Classic use of selective editing! The statement in the summary is actually:
the rate of growth in U.S. household energy use, and household energy use itself, is expected to decline slightly over the next 10 years
Since you're so smart I don't have to explain that this means that first the rate of growth will decline but remain positive, then become negative, causing the value to fall. As described in TFA.
Returned to the grid arbitrarily out of phase, which requires utility companies to employ large PFC installations and / or take the hit with extra generating capacity.
Only to compensate for the extra line loss! Which is important, but small compared to the real power consumed. You can measure watts produced at a generator, volt-amps in the load, and power in the load and see that the power produced by the generator is only slightly more than the real power consumed by the load. Implying that it is more, that CFLs don't save power and use the full volt-amps worth of power even with 0 PFC is pure ignorant bullshit FUD.
But they do have PFC installed.
Suggesting that widespread adoption of low power factor equipment is a non-issue is just another attempt at green-washing with bullshit.
We're just talking about low-power usage lighting when the PF for the home will be dominated by HVAC and large appliances. Acting like the claim that PF is a red herring for CFLs is the same as saying it's a non-issue if your whole house was running a low PF is just a bullshit way to cover for you getting called out on your flagrant ignorance.
What a lot of people don't realize about CFL's is that they can have really fucking poor power factors, we are talking in the region of 0.3 for the really cheap ones, so you may only be getting billed for 20W but the power company is feeling the burn of 60.
If by 'burn' you mean transmission losses then yes. If you mean 'burn' as in they have to actually produce 60W to run a 20W CFL then no, power factor does not work that way.
Power factor comes from the fact that CFLs are not a purely resistive load. But energy stored in a capacitor or inductor is not lost. It is returned to the grid. Your utility does need extra equipment to manage apparent vs real power and make their distribution more efficient (mostly eliminating the one downside of low power factor, but that's as far as it goes (and they already have this equipment).
Power factor as a negative of CFLs is a complete red herring, and whoever told you it was a big deal was taking advantage of you in order to slander a fine energy-saving technology. In reality all you can say is that there advantage over incandescents is slightly less great.
Pumpkin pie. It is the most sincere food. Though only if the pumpkins are harvested from a sincere pumpkin patch that is approved by the Great Pumpkin.
But that's just it - that's the underpinning of modern physics right there - it's no that there's not an aether, it's that as goes light so goes the universe.
Not, that's not just it. The underpinning of modern physics is that there is no privileged reference frame, when the whole point of the aether was that it was such a frame. That frame -- the aether -- does not exist. That's the first major distinction between "modern" and the prior physics in which the aether was hypothesised. It is inherently contradictory to talk about modern physics and then say "it's not that there's not an aether" because it is an inherent consequence of the true underpinning of modern physics that there isn't.
So calling space-time the luminiferous aether is completely stupid and and categorically wrong.
That's why nobody does. Hard to believe, I know.
Amd this is/. - all snark is warrented, elsewise what would we read?
You're so right; what would people do if they had to be snarky and make sense?
Imagine if the 19th century test equipent had been accurate enough to find gravity waves - don't you think Michelson and Morley would have seen that as evidence of something aetheric going on? How confusing would that have been.
Maybe, but they would have realised that it was very different than the theorised medium of the luminiferous aether. They expected a consistent difference between the arm of their device parallel to the motion of the earth versus the one perpendicular, showing the effect of the earth's motion through the medium. Transient effects not aligned with or related to the earth's motion would have indicated that their theory needed to be entirely re-worked.
Saying ultimate light propagates through the medium of space-time is true in one sense, but only metaphorically similar to the type of 'medium' that the aether theory was intended to supply. The same sense in which matter is the medium for sound waves -- some kind of stuff that exists in space so that the wave can travel through space. Space is what everything including the medium travels through, but the aether was light's medium, not everything's.
These two senses of 'medium' produce different experimental predictions. So "the medium for light is space-time" is the answer equivalent to what they would have called "light doesn't require a medium of its own, it can exist in empty space itself just like matter". Luminiferous aether is what you get if you believe that isn't the case.
The ultimate nature of space-time is a huge mystery, to be sure.
I'm just saying, whatever it is, it's nothing like the aether -- we know this much from experiment. Yes, they are in some ways analogous. That's not a reason to call it "luminiferous aether" when the whole point of how we got to here is that it isn't. And so the snark was unwarranted. "So 19th century" is no problem for the things from the 19th century that weren't wrong.
Dark matter does not appear to interact with itself any more than it does with normal matter. That's why in galactic collisions the dark matter of one galaxy will pass right through not just the dust clouds of the other galaxy, but its dark matter as well.
Amusingly, the gravity wave detectors are basically the same as the Michelson Morley apparatus, and the opposite result is expected. But of course we won't call these "aether waves" when we find them- that's so 19th century!
Well of course, because the phenomenon and thus expected experimental results are completely different. The gravitational potential of the detector relative to the earth will be constant, ergo there would be no distortion based on the earth's movement -- consistent with the Michelson/Morely experimental results -- whereas you would expect a difference if there was a light-propagation medium through which the earth was moving.
It's the same reason why when they detect minute changes due to seismic vibrations, they don't call those aether waves either.:P
What's interesting now is what it's made of - all we know is there's no interaction with photons, and no frictional clumping as you'd see in normal matter (or at least not in the wide range of energies involved in galaxy formation).
Like neutrinos, only heavier. Perhaps the hypothetical neutralino. They only interact via the weak force and gravity, which would explain the apparent behavior. Or maybe something completely different, but then these detectors would probably not be able to find it at all, which would be a bummer.
Man, it's so painful waiting for sufficient data to show up in real-time. These tantalizing but inconclusive hints are like torture! I can only imagine what it must be like for those actually doing the work -- or maybe actually doing the daily work makes it easier to bear and the years just slip by like on a big engineering project? I just wish I could fast-forward twenty years to when we have these problems solved! It feels like we're on the cusp of some great discoveries in physics.
Who has kids and who doesn't. Your creative turn of phrase definitely shows.
I had no idea I could ever be this protective. Touch my girl, you die. Simple, isn't it?
Uh, I'm childless, but the hypothetical thought of a hypothetical child being hypothetically diddled by a hypothetical TSA bastard (or anyone) puts me in a hypothetical killing mood.
I know damn well there would be nothing hypothetical about this feeling if my child wasn't hypothetical too.
I'm more confused by those who think it'd be no big deal. What's wrong with you?
The lander, of course. If we find life, and it's similar enough to earth life to support the idea that one seeded the other via interplanetary meteor, we want to be sure that it wasn't seeded in the 21st century by a NASA probe sent to search for signs of life.:P
Well yes, and that really wrecked AMDs revenue. The were number on on terms of absolute performance and price/performance, but a distant two in sales.
It did more than that. It wrecked their entire financial structure.
For a brief period, AMD's market share was fab limited. So AMD built a huge new fab, acquiring several billion dollars in debt in the process. No big deal, given the possible revenue the extra capacity could supply. Fabs are expensive. It's part of the game.
Once the fab came online, though, AMD's market share barely moved. Their market share was now Intel-limited. This is bad, because while their fabs were formerly full and thus efficient and profitable, now they were largely empty. An underutilized fab is a money sink fab, above and beyond the debt from building it and the depreciation of the equipment.
This more or less directly led to them spinning off their manufacturing division as Global Foundries. Their debt structure no longer matched their prospects, and it was going to be very expensive to finance the next fab which they would have to build to stay in the game.
There were certainly missteps by AMD, too. They did underestimate how quickly Intel would adapt. They had been developing their own from-scratch high-frequency K9 architecture, but it was canceled late in development. Instead they just tweaked K8 and doubled the cores to four to create Phenom, which had big enough problems that when rev C fixed them they re-launched the brand as Phenom II.
It is hard to say what would have happened had Intel not engaged in market manipulation. One thing I think can be said -- Intel, too, has had their missteps, but they're less damaging because they have the financial stability to absorb them. Maybe AMD would have made the same mistakes, and still been behind Intel just as much, but if they'd been able to attain the the market share they could have, they would have had the money to ride out the problems, and been able to keep their fabs, and a lot of engineers that were laid off.
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They price to maximise profit, not to maximise revenue, so if costs go up, then that changes the equation.
Profit is revenue (price * demand at that price) minus expenses. For any given level of expense, profit is maximised by maximising revenue. A change in expense only changes the optimal price part of the equation if it affects what people are willing to pay -- which in most cases it doesn't.
You are right, it's really profits that they are maximising, but they do it by maximizing revenue based on what the market can bear. When that's not enough, and costs still outweigh income, then they take a loss, and the same optimal price provides optimal revenue and thus optimal losses.
Take for example petrol which has gone up in price in the last year from about £1 per litre to about £1.30.
That's a great example for showing when and why the rule doesn't apply. Gas stations are an exception because gas is fungible (gas is gas so it's largely irrelevant who you buy it from), and a commodity traded on an open market. So they can't charge significantly more than their competitors.
Gas is also largely inelastic, so the demand doesn't change much with the price. Obviously it's not completely inelastic, but gas used to be $1 here ten years ago and it went above $4 before recreational travel was significantly curtailed, and people still drove to work, and shipping trucks still made their deliveries. So, there's not much incentive to lower price either.
Neither of those things apply to Playstations. They aren't fungible, and demand is elastic with price. Nobody cares if blue lasers cost Sony a lot, if they raise the price then fewer people will buy them, if they lower it more will. The price of a PS3 wasn't enough to cover the cost of making one at first, much less also cover the fixed costs. If it costs them $10 more to make one all of a sudden, and they raise the price by that amount and cross a psychological barrier (like $299 to $309) then sales are going to drop and they won't make more money.
The fact that the cost part of the equation has changed doesn't change the revenue portion.
No your right, it isn't a short because it would (ideally) have no real (resistive) component , current would flow because a suitably selected (i.e. very large) capacitor would have a very low impedance.
So the energy in this case would be consumed in the resistive heating of the generators coils, no real power would be developed in an ideal capacitor because P=I^2R and in this case R=0 (the impedance Z however would not be equal to zero)
I gotta give you props, you almost know what you're talking about, kid.
Yes, the actual power lost in this case would be P=i^2R where R is the resistance in the generator and transmission lines.
Whereas for an AC circuit current flow is i = V / Z, where Z is the impedance. R is only the non-imaginary component of impedance, which is 0 for an ideal capacitor. Power consumed in such a circuit is not i*V.
Which means, like I've been saying all along, that when a capacitive or inductive load causes a low power factor, the only extra power that is burned -- and thus needs to be generated by the power plant -- is due to the extra resistive losses alone.
I suggest you learn some basic electrical engineering theory before calling me out on power factor mr burke.
Please. You need to get past EE 101 before you try to call me out. You need to actually learn what these things mean beyond knowing that a capacitor has 'impedance' which is like resistance but for RLC circuits. It just replaces resistance in Ohm's law and everything else is the same, right? Derp!
I'm surprised you didn't try to call me out by saying that a capacitor is a short but only at infinite frequency, as long as we're bringing up 'ideal' scenarios. Oh wait, that would have also required you to actually understand what you're talking about.
This was detected by Kepler, so yep it applies.
I don't know, I once thought that myself, but I simply couldn't ignore the evidence of animal research showing complex reasoning in a variety of animals, sometimes high-level abstract reasoning. First with chimps, then dolphins and parrots and crows and even some cephalopods.
On the other hand, it might not have had as much to do with respect for evidence as i would like to think, and more to do with growing up and out of the preconceived notions I'd held on to so dearly as a teen.
I'm skeptical that interacting with humans could increase their odds of survival.
"Bobby, listen! That bird just said 'hey pretty lady!' Oh, do give it some food!"
Or:
"Hey, look! These wild parrots can talk! Let's sell tickets to tourists instead of clear cutting the forest to raise cattle!"
Good. Then they won't have to raise the price of their products.
So... you believe Sony is charging less for their products than the market would bear? They aren't seeking to seeking to optimize the equation Revenue = Cost * Sales at that Cost ? That if they thought they could charge an extra $10 today without hurting sales enough to negatively affect revenue, they wouldn't because they don't want the extra money?
Well, I don't believe that. I believe companies do try to optimize revenue irrespective of costs because they like money, and so if they suddenly accrue $10 extra costs, they accept $10 less margin. That makes more sense than applying an extra costs directly to the price at the expense of total revenue, seeing as that would defeat the purpose of defraying costs.
The only thing that worries me is if the "Intelligent Design" folks latch onto this. It seems like this guy is going to continue tweaking the experiment in hope of generating some self-replicating strain of his bubbles. (Heck, I would too.) But the ID crowd might see this as "proof" that life could only begin with "guidance" from above.
So what? They do that to anything whether it makes any sense or not. Digital cameras are as much "proof" that eyes can only be created by a "designer".
So what's the worry? That IDers will say "Ah ha!" and continue to think and say silly things? Oh noes! Science will as always press on without them.
Oh come on, you're both just letting your biases get in the way.
This is a very typical earth; if there's anything unusual about it at all it's that it's average for earths in every respect.
And in the same strain of disappointing mainstream science reporting, basically everything I've read on this seems to focus on the "we made cats glow green" part, rather than the more serious part of the research, which is to protect against AIDS.
Weird, because the first 3 articles I read off of Google News were entirely focused on the AIDS part, mentioning the glowing part only in the headline, and then in passing towards the end of the articles where they said they fluorescent gene was used to track where the modified genes were being expressed.
Who the hell does things for science? It's not a sentient being, it's not even a non-sentient physical thing. Science is a process.
Who the hell does things for "the advancement of human knowledge, acquired and evaluated through the scientific method"? Which is what people mean when they say they're doing things "for science"?
Lots of people.
It's one of the greatest ways to have an impact on the future of humanity -- more so than through genes, which spread slowly and only via reproduction, ideas can spread rapidly through an entire population, enhancing that population.
If you want to be a pedant
Then you'll fail to understand the vast majority of human communication. "Science is not a sentient being" is a perfect example of missing the point through false linguistic precision.
the rate of growth [...] is expected to decline slightly over the next 10 years.
Yeah! Classic use of selective editing! The statement in the summary is actually:
the rate of growth in U.S. household energy use, and household energy use itself, is expected to decline slightly over the next 10 years
Since you're so smart I don't have to explain that this means that first the rate of growth will decline but remain positive, then become negative, causing the value to fall. As described in TFA.
But really, props, that was classic.
A capacitor isn't a short, and where do you think the energy goes in this situation with no real power consumed?
Returned to the grid arbitrarily out of phase, which requires utility companies to employ large PFC installations and / or take the hit with extra generating capacity.
Only to compensate for the extra line loss! Which is important, but small compared to the real power consumed. You can measure watts produced at a generator, volt-amps in the load, and power in the load and see that the power produced by the generator is only slightly more than the real power consumed by the load. Implying that it is more, that CFLs don't save power and use the full volt-amps worth of power even with 0 PFC is pure ignorant bullshit FUD.
But they do have PFC installed.
Suggesting that widespread adoption of low power factor equipment is a non-issue is just another attempt at green-washing with bullshit.
We're just talking about low-power usage lighting when the PF for the home will be dominated by HVAC and large appliances. Acting like the claim that PF is a red herring for CFLs is the same as saying it's a non-issue if your whole house was running a low PF is just a bullshit way to cover for you getting called out on your flagrant ignorance.
What a lot of people don't realize about CFL's is that they can have really fucking poor power factors, we are talking in the region of 0.3 for the really cheap ones, so you may only be getting billed for 20W but the power company is feeling the burn of 60.
If by 'burn' you mean transmission losses then yes. If you mean 'burn' as in they have to actually produce 60W to run a 20W CFL then no, power factor does not work that way.
Power factor comes from the fact that CFLs are not a purely resistive load. But energy stored in a capacitor or inductor is not lost. It is returned to the grid. Your utility does need extra equipment to manage apparent vs real power and make their distribution more efficient (mostly eliminating the one downside of low power factor, but that's as far as it goes (and they already have this equipment).
Power factor as a negative of CFLs is a complete red herring, and whoever told you it was a big deal was taking advantage of you in order to slander a fine energy-saving technology. In reality all you can say is that there advantage over incandescents is slightly less great.
Pumpkin pie. It is the most sincere food. Though only if the pumpkins are harvested from a sincere pumpkin patch that is approved by the Great Pumpkin.
But that's just it - that's the underpinning of modern physics right there - it's no that there's not an aether, it's that as goes light so goes the universe.
Not, that's not just it. The underpinning of modern physics is that there is no privileged reference frame, when the whole point of the aether was that it was such a frame. That frame -- the aether -- does not exist. That's the first major distinction between "modern" and the prior physics in which the aether was hypothesised. It is inherently contradictory to talk about modern physics and then say "it's not that there's not an aether" because it is an inherent consequence of the true underpinning of modern physics that there isn't.
So calling space-time the luminiferous aether is completely stupid and and categorically wrong.
That's why nobody does. Hard to believe, I know.
Amd this is /. - all snark is warrented, elsewise what would we read?
You're so right; what would people do if they had to be snarky and make sense?
Imagine if the 19th century test equipent had been accurate enough to find gravity waves - don't you think Michelson and Morley would have seen that as evidence of something aetheric going on? How confusing would that have been.
Maybe, but they would have realised that it was very different than the theorised medium of the luminiferous aether. They expected a consistent difference between the arm of their device parallel to the motion of the earth versus the one perpendicular, showing the effect of the earth's motion through the medium. Transient effects not aligned with or related to the earth's motion would have indicated that their theory needed to be entirely re-worked.
Saying ultimate light propagates through the medium of space-time is true in one sense, but only metaphorically similar to the type of 'medium' that the aether theory was intended to supply. The same sense in which matter is the medium for sound waves -- some kind of stuff that exists in space so that the wave can travel through space. Space is what everything including the medium travels through, but the aether was light's medium, not everything's.
These two senses of 'medium' produce different experimental predictions. So "the medium for light is space-time" is the answer equivalent to what they would have called "light doesn't require a medium of its own, it can exist in empty space itself just like matter". Luminiferous aether is what you get if you believe that isn't the case.
The ultimate nature of space-time is a huge mystery, to be sure.
I'm just saying, whatever it is, it's nothing like the aether -- we know this much from experiment. Yes, they are in some ways analogous. That's not a reason to call it "luminiferous aether" when the whole point of how we got to here is that it isn't. And so the snark was unwarranted. "So 19th century" is no problem for the things from the 19th century that weren't wrong.
Dark matter does not appear to interact with itself any more than it does with normal matter. That's why in galactic collisions the dark matter of one galaxy will pass right through not just the dust clouds of the other galaxy, but its dark matter as well.
guinness and soy are both quite umami tastes.
Yeah. Saying Guinness tastes like Soy because both are "savory" is like saying potato chips taste like beef jerky because they're both salty.
Amusingly, the gravity wave detectors are basically the same as the Michelson Morley apparatus, and the opposite result is expected. But of course we won't call these "aether waves" when we find them- that's so 19th century!
Well of course, because the phenomenon and thus expected experimental results are completely different. The gravitational potential of the detector relative to the earth will be constant, ergo there would be no distortion based on the earth's movement -- consistent with the Michelson/Morely experimental results -- whereas you would expect a difference if there was a light-propagation medium through which the earth was moving.
It's the same reason why when they detect minute changes due to seismic vibrations, they don't call those aether waves either. :P
What happened to it?
What's interesting now is what it's made of - all we know is there's no interaction with photons, and no frictional clumping as you'd see in normal matter (or at least not in the wide range of energies involved in galaxy formation).
Like neutrinos, only heavier. Perhaps the hypothetical neutralino. They only interact via the weak force and gravity, which would explain the apparent behavior. Or maybe something completely different, but then these detectors would probably not be able to find it at all, which would be a bummer.
Man, it's so painful waiting for sufficient data to show up in real-time. These tantalizing but inconclusive hints are like torture! I can only imagine what it must be like for those actually doing the work -- or maybe actually doing the daily work makes it easier to bear and the years just slip by like on a big engineering project? I just wish I could fast-forward twenty years to when we have these problems solved! It feels like we're on the cusp of some great discoveries in physics.
Who has kids and who doesn't. Your creative turn of phrase definitely shows.
I had no idea I could ever be this protective. Touch my girl, you die. Simple, isn't it?
Uh, I'm childless, but the hypothetical thought of a hypothetical child being hypothetically diddled by a hypothetical TSA bastard (or anyone) puts me in a hypothetical killing mood.
I know damn well there would be nothing hypothetical about this feeling if my child wasn't hypothetical too.
I'm more confused by those who think it'd be no big deal. What's wrong with you?
Who's this "we", the lander or meteorite ejecta?
The lander, of course. If we find life, and it's similar enough to earth life to support the idea that one seeded the other via interplanetary meteor, we want to be sure that it wasn't seeded in the 21st century by a NASA probe sent to search for signs of life. :P
Well yes, and that really wrecked AMDs revenue. The were number on on terms of absolute performance and price/performance, but a distant two in sales.
It did more than that. It wrecked their entire financial structure.
For a brief period, AMD's market share was fab limited. So AMD built a huge new fab, acquiring several billion dollars in debt in the process. No big deal, given the possible revenue the extra capacity could supply. Fabs are expensive. It's part of the game.
Once the fab came online, though, AMD's market share barely moved. Their market share was now Intel-limited. This is bad, because while their fabs were formerly full and thus efficient and profitable, now they were largely empty. An underutilized fab is a money sink fab, above and beyond the debt from building it and the depreciation of the equipment.
This more or less directly led to them spinning off their manufacturing division as Global Foundries. Their debt structure no longer matched their prospects, and it was going to be very expensive to finance the next fab which they would have to build to stay in the game.
There were certainly missteps by AMD, too. They did underestimate how quickly Intel would adapt. They had been developing their own from-scratch high-frequency K9 architecture, but it was canceled late in development. Instead they just tweaked K8 and doubled the cores to four to create Phenom, which had big enough problems that when rev C fixed them they re-launched the brand as Phenom II.
It is hard to say what would have happened had Intel not engaged in market manipulation. One thing I think can be said -- Intel, too, has had their missteps, but they're less damaging because they have the financial stability to absorb them. Maybe AMD would have made the same mistakes, and still been behind Intel just as much, but if they'd been able to attain the the market share they could have, they would have had the money to ride out the problems, and been able to keep their fabs, and a lot of engineers that were laid off.