The development of spintronics allows many things, not just the hard drive read heads we've all had for the last 10 years. There are a couple of problems with flash, and if researchers can get the sizes down, these can be fixed with MRAM, magnetic memory based on spintronics again.
Also, these are the applications we know about; as with any branch of physics, you have to give the physicists more than 20 years to figure out the physics, and then give the engineers some more time to explore what they can do with it. It takes this at least this long to truly understand the impact, but this is not really what the Nobel Prize is for (it was even originally meant to be awarded in the same year as the research is done, but it's very difficult to fully comprehend just how much of an effect a discovery will have in less than a year (though the 1987 prize for high-Tc superconductivity is an exception).
By giving the Nobel Prize now, they're saying "This has sparked a huge amount of research into a field you discovered and you deserve that credit." It is practically impossible to work in the field and not recognize these guys.
It makes sense not to have firewire in the nano, but they fit firewire in the iPod Mini so they could fit it in the iPod Classic if nothing else. Then it would actually have all the features of the classic iPods.
At places like MIT, where basically everyone has a high IQ, there is another problem: most are male. In such environments attractiveness plays a great role I think.
Actually, at MIT, 45% are female. However, Georgia Tech is skewed male ~75:25, and CalTech is skewed male ~85:15.
Actually, at Caltech the ratio is about 70:30. Note that the original poster was correct (>50% means most) while you are clearly wrong for one of your "facts" causing me to doubt the others. I thought Georgia Tech was significantly "worse" (meaning fewer females) than Caltech, but I could be wrong.
That being said, there are plenty of places where basically everyone has a high IQ that aren't engineering schools: Stanford, Harvard, UC Berkeley, etc. which are probably better to study simply because they don't have the extra variable of the aforementioned ratio. An unbalanced ratio messes with a lot of things, but my observations do not indicate that attractiveness plays a great role; I would conclude that it plays less of a role than it did in high school (balanced ratio, people with lower and higher variation IQs).
So, in *high school* how many of those templates, clipart, special fonts, etc. get used? There was one built-in template I used: an MLA template for my English classes. I suppose I also made a custom MUN template for stuff, but I'd hazard to guess that Office 2007 probably doesn't come with one yet. I never used clipart, and nowadays practically anything can be found on the internet. Regarding special fonts: papers should be done in Helvetica, Times New Roman, Arial, or a handful of other fonts that are not derivations of Comic Sans. OpenOffice is good enough for high school. If it isn't, there is something seriously fscked up about high schools.
More recently, I have been using OpenOffice for everything from letters and presentations to complicated gradebooks to basic physics calculations for when Mathematica is not available. I haven't used MS Office in years, despite having a free and legal copy.
I went through all of high school (1998-2002) using WordPerfect. You may recall that MS Office compatibility with WPD files actually decreased during that time, but it really wasn't hard to manage. Nowadays you can even put OpenOffice and Abiword on a 1GB thumb drive and take your office suite with you. Therefore, I see the options as follows: either spend $500 to buy MS Office 2007 so you have the same thing at school and at home or spend $10 on a 1GB USB flash drive and put OpenOfficePortable on it and have the same thing at school and at home. Gee, $490 and the same argument they make says to go with OpenOffice.
Here is a link to the UC Santa Cruz press release and the professor is indeed there (I'm sure you can find him).
A little spiel from me:
I took a class on nanomagnetism this past term and definitely learned about this effect for individual spins and for domains and it has been known for quite some time. Without reading the PRL article because I'm off campus and don't have a personal subscription ($$$ and, hey, this is/.), my guess is that the model explains the why a lot better than existing ones, and how we get from individual precessing spins to the average spin of the entire domain without brute-force computing it, which is nearly impossible.
That being said, different ferromagnetic materials are very different in their interactions between spins and orbits between nearby spins and orbits and so I'm not sure without looking into it how many different ferromagnetic materials this applies too.
They indicate that the superconductor only superconducts below 40K, which means that LN2 cannot be used for cooling since it freezes at 63K. Liquid helium is going to be necessary which means that it will be pretty expensive to keep this thing cold. Oh, and if it gets too warm, you'd better stop putting current through it real quick, because it'll get really freaking hot and melt.
I got a CoolMax enclosure from newegg that supports internally SATA and IDE and externally eSATA, FW400, and USB2. I'm very pleased with the enclosure and the 500GB drive I bought, totally less than $200. I strongly recommend it to anyone who's willing to assemble it themselves and save lots of money. Link to Enclosure
There is a lot more information needed here. For those of you who haven't read the article, don't bother. Here is a summary: Some crackpots think neurons don't use electricity* because they don't get warm. Therefore, they use sound waves.
First of all, there appears to be no reason to suggest sound waves. Second, sound waves are not perfect transmitters of energy either. Some of it will bleed off as heat. So it seems to me that the very reason that they think it's not electricity* precludes it from being sound waves unless neurons are somehow made of an ideal medium.
IANA Neuroscientist but I have taken neuroscience classes and neurons don't conduct electricity. They open gates for ions to flow from areas of high electrical (and chemical?) potential to areas of low electrical potential, decreasing the voltage between the inside and outside of the neuron which then causes the next set of gates down the line to open. Not that I expect the article to get it right.
What are you smoking? Solar power converts sunlight into electricity which the gets converted into heat. End result: sunlight does something useful before being converted into heat. Similar with wind power. The only way to take heat out of the climate is to get it off the planet or store it in a giant battery (good luck with either of those).
By comparison, fossil fuels involve turning energy stored in a chemical battery into electricity (and then heat once it's used) and CO2.
If there is a monopoly (or even an oligopoly) on antivirus software you can bet on virus writers will test their software to make sure that it is undetected. Having a wide range of antivirus programs is essential or else pretty soon and the major AV software sucks compared to anything else. While people with Vista Home Edition will likely run the Windows AV Software, IT departments at corporations will most likely stick with Symantec and McAfee or whatever else they have.
The USS Enterprise has 8 A2W reactors (210 MW) and Nimitz class aircraft carriers have 2 A4W reactors (194MW). So yeah, 2x60W reactors can power much less than a nuclear aircraft carrier.
So a bit about spintronics, or spin-based electronics: conventional semiconductor gates are prone to electron tunneling and require energy to maintain their state. Spintronics utilizes quantum mechanical effects in an effort to decrease the tunneling current through magnetoresistance and stores information in the polarization of a magnet so that it does not consume energy to do nothing more than remember from one nanosecond to the next.
This research has been going on for a long time - you may have heard of it here and it's likely going to take a while before we see it since it still needs to be perfected and then economical and make its way into industry. As far as I can tell by reading the UWNews article, all they did was discover that an old pigment can work. Not that it isn't cool, but it's not really likely to advance science significantly, especially because a previous article in PRL which was published in 2004 mentions this effect.
Well, if you want more people to vote you could make it a holiday so that people have nothing else to do except go vote. There even happens to be a nice holiday on November 11 we could either move to the second Tuesday or we could hold elections then.
The other reason Reagan created a federal circuit specifically for intellectual property issues is so he could appoint all the judges since they liberal judges weren't helping his policy much. Everything else just helped him sell the idea to everyone else.
You're forgetting that string theory is the only theory (at least that I know of) that predicts the existence of gravitons and that if we can calculate more about them, it might tell us something very useful.
The goal of string theory is to create a verifyable prediction. Just because it hasn't yet created a predictable theory doesn't mean it can't.
Maybe my understanding of history is flawed, but I was under the impression that Navejo is far from being a major language. I mean, wasn't it the primary basis for a US code in the Pacific during World War II or something?
The first link states that "The cars can travel up to 100 mph, according to the report" while the second link agrees with the submitter (100km/hr; 60 mph).
Also, while I appreciate the clever name, isn't this more than an Low Emission Car? Isn't it entirely electric?
America's an absolute discrace, I find myself thinking more and more they deserve everything they get (I'll say hi to him in Guantanamo!)
So just living here means I deserve any shit I have to put up with here? You sir are full of shit. What do you expect me to do, bust into Guantamano and start a jailbreak? I have serious problems with much of what is going on, but please tell me, what can I do? I think that Congress shouldn't give Bush any more money until he puts the people on trial; I think the courts should have demanded that everyone at Guantamano be charged and tried within a reasonable amount of time. I, however, can do none of this.
Bosons don't necessarily carry forces; in fact not all atoms are fermions. For example, the Helium-4 and Carbon-12 nuclei is a boson. See wikipedia. Bosons are best defined as having integer spin and being capable of sharing the same quantum state while fermions have half-integer spin and obey the Pauil Exclusion Principle (cannot share the same quantum state). A composite particle of an even number of fermions (2 protons + 2 neutrons) is a boson (helium nucleus) but an odd number of fermions is always a fermion.
I also believe that physicists have determined that the electron neutrino has a mass of about 1meV-1eV (from a slide I saw in lecture a couple days ago).
In addition, physicists divide fermions into quarks and leptons, which are supersets of the elementary particles that make up nucleons and electrons.
I believe that most large solar cell arrays are built in desert-like places. These ecosystems tend to very quickly (within 24 hours) radiate away any heat that they absorbed during the day. All we are doing is taking the heat away a bit sooner and doing something productive with it. I also believe that most small solar cell arrays are built with local power consumption in mind, and since in the end all electricity is converted into heat it will not upset the local ecosystem there either.
So looking at things from a logical perspective, the goal is to minimally inconvenience peoples lives (whether it be by global warming, running out of oil, or disposing nuclear waste). Since this is another example of the Tragedy of the Commons, governments will need to intervene or the problem won't get solved. The problem seems to come from too many people using oil and not a renewable energy source. Thus people need more motivation to use less oil (whether in their cars or in power plants).
Solution: do what the government does best and tax; tax crude oil or tax machinery based on CO2 emissions. Let the market sort out for itself whether it wants to use nuclear, hydroelectric, wind, tidal, geothermal, solar, or some other form of electricity generation. Let the market determine how much people want to decrease their energy consumption. Maybe spend the increased revenue on renewable resources; it's not necessary, but that would help too.
So the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has approved two designs for future construction in order to remedy the situation where no two plants are the same. (The plus side of having a hundred unique plants is that we know which are easiest and the most cost-efficient.)
In my opinion, the best place in the United States for nuclear power plants is California. The warm temperatures year-round mean that freezing is not an issue in backup (normally non-circulating) pipes. The cold ocean water provides an excellent heatsink that does not require cooling towers and is therefore more thermodynamically efficient. Not that there is a problem with building them elsewhere. Natural disasters need to be considered but are not a siginificant issue. Power plants should be spread out in case part of the power grid is taken out for some reason. Also, is there anywhere that doesn't experience natural disasters and has lot of water for cooling?
The problem with being 100% nuclear is that nuclear power plants are baseline power plants, meaning that they are designed to run at 100% power whenever they are running. You can't start and stop them easily as the intermediate decay products will interfere with the neutron absorption cross section.
Regarding the comment about radiation absorption during a plane flight, radiation is a funny thing. The unit rads indicate how much energy is being absorbed by your body but does not take into account the type of radiation. Units which take into account the health effects of different types of radiation are those or rem or millirem. The average total natural exposure to radiation is 300 millirem with your LA-NY-LA plane flight giving you a mere 3 millirem of cosmic radiation. Workers in the nuclear industry are allowed as much as 5 rem of exposure each year.
Slashdot Mirror
Just as it seems we're about to move away from purely Mechanical Memory we find ways to make it better.
The development of spintronics allows many things, not just the hard drive read heads we've all had for the last 10 years. There are a couple of problems with flash, and if researchers can get the sizes down, these can be fixed with MRAM, magnetic memory based on spintronics again.
Also, these are the applications we know about; as with any branch of physics, you have to give the physicists more than 20 years to figure out the physics, and then give the engineers some more time to explore what they can do with it. It takes this at least this long to truly understand the impact, but this is not really what the Nobel Prize is for (it was even originally meant to be awarded in the same year as the research is done, but it's very difficult to fully comprehend just how much of an effect a discovery will have in less than a year (though the 1987 prize for high-Tc superconductivity is an exception).
By giving the Nobel Prize now, they're saying "This has sparked a huge amount of research into a field you discovered and you deserve that credit." It is practically impossible to work in the field and not recognize these guys.
It makes sense not to have firewire in the nano, but they fit firewire in the iPod Mini so they could fit it in the iPod Classic if nothing else. Then it would actually have all the features of the classic iPods.
Look at the title bar of your browser. See how it says "Inventor of GMR Bids To Shake Up Storage, Again" . . . yeah.
Actually, at MIT, 45% are female. However, Georgia Tech is skewed male ~75:25, and CalTech is skewed male ~85:15.
Actually, at Caltech the ratio is about 70:30. Note that the original poster was correct (>50% means most) while you are clearly wrong for one of your "facts" causing me to doubt the others. I thought Georgia Tech was significantly "worse" (meaning fewer females) than Caltech, but I could be wrong.
That being said, there are plenty of places where basically everyone has a high IQ that aren't engineering schools: Stanford, Harvard, UC Berkeley, etc. which are probably better to study simply because they don't have the extra variable of the aforementioned ratio. An unbalanced ratio messes with a lot of things, but my observations do not indicate that attractiveness plays a great role; I would conclude that it plays less of a role than it did in high school (balanced ratio, people with lower and higher variation IQs).
So, in *high school* how many of those templates, clipart, special fonts, etc. get used? There was one built-in template I used: an MLA template for my English classes. I suppose I also made a custom MUN template for stuff, but I'd hazard to guess that Office 2007 probably doesn't come with one yet. I never used clipart, and nowadays practically anything can be found on the internet. Regarding special fonts: papers should be done in Helvetica, Times New Roman, Arial, or a handful of other fonts that are not derivations of Comic Sans. OpenOffice is good enough for high school. If it isn't, there is something seriously fscked up about high schools.
More recently, I have been using OpenOffice for everything from letters and presentations to complicated gradebooks to basic physics calculations for when Mathematica is not available. I haven't used MS Office in years, despite having a free and legal copy.
I went through all of high school (1998-2002) using WordPerfect. You may recall that MS Office compatibility with WPD files actually decreased during that time, but it really wasn't hard to manage. Nowadays you can even put OpenOffice and Abiword on a 1GB thumb drive and take your office suite with you. Therefore, I see the options as follows: either spend $500 to buy MS Office 2007 so you have the same thing at school and at home or spend $10 on a 1GB USB flash drive and put OpenOfficePortable on it and have the same thing at school and at home. Gee, $490 and the same argument they make says to go with OpenOffice.
Here is a link to the UC Santa Cruz press release and the professor is indeed there (I'm sure you can find him). A little spiel from me: I took a class on nanomagnetism this past term and definitely learned about this effect for individual spins and for domains and it has been known for quite some time. Without reading the PRL article because I'm off campus and don't have a personal subscription ($$$ and, hey, this is /.), my guess is that the model explains the why a lot better than existing ones, and how we get from individual precessing spins to the average spin of the entire domain without brute-force computing it, which is nearly impossible.
That being said, different ferromagnetic materials are very different in their interactions between spins and orbits between nearby spins and orbits and so I'm not sure without looking into it how many different ferromagnetic materials this applies too.
They indicate that the superconductor only superconducts below 40K, which means that LN2 cannot be used for cooling since it freezes at 63K. Liquid helium is going to be necessary which means that it will be pretty expensive to keep this thing cold. Oh, and if it gets too warm, you'd better stop putting current through it real quick, because it'll get really freaking hot and melt.
I got a CoolMax enclosure from newegg that supports internally SATA and IDE and externally eSATA, FW400, and USB2. I'm very pleased with the enclosure and the 500GB drive I bought, totally less than $200. I strongly recommend it to anyone who's willing to assemble it themselves and save lots of money. Link to Enclosure
There is a lot more information needed here. For those of you who haven't read the article, don't bother. Here is a summary: Some crackpots think neurons don't use electricity* because they don't get warm. Therefore, they use sound waves. First of all, there appears to be no reason to suggest sound waves. Second, sound waves are not perfect transmitters of energy either. Some of it will bleed off as heat. So it seems to me that the very reason that they think it's not electricity* precludes it from being sound waves unless neurons are somehow made of an ideal medium. IANA Neuroscientist but I have taken neuroscience classes and neurons don't conduct electricity. They open gates for ions to flow from areas of high electrical (and chemical?) potential to areas of low electrical potential, decreasing the voltage between the inside and outside of the neuron which then causes the next set of gates down the line to open. Not that I expect the article to get it right.
What are you smoking? Solar power converts sunlight into electricity which the gets converted into heat. End result: sunlight does something useful before being converted into heat. Similar with wind power. The only way to take heat out of the climate is to get it off the planet or store it in a giant battery (good luck with either of those). By comparison, fossil fuels involve turning energy stored in a chemical battery into electricity (and then heat once it's used) and CO2.
If there is a monopoly (or even an oligopoly) on antivirus software you can bet on virus writers will test their software to make sure that it is undetected. Having a wide range of antivirus programs is essential or else pretty soon and the major AV software sucks compared to anything else. While people with Vista Home Edition will likely run the Windows AV Software, IT departments at corporations will most likely stick with Symantec and McAfee or whatever else they have.
The USS Enterprise has 8 A2W reactors (210 MW) and Nimitz class aircraft carriers have 2 A4W reactors (194MW). So yeah, 2x60W reactors can power much less than a nuclear aircraft carrier.
This research has been going on for a long time - you may have heard of it here and it's likely going to take a while before we see it since it still needs to be perfected and then economical and make its way into industry. As far as I can tell by reading the UWNews article, all they did was discover that an old pigment can work. Not that it isn't cool, but it's not really likely to advance science significantly, especially because a previous article in PRL which was published in 2004 mentions this effect.
Well, if you want more people to vote you could make it a holiday so that people have nothing else to do except go vote. There even happens to be a nice holiday on November 11 we could either move to the second Tuesday or we could hold elections then.
The other reason Reagan created a federal circuit specifically for intellectual property issues is so he could appoint all the judges since they liberal judges weren't helping his policy much. Everything else just helped him sell the idea to everyone else.
The goal of string theory is to create a verifyable prediction. Just because it hasn't yet created a predictable theory doesn't mean it can't.
Maybe my understanding of history is flawed, but I was under the impression that Navejo is far from being a major language. I mean, wasn't it the primary basis for a US code in the Pacific during World War II or something?
Also, while I appreciate the clever name, isn't this more than an Low Emission Car? Isn't it entirely electric?
So just living here means I deserve any shit I have to put up with here? You sir are full of shit. What do you expect me to do, bust into Guantamano and start a jailbreak? I have serious problems with much of what is going on, but please tell me, what can I do? I think that Congress shouldn't give Bush any more money until he puts the people on trial; I think the courts should have demanded that everyone at Guantamano be charged and tried within a reasonable amount of time. I, however, can do none of this.
PS. The word is disgrace.
What do we want to take it back for? It's right where we want to use it.
Bosons don't necessarily carry forces; in fact not all atoms are fermions. For example, the Helium-4 and Carbon-12 nuclei is a boson. See wikipedia. Bosons are best defined as having integer spin and being capable of sharing the same quantum state while fermions have half-integer spin and obey the Pauil Exclusion Principle (cannot share the same quantum state). A composite particle of an even number of fermions (2 protons + 2 neutrons) is a boson (helium nucleus) but an odd number of fermions is always a fermion.
I also believe that physicists have determined that the electron neutrino has a mass of about 1meV-1eV (from a slide I saw in lecture a couple days ago).
In addition, physicists divide fermions into quarks and leptons, which are supersets of the elementary particles that make up nucleons and electrons.
I believe that most large solar cell arrays are built in desert-like places. These ecosystems tend to very quickly (within 24 hours) radiate away any heat that they absorbed during the day. All we are doing is taking the heat away a bit sooner and doing something productive with it. I also believe that most small solar cell arrays are built with local power consumption in mind, and since in the end all electricity is converted into heat it will not upset the local ecosystem there either.
So looking at things from a logical perspective, the goal is to minimally inconvenience peoples lives (whether it be by global warming, running out of oil, or disposing nuclear waste). Since this is another example of the Tragedy of the Commons, governments will need to intervene or the problem won't get solved. The problem seems to come from too many people using oil and not a renewable energy source. Thus people need more motivation to use less oil (whether in their cars or in power plants).
Solution: do what the government does best and tax; tax crude oil or tax machinery based on CO2 emissions. Let the market sort out for itself whether it wants to use nuclear, hydroelectric, wind, tidal, geothermal, solar, or some other form of electricity generation. Let the market determine how much people want to decrease their energy consumption. Maybe spend the increased revenue on renewable resources; it's not necessary, but that would help too.
The drives are all 7200rpm. I don't remember if this was true with the old Mac Minis, can anybody comment?
So the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has approved two designs for future construction in order to remedy the situation where no two plants are the same. (The plus side of having a hundred unique plants is that we know which are easiest and the most cost-efficient.)
In my opinion, the best place in the United States for nuclear power plants is California. The warm temperatures year-round mean that freezing is not an issue in backup (normally non-circulating) pipes. The cold ocean water provides an excellent heatsink that does not require cooling towers and is therefore more thermodynamically efficient. Not that there is a problem with building them elsewhere. Natural disasters need to be considered but are not a siginificant issue. Power plants should be spread out in case part of the power grid is taken out for some reason. Also, is there anywhere that doesn't experience natural disasters and has lot of water for cooling?
The problem with being 100% nuclear is that nuclear power plants are baseline power plants, meaning that they are designed to run at 100% power whenever they are running. You can't start and stop them easily as the intermediate decay products will interfere with the neutron absorption cross section.
Regarding the comment about radiation absorption during a plane flight, radiation is a funny thing. The unit rads indicate how much energy is being absorbed by your body but does not take into account the type of radiation. Units which take into account the health effects of different types of radiation are those or rem or millirem. The average total natural exposure to radiation is 300 millirem with your LA-NY-LA plane flight giving you a mere 3 millirem of cosmic radiation. Workers in the nuclear industry are allowed as much as 5 rem of exposure each year.
Just my $0.02.