I'm tired of getting atoms to "one millionth of a degree from zero." Let's just stop it entirely already!
And I'm getting tired of our best accelerators which can only accelerate electrons and other subatomic particles to 0.999999c. How about getting to absolute c?
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This seems to be a common misconception here at/.
Nanotech != Nano robots
Nanotech refers to applied physics that occur at the nanometer scale. How this will apply to magnetic storage, as the link to the article suggests, is by utilizing things called GMR and CMR (giant magneto-resistance and colossal magneto-resistance). These are sort of analogs of resistance in the magnetic domain instead of the electronic domain. In ways I don't understand yet, you can use these technologies, together with some nanometer-scale structures, to create really small read/write heads for magnetic drives.
This is just one example of nanotech, and it's being applied in labs now, so it may be incorporated into consumer devices in not too long of a time. Magnetic storage industries have invested lots of $$$ for this kind of thing.
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Hey, no problem. I've noticed that nanotech seems to be a big topic here at/., but few people seem to understand what it's all about (including me). I'm just want to shed a little bit of light onto this often mystified subject (which is heavily based on quantum mechanics, which is finally starting to make sense to me this time around).
my background is political science
seems like we're in opposite positions. i'm from a physics background (i just started physics grad school now), and have been getting interested in poly-sci in the last several months (due to some degree to the election brouhaha)...
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From what I understand, the electrons in a nanotube behave like/as quantum particles
Dude, electrons ARE quantum particles, and ALWAYS behave as them. Namely, they're 1/2-spin fermions, are indistinguishable from each other, obey Pauli Exclusion Principle, and under the central-force potential of nucleons (ie, protons and neutrons), make atomic orbitals possible, which account for most chemical interactions we witness everyday.
losing none energy, emitting no interference,
and theoretically display superpositioning and entanglement
Man, don't bogart the buzzwords.:-)
Entanglement is interference of the individual spin (or angular momentum) of several particles, giving an apparent total spin (angular momentum) of the system of particles. Ie, it's not possible to measure the spin of the total state of particles while simultaneously measuring the spins of the individual particles. This is how you can have an even number of fermions (half-integral spin) behave as a boson (integral spin), etc.
So there IS interference, which is how the entanglement is realized.
Also, they supposedly can be used to make a capacitor that holds up to a billion amps.
Dude, get your terminology straight. A capacitor stores charge (manifested as an electric field between the two terminals). It does NOT store current!!! Maybe you meant to say is that nanotubes can function as superconductors, passing a current of 10^9 amps. However, I don't know if this is true or not. (hopefully I'll have a better understanding of condensed matter physics in a few years).
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Yeah, Tom Hanks plays Linus, who got stranded on a desert island with his 386 and a solar-power generator, but no commercial operating system for his computer. So he has to write his own, from scratch. All while a volleyball named RMS keeps him company.
Or use the method my friend told me about, it's amusing.
telemarketer : Let me tell you about our new deal which allows you to pay multiple credit card bills on one monthly bill, while we take a 50% cut. You : Wow, that sounds like a GREAT deal. I can't believe it. Honey, come here and listen to this. telemarketer : Yes, all we have to do now is get all your credit card information, including card number and expiration date. You : This is a great deal, tell me how to sign up. I can't wait to reap the rewards!
Keep it up, and just like politicians, just avert all questions leading for information with remarks of how great a deal it is. Eventually either the telemarketer gets frustated and hangs up, or you get bored.
Sometimes the telemarketers even laugh and voluntarily let you go.
There are sampling oscilloscopes, that can map out a repetitive waveform by taking a very small time-wise 'snapshot' of a signal, then wait an integer number of cycles + a small dt, and take another snapshot, then put the waveform together.
However, the fastest of these I've seen (and that's not many) had a bandwidth of 50GHz. There may be faster ones available, though, possibly using techniques outlined below.
There are methods that the optics community uses to measure high speeds / short times. One such idea is an autocorrelator, which interferes a fast signal with a delayed version of itself, thus allowing you to map out the waveform shape. Possibly the 750GHz team made a version of one of these.
There are pulsed lasers that have pulse widths of less than a femtosecond (admittedly, you probably have to build these yourself and be careful with components). these are probably the best generators of delta functions, and are also probably used to probe some of these novel devices.
The article talks about a new Hypres (sp) AD converter that runs at 12 GS/s, and can dynamically change SNR for bandwidth, and vice versa (or at least # of bits, as the article says).
Do you have any idea how many bits this puppy can do per sample? I didn't find this number, strangely, within the article.
OK... so if it is valid for OSS to take down VM ware because the can afford to give a product away
for free... (and I agree)
Then why was it wrong for Microsoft to take down Netscape by giving away a product IT could
afford to do for free?
Good question. The short answer, in my opinion, is that MSFT undercut Netscape strictly to wipe them out, then gain browser dominance on WinXX, then tie the browser to the OS, and lock the customer in.
Plex86 is releasing a product not strictly for money or power, but to fulfill a need the authors see for their program. They're not doing it to compete with VMware for customers, they're releasing it free (beer and speech) for the benefit of the community.
Maybe I'm an idealist, but I think that's the gist of it. I doubt for a second that MSFT gave a rat's ass about the community when it released IE for free.
And I also don't like the fact that Walmart buys things in major bulk so it can shut down all the small mom&pop stores by undercutting their prices. Once again, the difference between OSS and Walmart is that Walmart is doing it to compete for customers and gain $$$. OSS people are doing it for fun, for pride in their work, and to help out the community (again, maybe I'm an idealist). So there's a fundamental philosophical difference. It's more than just a question of economics, I guess.
For example, there is no acceptable free equivalent for MATLAB or Mathematica
Someone above mentioned this, but go get yerself Octave. It's mostly MATLAB compliant, but does alot of other cool stuff. Plus, it's threaded, so it will distribute nicely across other CPU's. (unlike current versions of IDL and MATLAB).
I'd love to see alot of college students hack away on Octave and make it even better. Spread the good word!
Umm, the "true spirit of capitalism" ain't worth squat.
Believe it or not, I actually agree completely with you. I'm really not a fan of capitalism in the extreme. The extent to which many adhere to the spirit of capitalism really pisses me off. For instance, the way many companies forsake product quality and customer service for increased sales and earnings and profits, etc. The dollar, or perhaps the Shareholders, come first.
I don't want to get into a debate of economic theories, etc. But whenever I voice these concerns to people, they always say, "well, that's what capitalism is all about". And then these same people like to call free-software advocates communists. So the opinion I expressed in my original post, is my own justification of why one can think of free-software folks not as communists, but as capitalists of a different sort.
It's kind of like Walmart undercutting the prices other stores, so they take most of the sales. If this is valid capitalism, then so too, is giving away a product that doesn't cost anything to distribute.
Note that I'm not trying to prove that free software won't impact the economy in any way. I'm just tired of hearing people complain and call OSS folks communists (in a negative sense of the word), when in fact, you could think of them really as capitalists. And did I mention that I'm not a big fan of capitalism, at least the way it's manifested here in the USA?
Of course, you're bound to disagree, but this is my two cents.
If a commercial vendor can't do better than the free project, the commercial vendor should pack up
their tents and find something else to do. Free enterprise includes the concept of competition, you
know:-) Nobody guarantees you a living.
Thank you, I'm glad I'm not the only one that sees it this way. Free software / Open-Source programmers are living in the true spirit of capitalism, if you think about it. It's a free market, and the distribution of code is free. So, if they can release a software package cheaper than their commercial counterparts and correspondingly take that companies business, well, that's the way the capitalist cookie crumbles. This happens between companies all the time in the business world. If you play the game, be prepared to lose too.
Companies may complain about how this takes business away from paid programmers, but that's what capitalism is all about. free market leading to freedom to choose the cheapest solution. in a free market, if someone can offer a product that's cheaper than an alternative, than the more expensive product had better offer more advantages making it justifiable to pay more for it.
As Bruce said, if companies can't offer a reason to pay more, better start packing up. Even if the comparitive software wasn't free but just cheaper, the same thing goes. Free software is an interesting case of capitalism to the max - zero cost of purchase.
So there's two spin states and when you store a spin
state to a bunch of electrons, half of them remember it? Isn't that kind useless? How
would you know what spin you stored there originally?
That's the point. Up until now, due to this problem, there have been limitations in the development of spintronics. Now new materials have just been discovered in the last few months that are the so-called half-metals, and thus ALL electrons within them posess the same spin. This ain't your normal class of ferromagnetic materials.
But then again, this is all new to me too, so I may be mussing up the details.
I thought the difficulty of measuring spin on electrons without losing the spin in the
process was what made quantum channels so great for secure transmissions...
Yes, this is one of the major difficulties, measuring the spin state of one of these samples (or a one bit of data, if you prefer). As far as I know, you need more than one electon to store the information using spin.
What was explained to me yesterday was that most ferromagnetic metals half about a 50% polarization, meaning if it's a magnetized sample and you withdraw an electron at random from it, there's an approx 50% probability that electron is polarized properly with the rest of that sample, when you measure the spin. This has to do with band gap stuff and hysteresis and other effects akin to ferromagnetics that I don't understand yet. (My QM is rusty too, that's why I dropped from the grad QM course to undergrad, a move I STRONGLY recommend to any grad student with shaky background hoping to really learn QM).
Recently, some new materials, called half-metals, have been found to match older theoretical predictions that there is 100% probability a withdrawn electron is aligned with the spin.
So that's why this field of spintronics is really exciting now, real materials are being discovered to actually make the theory possible.
From what I understand, though, we're not at the point of storing a bit in the spin of a single electron. I don't know the specifics of how these MRAM chips work, though, so maybe I shouldn't comment on it.
And about your point of losing the spin once you measure it. If, by manipulation in a magnetic field, you set the spin to point in say the Z direction. So this is the axis of spin (or angular momentum if you prefer). If you now measure the spin in EXACTLY this direction, you haven't changed the state of the system. Well, you have collapsed the wave function, but you can measure the bit infinitely many times, and you'll always get the same value for the spin. If you change spin axes, and try measuring the X or Y component, then you've lost all information of the Z-component (non-parallel spin operators don't commute, remember). So as long as you're in the same direction, you can measure with impunity.
In the real world, there may be a small angular difference between the spin state of the atom, and that direction in which it's read, but spin uncertainty can be minimized by keeping this angular uncertainty small.
Welcome to the new world of spintronics. It's amazing, I was just talking to one of the faculty here in the physics department about this stuff yesterday, to learn about all the good research the condensed matter group is doing here. So here's what I learened, in a nutshell.
Most electronics up until now work within the charge domain. That is, devices all deal with moving, changing, transferring, etc, electric charge and the lack of electric charge. Amplifiers, for instance, can amplify current, which is the flow of charge, or voltage, which is the energy/charge ratio. Semiconductors exploit all kinds of funky physics to do these things.
However, there's a whole other degree of freedom of the electron that's virtually unused. Spin. In any elementary quantum mechanics course you'll learn rather soon on that electrons are Fermions with total spin 1/2, which means there are two spin states an electron can be in, usually called spin-up and spin-down.
So the new world of spintronics aims at manipulating the spin of the electrons, instead of the charge. Spin is a different beast than charge, in that it can be manipulated by magnetic fields and light, in vastly-different ways than does charge flow. Spin is a fundamental nature of angular momentum, so whereby the total charge is conserved within a small sample, so too is the angular momentum.
Some of these MRAM's were specifically mentioned yesterday, in that the parity of the spin can be used to store bits. One nice fact about this could be that information isn't lost if power is turned off, unlike DRAM's and many SRAM's.
It's a VERY new field, spintronics. I did a search on Google last night for only 'spintronics' and only 665 sites were listed. It's been around for a few years so far, but there have been problems with finding the right magnetic materials. You need the right combination of ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic layers, and certain ways to test materials, before you can really start doing some good stuff. However, materials are starting to be found, so it's an exciting time for this potentially huge field.
Hopefully soon there'll be spin-like transistors, leading to spin amplifiers, and all sorts of other goodies.
Sorry I don't have any specifics about this, but I just found out about it yesterday.
The electoral college
forces candidates to pay more attention to more diverse regions and demographic groups. IMO,
the electoral college is a good idea, but could be done better, (i.e. not only allot votes to states,
but also to other demographic groups not necessarily region-based).
I agree that the electoral college is a nice balance between each state getting equal vote independent of population, and a purely popular vote, which can lead to the majority overriding the minorities.
But I think it could be done better if the states weren't voted for in a winner-takes-all mentality. There are two states that currently allow their votes to be split along the state's vote makup, sorry, I forget which two. This would be the way to go, IMHO. It would make the whole Florida issue mute (well, unless the elector cases were so close that each 1-elector-vote of all the states mattered). Maybe to help allieve this possibility, if the state's popular vote is within the margin of error, then abstain one of the votes, or something like that.
This method would also be good for third-party candidates, as they would now actually have a non-zero shot of getting an actual electoral vote.
If the election was done by popular vote than they
could visit California, New York, Texas, and Florida over and over again and only worry
about issues there.
I've heard this point brought up endlessly over the past few weeks, but it's somewhat flawed. This argument is one of the fundamental arguments against a popular vote for president. But what people that quote this are assuming is that EVERYBODY from these four states will vote for one or another candidate. That is NOT true (at least for this past election). In many of these states the vote is so SO close, but the electoral college is a winner-takes-all scheme.
If it was a popular vote instead, you'd still have a major constituent of Bush votes coming from these four states. In other words, it's very unlikely that these four states would unamimously (sp) vote for one or another candidate.
But this begs a worthwhile question. What is the fair way to count votes? People argue that a strictly popular vote puts too much power in the large urban areas. But why should a state with far less populace necessarily have more voting power relatively per capita? The electoral college seems to be a nice balance between a popular vote and a land-area vote. However, the winner-takes-all strategyof the EC seems a bit ridiculous. In the case of Florida, if electoral votes could be split, this whole counting/voting fiasco would be a non-issue. Give 12 votes to both Bush and Gore, and one to Nader. Or give the extra vote to Bush or Gore, whoever pulls ahead by a little. (I don't know the exact Nader percentage to know if he warrants a vote in this state.) But hinging an entire 25 EC votes over a handful of popular votes seems kind of counter-intuitive. (and this happened in many states this election, on both sides).
Besides
you can't change the rules for electing the president in the middle of the game, as the
Democrats are trying to do.
On a totally-unrelated side note, is it just me, or have other people noticed the major partisanship developing in the last several years or so? These kind of quotes, speaking out agsinst and eagerly insulting the opposing party of the poster, litter not only this slashdot thread, but all other political chatrooms I've seen lately. Have I just not been paying enough attention during my youth (I'm 25 now) or has politics gotten REALLY heated in terms of party-vs-party in the past few years? This is one of the reasons why the two-party system sucks (IMHO). If multiple parties made up Congress, it would be too scattered to have this kind of partisan bifurcation.
The funny thing is that if the tables were turned, both parties would most-likely be doing the exact same thing that their opposition is doing now. It would be interesting to see a parallel universe, and observe what said parties are doing, along with their own critics and supporters (like the above poster) too.
I think you're missing the big picture. The point of the polls is to get the public opinion, and that wasn't done accurately enough. Usually there's enough margin between victor that poll error (which is probably nearly impossible to entirely get rid of) is insignificant. But in this case, it's VERY significant.
So the question boils down to Do we elect a president based upon a few nitpickings over the meaning of the law?
personally, I think that whoever gets elected will already have half the country pissed at them. The only way to fully restore national confidence would be an entire national revote. I don't know how possible or costly or likely that could be, but to preserve sanity and not turn this into a partisan war, it seems like perhaps the only way to go.
The ballot in Palm Beach was reviewed and approved by both the Democratic and Republican
parties well in advance of the election. Barring out and out fraud, should we redo the whole
county/state because of a particularly high density of stupid people?
You mean a high density of elderly people, many with limited vision? They should have just as much of a say as anyone else.
Also, don't you think it's somewhat ridiculous to elect a president based upon such a narrow margin of uncertainty? I think perhaps a national revote would be more in order.
Let's face it, the point of elections is to find out what candidate the people want to elect. If the elections are misleading, then the valid opinion of the people isn't fully expressed. I don't think a revote is unconstitutional at all, as long as it's done fairly.
I do think it's unfair that the media projected states to one or another candidate before the polls were fully closed. Very interesting is that Florida was projected to Gore after only a small percentage of votes, yet Bush was actually leading in the percentage of votes thus far. Hmm, was the media trying to sway the voters in some way? Anyone know of pyschology of voting? are people more likely to vote for their candidate if (s)he is winning or losing? And by alot or a little?
Or you can look at this chart , with total number of Buchanan votes per Florida county. Granted, it's in terms of actual number of votes, instead of overall percentages. Anyone know of a similar-style chart in terms of percentage of vote instead?
However, here lies the fundamental problem. The president is elected based on merit/accomplishments alone, claiming that his/her past has nothing to do with the election and ability to do the job. Joe Schmoe, on the other hand, is hired on his merits/accomplishments, and then is only given access to secret information after a careful background check. In other words, Joe Schmoe's past plays a big role in the government's assessment of ability to handle classified information. Yet the president has no such hindrances.
And while the president is but one person, he/she wields far more power, and is privy to far more classified information, than Joe Schmoe.
Okay, now if 200 million voters can't be wrong, how can they be given a chance to be wrong when Bush won't make his past publicly available? Ie, Joe Schmoe would be booted from his job in an instant if he tried to keep his past a secret. Shouldn't the presidential candidates at least make available SOME of the same information that Joe Schmoe must make available?
I know, I know, you'll point out that the people should have the most say in governmental policy, including voting for president. But most are spoonfed the basic crap that each of the major candidates serve, which are all lies and distortions of their own accomplishments and their opponents faults.
I just realized now that it's a self-perpetuating problem. Bush knows his DUI/drug use past will hurt him, so he keeps it a secret. But once it gets let out of the bag, it hurts him more because he didn't let the public know about it. So the next candidate will keep his/her past secret, etc.
If these people would be honest (politicians? HA!) it would avoid alot of unnecessary damage. But that's asking WAY too much.
up to and including murder (sounds like a made-for-tv movie, but there are
cases)
there WAS a movie about this. made for TV, but based on that true story. It was an HBO original, i think, with a long title name that was something like "texas murdering cheerleader mom" or something wacky like that.
That's true, the people should decide. However, the candidates keep their dark dirty past secret, so the people don't have all the information that would otherwise be available for the standard background check.
If Bush was trying to get a security clearance, the government would inquire meticulously about his past. However, he's not making available to the American public this similar information that the government would seek. You may argue that he shouldn't have to make his past public, but then on a similar boat, one Joe Schmoe shouldn't have to make his past available either to get a secret clearance. But that ain't how it works.
But while Joe Schmoe is hired based on his accomplishments alone, he then has to undergo the background check to get access sensitive information. Yet for president, one only has to solely use their current accomplishments? One thing that was related to me at my old job was that if you have a non-trivial police record, chances are you won't get a clearance. Because most of the sensitive-information leaks have been from people with said police records.
Basically what's happenening is Bush saying that his past shouldn't matter to get him elected, yet it turns out that joe schmoe's past should matter to get a secret clearance. And president is a far more powerful (and potentially destructive) position than joe schmoe would have.
Slashdot Mirror
And I'm getting tired of our best accelerators which can only accelerate electrons and other subatomic particles to 0.999999c. How about getting to absolute c? .V / _` (_-<_-<
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This seems to be a common misconception here at /.
Nanotech != Nano robots
Nanotech refers to applied physics that occur at the nanometer scale. How this will apply to magnetic storage, as the link to the article suggests, is by utilizing things called GMR and CMR (giant magneto-resistance and colossal magneto-resistance). These are sort of analogs of resistance in the magnetic domain instead of the electronic domain. In ways I don't understand yet, you can use these technologies, together with some nanometer-scale structures, to create really small read/write heads for magnetic drives.
This is just one example of nanotech, and it's being applied in labs now, so it may be incorporated into consumer devices in not too long of a time. Magnetic storage industries have invested lots of $$$ for this kind of thing. .V / _` (_-<_-<
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Hey, no problem. I've noticed that nanotech seems to be a big topic here at /., but few people seem to understand what it's all about (including me). I'm just want to shed a little bit of light onto this often mystified subject (which is heavily based on quantum mechanics, which is finally starting to make sense to me this time around).
my background is political science
seems like we're in opposite positions. i'm from a physics background (i just started physics grad school now), and have been getting interested in poly-sci in the last several months (due to some degree to the election brouhaha)... .V / _` (_-<_-<
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Dude, electrons ARE quantum particles, and ALWAYS behave as them. Namely, they're 1/2-spin fermions, are indistinguishable from each other, obey Pauli Exclusion Principle, and under the central-force potential of nucleons (ie, protons and neutrons), make atomic orbitals possible, which account for most chemical interactions we witness everyday.
losing none energy, emitting no interference, and theoretically display superpositioning and entanglement
Man, don't bogart the buzzwords. :-)
Entanglement is interference of the individual spin (or angular momentum) of several particles, giving an apparent total spin (angular momentum) of the system of particles. Ie, it's not possible to measure the spin of the total state of particles while simultaneously measuring the spins of the individual particles. This is how you can have an even number of fermions (half-integral spin) behave as a boson (integral spin), etc.
So there IS interference, which is how the entanglement is realized.
Also, they supposedly can be used to make a capacitor that holds up to a billion amps.
Dude, get your terminology straight. A capacitor stores charge (manifested as an electric field between the two terminals). It does NOT store current!!! Maybe you meant to say is that nanotubes can function as superconductors, passing a current of 10^9 amps. However, I don't know if this is true or not. (hopefully I'll have a better understanding of condensed matter physics in a few years). .V / _` (_-<_-<
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It raises some interesting questions. .V / _` (_-<_-<
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Yeah, Tom Hanks plays Linus, who got stranded on a desert island with his 386 and a solar-power generator, but no commercial operating system for his computer. So he has to write his own, from scratch. All while a volleyball named RMS keeps him company.
telemarketer : Let me tell you about our new deal which allows you to pay multiple credit card bills on one monthly bill, while we take a 50% cut.
You : Wow, that sounds like a GREAT deal. I can't believe it. Honey, come here and listen to this.
telemarketer : Yes, all we have to do now is get all your credit card information, including card number and expiration date.
You : This is a great deal, tell me how to sign up. I can't wait to reap the rewards!
Keep it up, and just like politicians, just avert all questions leading for information with remarks of how great a deal it is. Eventually either the telemarketer gets frustated and hangs up, or you get bored. Sometimes the telemarketers even laugh and voluntarily let you go.
Or you can just follow the information at the JunkBuster's telemarketing-reduction page .
There are methods that the optics community uses to measure high speeds / short times. One such idea is an autocorrelator, which interferes a fast signal with a delayed version of itself, thus allowing you to map out the waveform shape. Possibly the 750GHz team made a version of one of these.
There are pulsed lasers that have pulse widths of less than a femtosecond (admittedly, you probably have to build these yourself and be careful with components). these are probably the best generators of delta functions, and are also probably used to probe some of these novel devices.
The article talks about a new Hypres (sp) AD converter that runs at 12 GS/s, and can dynamically change SNR for bandwidth, and vice versa (or at least # of bits, as the article says).
Do you have any idea how many bits this puppy can do per sample? I didn't find this number, strangely, within the article.
Thanks.
Good question. The short answer, in my opinion, is that MSFT undercut Netscape strictly to wipe them out, then gain browser dominance on WinXX, then tie the browser to the OS, and lock the customer in.
Plex86 is releasing a product not strictly for money or power, but to fulfill a need the authors see for their program. They're not doing it to compete with VMware for customers, they're releasing it free (beer and speech) for the benefit of the community.
Maybe I'm an idealist, but I think that's the gist of it. I doubt for a second that MSFT gave a rat's ass about the community when it released IE for free.
And I also don't like the fact that Walmart buys things in major bulk so it can shut down all the small mom&pop stores by undercutting their prices. Once again, the difference between OSS and Walmart is that Walmart is doing it to compete for customers and gain $$$. OSS people are doing it for fun, for pride in their work, and to help out the community (again, maybe I'm an idealist). So there's a fundamental philosophical difference. It's more than just a question of economics, I guess.
Someone above mentioned this, but go get yerself Octave. It's mostly MATLAB compliant, but does alot of other cool stuff. Plus, it's threaded, so it will distribute nicely across other CPU's. (unlike current versions of IDL and MATLAB).
I'd love to see alot of college students hack away on Octave and make it even better. Spread the good word!
Believe it or not, I actually agree completely with you. I'm really not a fan of capitalism in the extreme. The extent to which many adhere to the spirit of capitalism really pisses me off. For instance, the way many companies forsake product quality and customer service for increased sales and earnings and profits, etc. The dollar, or perhaps the Shareholders, come first.
I don't want to get into a debate of economic theories, etc. But whenever I voice these concerns to people, they always say, "well, that's what capitalism is all about". And then these same people like to call free-software advocates communists. So the opinion I expressed in my original post, is my own justification of why one can think of free-software folks not as communists, but as capitalists of a different sort.
It's kind of like Walmart undercutting the prices other stores, so they take most of the sales. If this is valid capitalism, then so too, is giving away a product that doesn't cost anything to distribute.
Note that I'm not trying to prove that free software won't impact the economy in any way. I'm just tired of hearing people complain and call OSS folks communists (in a negative sense of the word), when in fact, you could think of them really as capitalists. And did I mention that I'm not a big fan of capitalism, at least the way it's manifested here in the USA?
Of course, you're bound to disagree, but this is my two cents.
Thank you, I'm glad I'm not the only one that sees it this way. Free software / Open-Source programmers are living in the true spirit of capitalism, if you think about it. It's a free market, and the distribution of code is free. So, if they can release a software package cheaper than their commercial counterparts and correspondingly take that companies business, well, that's the way the capitalist cookie crumbles. This happens between companies all the time in the business world. If you play the game, be prepared to lose too.
Companies may complain about how this takes business away from paid programmers, but that's what capitalism is all about. free market leading to freedom to choose the cheapest solution. in a free market, if someone can offer a product that's cheaper than an alternative, than the more expensive product had better offer more advantages making it justifiable to pay more for it.
As Bruce said, if companies can't offer a reason to pay more, better start packing up. Even if the comparitive software wasn't free but just cheaper, the same thing goes. Free software is an interesting case of capitalism to the max - zero cost of purchase.
That's the point. Up until now, due to this problem, there have been limitations in the development of spintronics. Now new materials have just been discovered in the last few months that are the so-called half-metals, and thus ALL electrons within them posess the same spin. This ain't your normal class of ferromagnetic materials.
But then again, this is all new to me too, so I may be mussing up the details.
Yes, it is a catchy buzzword, but at least it's an applicable one.
Yes, this is one of the major difficulties, measuring the spin state of one of these samples (or a one bit of data, if you prefer). As far as I know, you need more than one electon to store the information using spin.
What was explained to me yesterday was that most ferromagnetic metals half about a 50% polarization, meaning if it's a magnetized sample and you withdraw an electron at random from it, there's an approx 50% probability that electron is polarized properly with the rest of that sample, when you measure the spin. This has to do with band gap stuff and hysteresis and other effects akin to ferromagnetics that I don't understand yet. (My QM is rusty too, that's why I dropped from the grad QM course to undergrad, a move I STRONGLY recommend to any grad student with shaky background hoping to really learn QM).
Recently, some new materials, called half-metals, have been found to match older theoretical predictions that there is 100% probability a withdrawn electron is aligned with the spin. So that's why this field of spintronics is really exciting now, real materials are being discovered to actually make the theory possible.
From what I understand, though, we're not at the point of storing a bit in the spin of a single electron. I don't know the specifics of how these MRAM chips work, though, so maybe I shouldn't comment on it.
And about your point of losing the spin once you measure it. If, by manipulation in a magnetic field, you set the spin to point in say the Z direction. So this is the axis of spin (or angular momentum if you prefer). If you now measure the spin in EXACTLY this direction, you haven't changed the state of the system. Well, you have collapsed the wave function, but you can measure the bit infinitely many times, and you'll always get the same value for the spin. If you change spin axes, and try measuring the X or Y component, then you've lost all information of the Z-component (non-parallel spin operators don't commute, remember). So as long as you're in the same direction, you can measure with impunity.
In the real world, there may be a small angular difference between the spin state of the atom, and that direction in which it's read, but spin uncertainty can be minimized by keeping this angular uncertainty small.
Most electronics up until now work within the charge domain. That is, devices all deal with moving, changing, transferring, etc, electric charge and the lack of electric charge. Amplifiers, for instance, can amplify current, which is the flow of charge, or voltage, which is the energy/charge ratio. Semiconductors exploit all kinds of funky physics to do these things.
However, there's a whole other degree of freedom of the electron that's virtually unused. Spin. In any elementary quantum mechanics course you'll learn rather soon on that electrons are Fermions with total spin 1/2, which means there are two spin states an electron can be in, usually called spin-up and spin-down.
So the new world of spintronics aims at manipulating the spin of the electrons, instead of the charge. Spin is a different beast than charge, in that it can be manipulated by magnetic fields and light, in vastly-different ways than does charge flow. Spin is a fundamental nature of angular momentum, so whereby the total charge is conserved within a small sample, so too is the angular momentum.
Some of these MRAM's were specifically mentioned yesterday, in that the parity of the spin can be used to store bits. One nice fact about this could be that information isn't lost if power is turned off, unlike DRAM's and many SRAM's.
It's a VERY new field, spintronics. I did a search on Google last night for only 'spintronics' and only 665 sites were listed. It's been around for a few years so far, but there have been problems with finding the right magnetic materials. You need the right combination of ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic layers, and certain ways to test materials, before you can really start doing some good stuff. However, materials are starting to be found, so it's an exciting time for this potentially huge field.
Hopefully soon there'll be spin-like transistors, leading to spin amplifiers, and all sorts of other goodies. Sorry I don't have any specifics about this, but I just found out about it yesterday.
I agree that the electoral college is a nice balance between each state getting equal vote independent of population, and a purely popular vote, which can lead to the majority overriding the minorities.
But I think it could be done better if the states weren't voted for in a winner-takes-all mentality. There are two states that currently allow their votes to be split along the state's vote makup, sorry, I forget which two. This would be the way to go, IMHO. It would make the whole Florida issue mute (well, unless the elector cases were so close that each 1-elector-vote of all the states mattered). Maybe to help allieve this possibility, if the state's popular vote is within the margin of error, then abstain one of the votes, or something like that.
This method would also be good for third-party candidates, as they would now actually have a non-zero shot of getting an actual electoral vote.
I've heard this point brought up endlessly over the past few weeks, but it's somewhat flawed. This argument is one of the fundamental arguments against a popular vote for president. But what people that quote this are assuming is that EVERYBODY from these four states will vote for one or another candidate. That is NOT true (at least for this past election). In many of these states the vote is so SO close, but the electoral college is a winner-takes-all scheme.
If it was a popular vote instead, you'd still have a major constituent of Bush votes coming from these four states. In other words, it's very unlikely that these four states would unamimously (sp) vote for one or another candidate.
But this begs a worthwhile question. What is the fair way to count votes? People argue that a strictly popular vote puts too much power in the large urban areas. But why should a state with far less populace necessarily have more voting power relatively per capita? The electoral college seems to be a nice balance between a popular vote and a land-area vote. However, the winner-takes-all strategyof the EC seems a bit ridiculous. In the case of Florida, if electoral votes could be split, this whole counting/voting fiasco would be a non-issue. Give 12 votes to both Bush and Gore, and one to Nader. Or give the extra vote to Bush or Gore, whoever pulls ahead by a little. (I don't know the exact Nader percentage to know if he warrants a vote in this state.) But hinging an entire 25 EC votes over a handful of popular votes seems kind of counter-intuitive. (and this happened in many states this election, on both sides).
Besides you can't change the rules for electing the president in the middle of the game, as the Democrats are trying to do.
On a totally-unrelated side note, is it just me, or have other people noticed the major partisanship developing in the last several years or so? These kind of quotes, speaking out agsinst and eagerly insulting the opposing party of the poster, litter not only this slashdot thread, but all other political chatrooms I've seen lately. Have I just not been paying enough attention during my youth (I'm 25 now) or has politics gotten REALLY heated in terms of party-vs-party in the past few years? This is one of the reasons why the two-party system sucks (IMHO). If multiple parties made up Congress, it would be too scattered to have this kind of partisan bifurcation.
The funny thing is that if the tables were turned, both parties would most-likely be doing the exact same thing that their opposition is doing now. It would be interesting to see a parallel universe, and observe what said parties are doing, along with their own critics and supporters (like the above poster) too.
So the question boils down to Do we elect a president based upon a few nitpickings over the meaning of the law?
personally, I think that whoever gets elected will already have half the country pissed at them. The only way to fully restore national confidence would be an entire national revote. I don't know how possible or costly or likely that could be, but to preserve sanity and not turn this into a partisan war, it seems like perhaps the only way to go.
You mean a high density of elderly people, many with limited vision? They should have just as much of a say as anyone else.
Also, don't you think it's somewhat ridiculous to elect a president based upon such a narrow margin of uncertainty? I think perhaps a national revote would be more in order.
Let's face it, the point of elections is to find out what candidate the people want to elect. If the elections are misleading, then the valid opinion of the people isn't fully expressed. I don't think a revote is unconstitutional at all, as long as it's done fairly.
I do think it's unfair that the media projected states to one or another candidate before the polls were fully closed. Very interesting is that Florida was projected to Gore after only a small percentage of votes, yet Bush was actually leading in the percentage of votes thus far. Hmm, was the media trying to sway the voters in some way? Anyone know of pyschology of voting? are people more likely to vote for their candidate if (s)he is winning or losing? And by alot or a little?
Or you can look at this chart , with total number of Buchanan votes per Florida county. Granted, it's in terms of actual number of votes, instead of overall percentages. Anyone know of a similar-style chart in terms of percentage of vote instead?
However, here lies the fundamental problem. The president is elected based on merit/accomplishments alone, claiming that his/her past has nothing to do with the election and ability to do the job. Joe Schmoe, on the other hand, is hired on his merits/accomplishments, and then is only given access to secret information after a careful background check. In other words, Joe Schmoe's past plays a big role in the government's assessment of ability to handle classified information. Yet the president has no such hindrances. And while the president is but one person, he/she wields far more power, and is privy to far more classified information, than Joe Schmoe.
Okay, now if 200 million voters can't be wrong, how can they be given a chance to be wrong when Bush won't make his past publicly available? Ie, Joe Schmoe would be booted from his job in an instant if he tried to keep his past a secret. Shouldn't the presidential candidates at least make available SOME of the same information that Joe Schmoe must make available?
I know, I know, you'll point out that the people should have the most say in governmental policy, including voting for president. But most are spoonfed the basic crap that each of the major candidates serve, which are all lies and distortions of their own accomplishments and their opponents faults.
I just realized now that it's a self-perpetuating problem. Bush knows his DUI/drug use past will hurt him, so he keeps it a secret. But once it gets let out of the bag, it hurts him more because he didn't let the public know about it. So the next candidate will keep his/her past secret, etc.
If these people would be honest (politicians? HA!) it would avoid alot of unnecessary damage. But that's asking WAY too much.
there WAS a movie about this. made for TV, but based on that true story. It was an HBO original, i think, with a long title name that was something like "texas murdering cheerleader mom" or something wacky like that.
If Bush was trying to get a security clearance, the government would inquire meticulously about his past. However, he's not making available to the American public this similar information that the government would seek. You may argue that he shouldn't have to make his past public, but then on a similar boat, one Joe Schmoe shouldn't have to make his past available either to get a secret clearance. But that ain't how it works.
But while Joe Schmoe is hired based on his accomplishments alone, he then has to undergo the background check to get access sensitive information. Yet for president, one only has to solely use their current accomplishments? One thing that was related to me at my old job was that if you have a non-trivial police record, chances are you won't get a clearance. Because most of the sensitive-information leaks have been from people with said police records.
Basically what's happenening is Bush saying that his past shouldn't matter to get him elected, yet it turns out that joe schmoe's past should matter to get a secret clearance. And president is a far more powerful (and potentially destructive) position than joe schmoe would have.