Okay, thanks for your clarification. It's highly frustrating when I see so many other people posting things like that on slashdot and other blogs, actually believing that the USA has not made any cultural contributions to the wold. Anyway, I sympathize with you regarding stupidity of the new American customs laws, regarding finger printing and whatnot. I've heard many people online say they've changed their plans to avoid the US, in lieu of other countries just due to these issues.
Regarding the pub you mention, I thought it was pretty cool that my hometown has a 200+ year old tavern still around, one that was visited by George Washington back in the 1700's. But of course that doesn't hold a candle to an 800 year old pub, but hopefully these old US landmarks will be around in 800 more years, if they don't rip them out to install yet another housing development of full of McMansions. Some of my friends just went to Egypt and were telling me about having coffee in a 1000 year old coffeehouse, still with the original mirrors and other decor on the walls.
Anyway, regarding foreign travel and the density of historical sites, I'd say it's just as rewarding and educational, if not more so, to go visit other lands regardless of how many historical sites there are within a finite distance. Personally I'm a big fan of the countryside and scenic landscapes. There are huge cultural differences, vastly different lays of the land, varying culinary experiences, etc. Eg, just within the US, you'd be surprised how many Americans that consider themselves 'worldly' have never even travelled to the rural countryside and hung out with the locals where it's a hugely different way of life. Thus far I've visited all 48 of the mainland states, and there are so many cultural differences just between the geographic regions of the US.
In fact, to relate to one particular British mindset, I was on a small roadtrip on spring break six years ago and I met a British woman at a hostel down in Georgia, who needed to get back to DC so I gave her a ride. We were lamenting the election of Bush and the whole Republican war on rationality, but even so she kept saying how she loved the American landscape and that there's nothing like it in England. From the peaks of the Rockies, the great plains, the smokey mountains of the Appalachians, the bayous of southern Louisiana, there is so much beauty in the American land (and I say this as one of the strongest critics of Bush and the Repubican administration).
And it's just as amazing going to other countries and lands. I've travelled twice to Cuba, which while only 90 miles away from Florida, is a whole cultural world of difference, and I'd highly recommend to anybody to visit there. The Cuban people have such a love of life, it's an amazing experience. Even so on a recent trip to Spain, just travelling the few miles across the Straits of Gibraltar to Morocco was a far bigger step culturally then the short boatride, and was pretty awesome. And even within Spain itself, driving around between the large cities was an amazing experience. while most tourists just go to the cities like Madrid, Sevilla, and Barcelona, we drove through the plains of La Mancha, the windy hills near Gibraltar, hung out with locals at small seaside towns, and each place was like a trip and a half.
Anyway, I've been rambling, but I hope you see my point, and thanks for your clarification. It's rather annoying to see how many people online don't consider American culture as anything beyond its consumerist capitalism.
No offence meant, the US has it's merits and is unique in it's own way, but American culture is very different from European culture; When some one says "American culture", my first thought is of McDonalds if some one talks about "European culture" I think of the Renaissance.
This is a very common misconception amongst Europeans, that American culture doesn't exist beyond Walmart, McDonalds, and the Simpsons. Your statement is highly misleading because it looks at current American consumer companies while contrasting that to one of European history. For American culture in comparison to your European Renaissance comment, for example, you could consider the allure of the Wild West ("Cowboys & Indians", Dodge City and Boot Hill, railroads in the great westward expansion, etc).
If you really want to consider American culture, how about American music (jazz, blues, country/western, bluegrass, soul, rap, hip-hop). And of course important American influences on rock&roll. How about American dance forms, which deviated from the formal ballroom dances of Europe with 'street dancing' (eg Swing in NYC in the 20's). And also American contributions (eg in Miami, NYC, and Puerto Rico) to Salsa and other Latin dance and musical styles. How about American contributions to literature, considering these American Nobel Laureates in literature.
And of course there's a whole world of culture in the conflicts in American history. For example, with slavery and the Civil War, and the continuing struggle for Civil Rights including Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and the whole associated musical/dance/literary/art culture with this (eg, I'd highly recomend seeing Sweet Honey in the Rock if you get a chance).
I could go on and on. But long story short, anybody claiming that American culture doesn't exist is exhibiting an unfortunate ignorance which ironically is a common stereotype of how unworldly Americans are these days.
We already have drivers chatting on cell phones. Now we want them downloading music and checking their email while driving?!? Close your eyes for a minute and imagine what your favorite busy intersection is going to look like with that going on. NOT pretty, huh?
Dude, you haven't even seen the worst of what we have nowadays. I kid you not, but a few months ago the guy in the next lane on the highway from me was text-messaging while driving! I couldn't believe it, he had his phone held in his left hand open, typing in letters, and driving w/ his right hand, and looking up at the road every once in awhile. In my car we were jaw-droppingly stunned that somone could be so irresponsible. And he had a pick-up truck too, not exactly a small and petite vehicle.
The worst part about it was that he wasn't driving straight, but kind of swerving back and forth in his lane. At one point he came dangerously close to my car and I honked at him, after which he got really pissed off as if I insulted his honor or something. As I usually do with nutcase drivers, I slowed down to let him go ahead of me to get out of his range, but we followed him a few more minutes until we got off the highway, and he was still texting the whole way.
But am I the only one who has a bit of an issue with no third party (and by that I mean COMPLETELY outside Apple) oversight?
You mean like the SEC, to whom Apple directly gave the results and all details of their formal investigation to? And to whom they're legally obligated when carrying out said investigation, under penalties of perjury?
Now of course just because Apple finds these conclusions on its own investigation which is 'on the record', doesn't mean they're inherently innocent, the SEC will give their own ruling on the matter in the near future. However, if Apple did put anything misleading in this report, they'd be in far more trouble than they are now, not to mention the huge can worms in terms of stockholder lawsuits they'd open by willfully lying to the SEC this time around.
You wrote: The internet is buzzing withspeculation that Steve Jobs may step down over reports that he profited $7.5 million in stock options by falsifying an executive board meeting. The financial times has a good overview of the unfolding story.
Yet quoting from the Financial Times article you linked to
Mr Jobs later surrendered his options before they were exercised, implying that he did not gain any direct benefit from them. He was later given a grant of restricted stock by the company instead.
So where is all this internet buzz describing how Jobs 'profited' from $7.5 million in stock options that he surrendered without exercising? You might want to RTFA which has many more specifics than your links.
You further claim that Apple 'cleared him' due to speculation, rumors, and falling stock. But please explain how Apple can formally and legally exonerate Jobs without demonstrating exhaustive proof within SEC accounting rules that Jobs wasn't involved. Ie, they handed all results of their internal inquiry directly to the SEC, and if they falsified anything in there they'd be in far more trouble than they are now. And their internal investigation was quite exhaustive, with over 26,000 man hours devoted to this issue.
Also, you'll notice in that NYT article that the focus of the blame seems to lie on two executives (Fred Anderson and Nancy Heinen) that have both subsequently quit Apple since this backdating scam and also have their own independent lawyers ready. And FWIW, I can't find the story now, but an analyst at Piper Jaffray claimed a less than 5% chance Jobs was illegally involved but that as CEO it's standard practice to retain one's own legal counsel for such a situation.
ut there is absolutely nothing unethical about putting a product in the hands of folks who have an audience and might say something nice about it.
Sure, just like there's nothing unethical about businesses flying politicians out to tropical resorts for a luxurious relaxing vacation, so they can 'clear their mind' before making a potentially rash decision on the upcoming legislation that happens to involve that same company.
No different from record labels sending promos to music journalists, or game companies sending software to reviewers.
Are you seriously not aware of the difference? Sure, record labels send free CD's to radio stations and other people to increase exposure to the music. However, they DON'T send shiny brand-spanking-new high-fidelity stereo equipment worth a few thousand dollars to those same reps, for reporting favorably.
In other words, if Microsoft sent copies of Vista to people to review (which they did), that's akin to record companies sending free CD's. But sending high-end laptops to people for blogging in their favor, that's a few levels up on the astroturfing scale.
What is means is that here on slashdot, or any other blog, when someone praises Vista, or counters a criticism of Vista, you have no way of knowing whether the person is
genuinely writing about their experiences with Vista
a paid Microsoft shill (no tin foil hat necessary, they've been caught astroturfing for at least a decade now)
this new option, now, that the person is an 'independent' blogger swayed by the prospect of generous tech gifts for 'reporting' in Microsoft's favor.
In other words, it's now even harder to identify on the blog scene what is astroturfing in favor of Microsoft and what isn't.
In other words, they're complaining that Apple doesn't regularly fly these guys out on a free 'vacation' to Cupercino, feeding them luxurious 5-star dinners and hosting them in 5-star resorts, to rave about their latest vaporware hype, like other well-known software and hardware vendors do.
No, this is just some bad data. If "secretive Apple" isn't publishing data, where do that get it from? Oh yeah, Forrester...
In TFA they say they get it from credit card sales, which firstly ignores all the iTunes gift cards I've seen all over the place lately. But brings up another point I haven't thought much about, regarding credit card companies freely selling their customer's spending habits.
Where do you draw the line? Does Apple have to pay every existing recording studio for potential thefts, including little Jimmy running a studio in his parent's basement?
The iPod is a media player, so look at how it relates to other media players. When you buy a TV, does part of the purchase price go to Paramount just in case someone watches a pirated version of Indiana Jones on it? Does every movie theater built in the USA have to pay construction fees to movie companies (I'm not talking proceeds of ticket sales, I'm talking about a fee just to build the damn theater) because it's possible a future owner might show a pirated film there?
If this Universal casehas any merit, it should extend to everything just to point out how ridiculous it is. Eg, every hammer sold should include a fee to De Beers because that hammer can be used to break a window and steal one of their diamonds. Likewise every diamond purchased should include a fee to Home Depot, because that diamond can be ground to make diamond dust, which can be used to saw through locking gates and bars and to steal hammers. Rinse lather repeat.
Coincidentally, the article after this one in this week's Nature is the report about superconducting doped silicon, also on slashdot's front page from a few days ago.
Getting to 4K is relatively easy, you get a dewar of helium (this is the relatively abundant He4 isotope) at roughly $4 per liter. You can cool to 1K relatively easily too by pumping on the vapor over the helium, evaporatively cooling ot down to 1K. It's inefficient to do this, though, people tend to build a 1K pot into their cryostat to only pump on a small volume of helium to cool their system to 1K, not the whole dewar.
Regarding the Helium 3 Fridge, that's actually doing the EXACT same thing as the 1K pot above, you're evaporatively pumping He3 with the charcoal sorb. Since He3 is rare and expensive, this is done in a closed system and recycled.
I know your pain, though, our He3 fridge has a leak, luckily not on the He3 system (He3 is super expensive), and it's been a pain in the ass to try to fix. To fix your system, you probably don't need that French dude to fix it, get a leak checker (find some experimental condensed matter guys that do vacuum sputtering or evaporation work, they'll have a leak checker), track down the leak on your He3 system, plug the leak (silver solder if possible w/ your machine shop), then pay some $$$ to inject some He3 back in when you're damn sure you've got no more leaks left.
It's more of interest for physics-level study of electron interactions. This announcement would be one of many similar research papers to hit the physics journals each week, nearly all of which don't have immediate applications in mind. But that's the point of physics, to study what the hell happens in systems, and to explain why we see what we think is weird behavior, or to try to predict other effects.
I'm sure most of the people studying electron band structure of p and n doped silicon could never have dreamed of the multi-billion dollar semiconductor industry to pop up over the next several decades. Some of my colleagues were among the first people to discover GMR (Giant Magnetoresistance), and that science has been immediately applied and wound up revolutionizing the magnetic media industry. But the grad studnets studying M-H curves for bilayer systems, and writing up papers that they thought only a few others in the field would read, probably never would have imagined such a market they'd open up.
Pretty much anything will superconduct below 0.35K. How is this news?
Actually, no, many things do not superconduct at arbitrarily low temperature, common examples being some of the best room-temperatures conductors we know of (eg copper and gold). Pure silicon also does not superconduct, as explained in TFA, which was known for some time.
As for this being news, well it interests me because I do experimental research with superconductors. But I'm surprised it made the front page of slashdot.
There's no reason why you cannot convert heat into electricity, it's been done for quite some time. Ie, it can be done indirectly by using heat to boil water, which turns a turbine, which spins a magnet inside a coil, inducing an EMF. It's been done directly too, thermoelectric materials have been known for about a century, where an applied voltage along a material induces a thermal gradient, or vice versa.
The real question is efficiency, and that you cannot just convert ALL waste heat into usable energy (ie, work) as that violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Essentially to make this thing work, you need a hot reservoir (ie, the battery or whatever giving off excess heat) and you need to dump some of this heat into a cold reservoir (ie, another face of the laptop). You can glean some work out, and of course the higher the efficienty, the less waste heat goes right to the cold reservoir. But you MUST dump some waste heat there, how much depends on the details of the process.
So I suppose the Zeeman effect is that energy consumed by keeping the magnetic field at strength while the spin is changed. Does your book (or other source) indicate whether the spin flips back when the magfield is removed? Does it emit the energy difference? Or does an external stimulus have to force the flip back?
Zeeman effect is the splitting of degenerate 'atomic' states in the presence of a magnetic field. Atomic really means here hydrogen atom, because that's the only exactly solvable model.
What this means is that there would be a number of discrete states that an electron in a hydrogen atom can be in, none can be the same due to Pauli exclusion. However, many of these have the same energy (called degenerate states). The degeneracy is split (ie, the energy levels are slightly changed) due to an applied magnetic field. When you consider other effects like the spin-orbit interaction (the electron's motion around the nucleus makes it seem like the charged nucleus is moving around it, creating a magnetic field which interacts with the electron's spin), and also to a lesser extent spin-spin interactions (magnetic dipole interaction between nucleus and electron) they also slightly split those degenerate energy levels.
Anyway, the electron can be in a number of different discrete states. Applying a field changes those discrete states that the electron can be in. If you knew for certain the electron was in one state (eg, as per a measurement), and then applied or removed a field such that the state the electron was in is now not a valid state, the electron will be in a linear combination of the other now-valid states.
Finally, I'm too lazy to punch numbers, but I suspect the grandparent's post is incorrect in that when calculating the magnitude of Zeeman splitting, it assumed an electron in a magnetic field when in this case it's really a proton in the magnetic field (different magnetic moment, by a factor of about 2000).
Storing data as spin has a far more interesting effect, and that is it's a specifically quantum mechanical value, meaning that it can be in a superposition of the two states, unlike a classical bit, and more importantly can be operated on and entangled with other qubits to allow for quantum computation. That's the whole quest for this research, to make workable quantum computers, which means at this point having workable qubits capable of storing a value for a 'reasonable' length of time.
I'm too lazy to look up values or calculate it, but when using the magnitude of Zeeman splitting, you'd need to use nuclear magneton, not the Bohr magneton (as the textbook for Zeeman splitting almost certainly did), since this effect is looking at nuclear spins. Since the proton is about 2000 times as massive as the electron, the nuclear magneton is about 2000 times smaller.
Umm, the latter part of your post is a bunch of incoherent rambling that may sound profound but is not really saying anything useful (like the alien as the professor in the episode of American Dad last night).
Since electrons are like photons
Okay, I'll just stop you there, electrons are NOTHING like photons, those two couldn't be further apart. Phonons are massless chargeless relativistic spin-1 bosons, electrons are massive spin-1/2 fermions with charge -e. Big HUGE difference, in every quantum effect. They are of course related in that the electrostatic force between two electrons is mediated by exchange of photons, but they are so entirely differnet. Massive electrons versus massless photons (big implications of chemical potential when considering thermodynamic quantities). Boson vs fermion (HUGE implications, photons aren't subject to Pauli exclusion and can be in a collective ground state, not true with electrons, electrons have a fermi surface at reasonably-cold temperatures leading to concepts like metals, semiconductors, insulators). Also photons are relativistic, with kinetic energy proportional to momentum, non-relativistic electrons have kinetic energy proportional to momentum squared. All of these give these two particles major MAJOR differences in the way they act, and how their collective properties occur.
Spin is what's called 'intrinsic angular momentum', and it's present in many subatomic particles like electrons and photons. There's an angular momentum that is 'just there', you cannot get rid of it. Electrons are spin-1/2, which means they can have a value of spin either +hbar/2 or -hbar/2, no middle value. It's unlike classical mechanics because a spinning top can go clockwise or counterwise, with a magnitude of angular momentum from 0 to infinity. Not true in quantum mechanics where angular momentum is quantized in units of hbar. Electrons only have two allowable spin values (protons too, as they are also spin-1/2 fermions). Those two values are why electrons, or nuclei, make good candidates for quantum computers. Photons are spin-1, so they can have spin +hbar, 0, or -hbar. (And actually for complicated relativistic reasons they cannot have value 0.) The two states +hbar and -hbar would correspond to clockwise and counterclockwise circular polarization of the photon, which you can write as a linear combination of horizontal and vertical linear polarization.
'Resistivity' is really only valid on a macroscopic scale, where electron transfer is dominated by diffusive motion. Ie, one can derive Ohm's Law quite easily in the simplest example for a metal with scattering, the Drude Model.
In that link, when they get to the point J=sigma E, that is Ohm's Law, albeit in a form you might not be familiar with, where J is the current density, E is electric field, and sigma is conductivity, or the inverse of resistivity. Assuming no gradients in current or field, you can use J=I/A and E=V/d where A is cross-sectional area, d is length of the chunk, and you can derive Ohm's law in the form you're more familiar with, with the resistance as a function of resistivity (the one you alluded to previously).
For a type of material of unknown physical characteristics resistivity (Ohms*meters) is the proper unit.
Wrong, not in the quantum ballistic limit, where each quantum conducting channel contributes one unit of quantum conductance, (2e^2/h), where conductance is inverse of resistance. It makes no sense to talk about resistance per unit length when the electron travels ballistically through the device!
What a stupid comment. If a carbon nanotube conducts electricity then it is by definition a metal.
Are you serious, or are you just trolling? As a blatant counterexample, there are non-metallic superconductors, which conduct electricity infinitely better than a metal. So sure, metals conduct (with non-zero resistance) and have some common characteristics, eg their fermi energy typically lies in the middle of a band (unlike semiconductors or insulators), ratio of thermal to electrical conductivity is relatively constant, etc.
But there are many things that also conduct fairly well at room temperature, such as doped silicon (an insulator). However, cool down silicon and the resistance increases (not enough thermal energy to excite electrons above the bandgap). Cool down a metal and its resistance will decrease (to a limiting factor). Cool down a superconductor and it undergoes a phase transition to a state of infinite conductivity.
Carbon nanotubes are actually extremely interesting in this regards, they can look metallic or insulating, depending on the chirality (ie, how the graphene plane is rolled into a tube). The metallic ones (with the fermi energy in the middle of a band) have quite long mean-free paths. Hence electrons can travel through the tube without scattering (this is the ballistic travel mentioned in the slashdot blurb). This limits the nanotubes resistance to the quantum resistance of about 25 kOhm. (Actually, the tube's resistance is 1/4 this resistance, as there are four quantum conducting channels because the graphene plane has two independent sites in its unit cell, and each site can have two values of electron spin).
Even some the insulating (or semiconducting) carbon nanotubes (or the graphene plane itself) are really cool. Due to the layout of the graphene plane, the band structure isn't pseudo-parabolic (as in a standard insulator) but conical (two cones meeting at a point), like a Minkowski light cone, or MCP from TRON. In the right orientations, the Fermi energy lies exactly at the intersection, and believe it or not, the excited states look EXACTLY like relativistic massive particles. The speed of light is mapped to the speed of sound instead, in this system. Really cool stuff, there are tons of future applications for nanotubes and graphene studies due to the interesting band structure, we've only really begun to break the surface.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, thanks for your clarification. It's highly frustrating when I see so many other people posting things like that on slashdot and other blogs, actually believing that the USA has not made any cultural contributions to the wold. Anyway, I sympathize with you regarding stupidity of the new American customs laws, regarding finger printing and whatnot. I've heard many people online say they've changed their plans to avoid the US, in lieu of other countries just due to these issues.
Regarding the pub you mention, I thought it was pretty cool that my hometown has a 200+ year old tavern still around, one that was visited by George Washington back in the 1700's. But of course that doesn't hold a candle to an 800 year old pub, but hopefully these old US landmarks will be around in 800 more years, if they don't rip them out to install yet another housing development of full of McMansions. Some of my friends just went to Egypt and were telling me about having coffee in a 1000 year old coffeehouse, still with the original mirrors and other decor on the walls.
Anyway, regarding foreign travel and the density of historical sites, I'd say it's just as rewarding and educational, if not more so, to go visit other lands regardless of how many historical sites there are within a finite distance. Personally I'm a big fan of the countryside and scenic landscapes. There are huge cultural differences, vastly different lays of the land, varying culinary experiences, etc. Eg, just within the US, you'd be surprised how many Americans that consider themselves 'worldly' have never even travelled to the rural countryside and hung out with the locals where it's a hugely different way of life. Thus far I've visited all 48 of the mainland states, and there are so many cultural differences just between the geographic regions of the US.
In fact, to relate to one particular British mindset, I was on a small roadtrip on spring break six years ago and I met a British woman at a hostel down in Georgia, who needed to get back to DC so I gave her a ride. We were lamenting the election of Bush and the whole Republican war on rationality, but even so she kept saying how she loved the American landscape and that there's nothing like it in England. From the peaks of the Rockies, the great plains, the smokey mountains of the Appalachians, the bayous of southern Louisiana, there is so much beauty in the American land (and I say this as one of the strongest critics of Bush and the Repubican administration).
And it's just as amazing going to other countries and lands. I've travelled twice to Cuba, which while only 90 miles away from Florida, is a whole cultural world of difference, and I'd highly recommend to anybody to visit there. The Cuban people have such a love of life, it's an amazing experience. Even so on a recent trip to Spain, just travelling the few miles across the Straits of Gibraltar to Morocco was a far bigger step culturally then the short boatride, and was pretty awesome. And even within Spain itself, driving around between the large cities was an amazing experience. while most tourists just go to the cities like Madrid, Sevilla, and Barcelona, we drove through the plains of La Mancha, the windy hills near Gibraltar, hung out with locals at small seaside towns, and each place was like a trip and a half.
Anyway, I've been rambling, but I hope you see my point, and thanks for your clarification. It's rather annoying to see how many people online don't consider American culture as anything beyond its consumerist capitalism.
No offence meant, the US has it's merits and is unique in it's own way, but American culture is very different from European culture; When some one says "American culture", my first thought is of McDonalds if some one talks about "European culture" I think of the Renaissance.
This is a very common misconception amongst Europeans, that American culture doesn't exist beyond Walmart, McDonalds, and the Simpsons. Your statement is highly misleading because it looks at current American consumer companies while contrasting that to one of European history. For American culture in comparison to your European Renaissance comment, for example, you could consider the allure of the Wild West ("Cowboys & Indians", Dodge City and Boot Hill, railroads in the great westward expansion, etc).
If you really want to consider American culture, how about American music (jazz, blues, country/western, bluegrass, soul, rap, hip-hop). And of course important American influences on rock&roll. How about American dance forms, which deviated from the formal ballroom dances of Europe with 'street dancing' (eg Swing in NYC in the 20's). And also American contributions (eg in Miami, NYC, and Puerto Rico) to Salsa and other Latin dance and musical styles. How about American contributions to literature, considering these American Nobel Laureates in literature.
And of course there's a whole world of culture in the conflicts in American history. For example, with slavery and the Civil War, and the continuing struggle for Civil Rights including Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and the whole associated musical/dance/literary/art culture with this (eg, I'd highly recomend seeing Sweet Honey in the Rock if you get a chance).
I could go on and on. But long story short, anybody claiming that American culture doesn't exist is exhibiting an unfortunate ignorance which ironically is a common stereotype of how unworldly Americans are these days.
We already have drivers chatting on cell phones. Now we want them downloading music and checking their email while driving?!? Close your eyes for a minute and imagine what your favorite busy intersection is going to look like with that going on. NOT pretty, huh?
Dude, you haven't even seen the worst of what we have nowadays. I kid you not, but a few months ago the guy in the next lane on the highway from me was text-messaging while driving! I couldn't believe it, he had his phone held in his left hand open, typing in letters, and driving w/ his right hand, and looking up at the road every once in awhile. In my car we were jaw-droppingly stunned that somone could be so irresponsible. And he had a pick-up truck too, not exactly a small and petite vehicle.
The worst part about it was that he wasn't driving straight, but kind of swerving back and forth in his lane. At one point he came dangerously close to my car and I honked at him, after which he got really pissed off as if I insulted his honor or something. As I usually do with nutcase drivers, I slowed down to let him go ahead of me to get out of his range, but we followed him a few more minutes until we got off the highway, and he was still texting the whole way.
But am I the only one who has a bit of an issue with no third party (and by that I mean COMPLETELY outside Apple) oversight?
You mean like the SEC, to whom Apple directly gave the results and all details of their formal investigation to? And to whom they're legally obligated when carrying out said investigation, under penalties of perjury?
Now of course just because Apple finds these conclusions on its own investigation which is 'on the record', doesn't mean they're inherently innocent, the SEC will give their own ruling on the matter in the near future. However, if Apple did put anything misleading in this report, they'd be in far more trouble than they are now, not to mention the huge can worms in terms of stockholder lawsuits they'd open by willfully lying to the SEC this time around.
The internet is buzzing withspeculation that Steve Jobs may step down over reports that he profited $7.5 million in stock options by falsifying an executive board meeting. The financial times has a good overview of the unfolding story.
Yet quoting from the Financial Times article you linked to
So where is all this internet buzz describing how Jobs 'profited' from $7.5 million in stock options that he surrendered without exercising? You might want to RTFA which has many more specifics than your links.
You further claim that Apple 'cleared him' due to speculation, rumors, and falling stock. But please explain how Apple can formally and legally exonerate Jobs without demonstrating exhaustive proof within SEC accounting rules that Jobs wasn't involved. Ie, they handed all results of their internal inquiry directly to the SEC, and if they falsified anything in there they'd be in far more trouble than they are now. And their internal investigation was quite exhaustive, with over 26,000 man hours devoted to this issue.
Also, you'll notice in that NYT article that the focus of the blame seems to lie on two executives (Fred Anderson and Nancy Heinen) that have both subsequently quit Apple since this backdating scam and also have their own independent lawyers ready. And FWIW, I can't find the story now, but an analyst at Piper Jaffray claimed a less than 5% chance Jobs was illegally involved but that as CEO it's standard practice to retain one's own legal counsel for such a situation.
Sure, just like there's nothing unethical about businesses flying politicians out to tropical resorts for a luxurious relaxing vacation, so they can 'clear their mind' before making a potentially rash decision on the upcoming legislation that happens to involve that same company.
Are you seriously not aware of the difference?
Sure, record labels send free CD's to radio stations and other people to increase exposure to the music. However, they DON'T send shiny brand-spanking-new high-fidelity stereo equipment worth a few thousand dollars to those same reps, for reporting favorably.
In other words, if Microsoft sent copies of Vista to people to review (which they did), that's akin to record companies sending free CD's. But sending high-end laptops to people for blogging in their favor, that's a few levels up on the astroturfing scale.
- genuinely writing about their experiences with Vista
- a paid Microsoft shill (no tin foil hat necessary, they've been caught astroturfing for at least a decade now)
- this new option, now, that the person is an 'independent' blogger swayed by the prospect of generous tech gifts for 'reporting' in Microsoft's favor.
In other words, it's now even harder to identify on the blog scene what is astroturfing in favor of Microsoft and what isn't.In other words, they're complaining that Apple doesn't regularly fly these guys out on a free 'vacation' to Cupercino, feeding them luxurious 5-star dinners and hosting them in 5-star resorts, to rave about their latest vaporware hype, like other well-known software and hardware vendors do.
Seriously. I mean, in a nutshell, this guy is complaining that reporters did substandard research on his own substandard research.
In TFA they say they get it from credit card sales, which firstly ignores all the iTunes gift cards I've seen all over the place lately. But brings up another point I haven't thought much about, regarding credit card companies freely selling their customer's spending habits.
Hey, what did the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics ever do to you? (ducks)
The iPod is a media player, so look at how it relates to other media players. When you buy a TV, does part of the purchase price go to Paramount just in case someone watches a pirated version of Indiana Jones on it? Does every movie theater built in the USA have to pay construction fees to movie companies (I'm not talking proceeds of ticket sales, I'm talking about a fee just to build the damn theater) because it's possible a future owner might show a pirated film there?
If this Universal casehas any merit, it should extend to everything just to point out how ridiculous it is. Eg, every hammer sold should include a fee to De Beers because that hammer can be used to break a window and steal one of their diamonds. Likewise every diamond purchased should include a fee to Home Depot, because that diamond can be ground to make diamond dust, which can be used to saw through locking gates and bars and to steal hammers. Rinse lather repeat.
Coincidentally, the article after this one in this week's Nature is the report about superconducting doped silicon, also on slashdot's front page from a few days ago.
Getting to 4K is relatively easy, you get a dewar of helium (this is the relatively abundant He4 isotope) at roughly $4 per liter. You can cool to 1K relatively easily too by pumping on the vapor over the helium, evaporatively cooling ot down to 1K. It's inefficient to do this, though, people tend to build a 1K pot into their cryostat to only pump on a small volume of helium to cool their system to 1K, not the whole dewar.
Regarding the Helium 3 Fridge, that's actually doing the EXACT same thing as the 1K pot above, you're evaporatively pumping He3 with the charcoal sorb. Since He3 is rare and expensive, this is done in a closed system and recycled.
I know your pain, though, our He3 fridge has a leak, luckily not on the He3 system (He3 is super expensive), and it's been a pain in the ass to try to fix. To fix your system, you probably don't need that French dude to fix it, get a leak checker (find some experimental condensed matter guys that do vacuum sputtering or evaporation work, they'll have a leak checker), track down the leak on your He3 system, plug the leak (silver solder if possible w/ your machine shop), then pay some $$$ to inject some He3 back in when you're damn sure you've got no more leaks left.
It's more of interest for physics-level study of electron interactions. This announcement would be one of many similar research papers to hit the physics journals each week, nearly all of which don't have immediate applications in mind. But that's the point of physics, to study what the hell happens in systems, and to explain why we see what we think is weird behavior, or to try to predict other effects.
I'm sure most of the people studying electron band structure of p and n doped silicon could never have dreamed of the multi-billion dollar semiconductor industry to pop up over the next several decades. Some of my colleagues were among the first people to discover GMR (Giant Magnetoresistance), and that science has been immediately applied and wound up revolutionizing the magnetic media industry. But the grad studnets studying M-H curves for bilayer systems, and writing up papers that they thought only a few others in the field would read, probably never would have imagined such a market they'd open up.
Pretty much anything will superconduct below 0.35K. How is this news?
Actually, no, many things do not superconduct at arbitrarily low temperature, common examples being some of the best room-temperatures conductors we know of (eg copper and gold). Pure silicon also does not superconduct, as explained in TFA, which was known for some time.
As for this being news, well it interests me because I do experimental research with superconductors. But I'm surprised it made the front page of slashdot.
The real question is efficiency, and that you cannot just convert ALL waste heat into usable energy (ie, work) as that violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Essentially to make this thing work, you need a hot reservoir (ie, the battery or whatever giving off excess heat) and you need to dump some of this heat into a cold reservoir (ie, another face of the laptop). You can glean some work out, and of course the higher the efficienty, the less waste heat goes right to the cold reservoir. But you MUST dump some waste heat there, how much depends on the details of the process.
Zeeman effect is the splitting of degenerate 'atomic' states in the presence of a magnetic field. Atomic really means here hydrogen atom, because that's the only exactly solvable model.
What this means is that there would be a number of discrete states that an electron in a hydrogen atom can be in, none can be the same due to Pauli exclusion. However, many of these have the same energy (called degenerate states). The degeneracy is split (ie, the energy levels are slightly changed) due to an applied magnetic field. When you consider other effects like the spin-orbit interaction (the electron's motion around the nucleus makes it seem like the charged nucleus is moving around it, creating a magnetic field which interacts with the electron's spin), and also to a lesser extent spin-spin interactions (magnetic dipole interaction between nucleus and electron) they also slightly split those degenerate energy levels.
Anyway, the electron can be in a number of different discrete states. Applying a field changes those discrete states that the electron can be in. If you knew for certain the electron was in one state (eg, as per a measurement), and then applied or removed a field such that the state the electron was in is now not a valid state, the electron will be in a linear combination of the other now-valid states.
Finally, I'm too lazy to punch numbers, but I suspect the grandparent's post is incorrect in that when calculating the magnitude of Zeeman splitting, it assumed an electron in a magnetic field when in this case it's really a proton in the magnetic field (different magnetic moment, by a factor of about 2000).
I'm too lazy to look up values or calculate it, but when using the magnitude of Zeeman splitting, you'd need to use nuclear magneton, not the Bohr magneton (as the textbook for Zeeman splitting almost certainly did), since this effect is looking at nuclear spins. Since the proton is about 2000 times as massive as the electron, the nuclear magneton is about 2000 times smaller.
Since electrons are like photons
Okay, I'll just stop you there, electrons are NOTHING like photons, those two couldn't be further apart. Phonons are massless chargeless relativistic spin-1 bosons, electrons are massive spin-1/2 fermions with charge -e. Big HUGE difference, in every quantum effect. They are of course related in that the electrostatic force between two electrons is mediated by exchange of photons, but they are so entirely differnet. Massive electrons versus massless photons (big implications of chemical potential when considering thermodynamic quantities). Boson vs fermion (HUGE implications, photons aren't subject to Pauli exclusion and can be in a collective ground state, not true with electrons, electrons have a fermi surface at reasonably-cold temperatures leading to concepts like metals, semiconductors, insulators). Also photons are relativistic, with kinetic energy proportional to momentum, non-relativistic electrons have kinetic energy proportional to momentum squared. All of these give these two particles major MAJOR differences in the way they act, and how their collective properties occur.
Spin is what's called 'intrinsic angular momentum', and it's present in many subatomic particles like electrons and photons. There's an angular momentum that is 'just there', you cannot get rid of it. Electrons are spin-1/2, which means they can have a value of spin either +hbar/2 or -hbar/2, no middle value. It's unlike classical mechanics because a spinning top can go clockwise or counterwise, with a magnitude of angular momentum from 0 to infinity. Not true in quantum mechanics where angular momentum is quantized in units of hbar. Electrons only have two allowable spin values (protons too, as they are also spin-1/2 fermions). Those two values are why electrons, or nuclei, make good candidates for quantum computers. Photons are spin-1, so they can have spin +hbar, 0, or -hbar. (And actually for complicated relativistic reasons they cannot have value 0.) The two states +hbar and -hbar would correspond to clockwise and counterclockwise circular polarization of the photon, which you can write as a linear combination of horizontal and vertical linear polarization.
In that link, when they get to the point J=sigma E, that is Ohm's Law, albeit in a form you might not be familiar with, where J is the current density, E is electric field, and sigma is conductivity, or the inverse of resistivity. Assuming no gradients in current or field, you can use J=I/A and E=V/d where A is cross-sectional area, d is length of the chunk, and you can derive Ohm's law in the form you're more familiar with, with the resistance as a function of resistivity (the one you alluded to previously).
Wrong, not in the quantum ballistic limit, where each quantum conducting channel contributes one unit of quantum conductance, (2e^2/h), where conductance is inverse of resistance. It makes no sense to talk about resistance per unit length when the electron travels ballistically through the device!
Are you serious, or are you just trolling? As a blatant counterexample, there are non-metallic superconductors, which conduct electricity infinitely better than a metal. So sure, metals conduct (with non-zero resistance) and have some common characteristics, eg their fermi energy typically lies in the middle of a band (unlike semiconductors or insulators), ratio of thermal to electrical conductivity is relatively constant, etc.
But there are many things that also conduct fairly well at room temperature, such as doped silicon (an insulator). However, cool down silicon and the resistance increases (not enough thermal energy to excite electrons above the bandgap). Cool down a metal and its resistance will decrease (to a limiting factor). Cool down a superconductor and it undergoes a phase transition to a state of infinite conductivity.
Carbon nanotubes are actually extremely interesting in this regards, they can look metallic or insulating, depending on the chirality (ie, how the graphene plane is rolled into a tube). The metallic ones (with the fermi energy in the middle of a band) have quite long mean-free paths. Hence electrons can travel through the tube without scattering (this is the ballistic travel mentioned in the slashdot blurb). This limits the nanotubes resistance to the quantum resistance of about 25 kOhm. (Actually, the tube's resistance is 1/4 this resistance, as there are four quantum conducting channels because the graphene plane has two independent sites in its unit cell, and each site can have two values of electron spin).
Even some the insulating (or semiconducting) carbon nanotubes (or the graphene plane itself) are really cool. Due to the layout of the graphene plane, the band structure isn't pseudo-parabolic (as in a standard insulator) but conical (two cones meeting at a point), like a Minkowski light cone, or MCP from TRON. In the right orientations, the Fermi energy lies exactly at the intersection, and believe it or not, the excited states look EXACTLY like relativistic massive particles. The speed of light is mapped to the speed of sound instead, in this system. Really cool stuff, there are tons of future applications for nanotubes and graphene studies due to the interesting band structure, we've only really begun to break the surface.