Established since decades? Um, you do realize that neutrons were discovered only in 1932. The discovery of fission was in 1938. The Manhattan project began in 1942. The Nobel Prize for the discovery of nuclear fission was awarded in 1944 for Hahn's discovery in 1938.

Theories need to be experimentally tested; if theories were never tested, we'd still have the theory that heavier objects fall faster than lighter objects, that the world is flat, that Newtonian mechanics explains planetary orbits, etc. Theories are constantly proven wrong, and that's how we end up with newer, better models for nature.

That's also why Nobel prizes aren't awarded the same year as discoveries. They wait to make sure it's experimentally repeatable and peer-reviewed.

I don't think they're suggesting more carbon atoms are being created out of thin air. It seems like they're saying it would have the same size and number of particles, but its mass would go up -- i.e. it would have more inertia. Lots of models in physics require "gaining mass" -- i.e. gaining inertia.

Einstein predicts as you accelerate to the speed of light, you gain mass in your reference frame -- i.e. it becomes harder and harder to accelerate yourself further because you appear to be getting infinitely massive. Einstein is not suggesting that your belly expands and you start generating more particles. He's using "mass" interchangeably with "inertia". Greater mass == greater inertia, when all else is kept constant.

Similarly, the experiment with graphene suggests that a proper configuration of it will yield something with greater inertia (i.e. greater mass) than its constituent masses imply.

All science predictions are math tricks. If the prediction holds up, our existing models are correct, otherwise, our existing models are broken. Creating mass from graphene is not a new theory, it is the _consequence_ of our existing theories that someone cleverly derived.

Point is, either way, Abdulaziz Alhaidari is now famous and has done the incredible. He's either famous for making a marvelous derivation of our existing theories, or he's famous for disproving our current models by explaining what our current models predict that would later be experimentally contradicted. Just as the Manhattan project was a test of atomic theory; if it worked, an amazing weapon was created; if it didn't work, it had profound ramifications on invalidating the the atomic theory of the day. Either it's a win for engineering, building something amazing, or a win for science, changing the models to more closely match reality.

The judge must be a T-1000 sent here to prevent John Conner from becoming l33t.

Facebook, MySpace, Orkut -- everyone of these requires https for sending username and password. They switch back to normal http after the login because https puts load on their system.

He better not use a web-browser, they all support SSL. Oh, and he can't use banking websites, they all require https.

You forgot to mention the most retarded part of the "spending" concerns. India's Fed. Govt. isn't increasing the Dept. of Atomic Energy's budget. It merely gave clearance to the DAE to build the facility using the DAE's existing budget. If the Fed. Govt denied clearance, the $270m stays with the DAE, and _cannot_ be spent by the Dept. of Transportation for roads or the Dept. of Education for schools or the Dept. of Agriculture for farm subsidies. If the DAE didn't build a nutrino detector, it would just spend that money on other nuclear research. That's what the whole freaking department is about, atomic research. If NASA saves some money by not doing a shuttle launch, its money doesn't get yanked and moved to Homeland Security. Once NASA has been budgeted, the money stays within NASA. The following year, NASA's budget can be reduced if the senate thinks it's wasteful.

Folks don't realize that budgets work like fractals, and on contract law. The Fed. Govt is only responsible on carving out the budget for its departments, it does not directly budget every single brick and peon. Moreover, once budgeted, the Govt. enters into a contract and has to fulfill it or risk default. Democracies operate on contract-law and rule of law; the Fed. Govt. would be acting like an asshat monarch if it just swooped in and stole money from one dept. and moved it to another mid-year.

If you read the original article, you'll learn that India's DoE is building it out of its own allocated budget -- it is _not_ requesting a budget increase from the Federal Govt. All the fed. govt has done is given _clearance_ (NOT _funding_) for the DoE to build it. It's up to the DoE to find out how to scrape together $270m from their budget.

To put it succinctly, if the nutrino detector isn't built, the DoE would have an extra $270m to spend on something else. You'd rather they build a nuclear reactor?

He gets an impressive resume and gains admission to any PhD program of his choosing? Becomes a professor, and... uses his teaching assistants as an endless supply of cannibalistic food?

Considering India's GDP growth rate is among the highest in the world, I'm not sure if they ought to be listening to advice from nations with stagnant GDP growth or negative GDP growth.

Fix your own economy first before preaching. And if you believe your own words, don't breathe, don't take bathroom breaks, until you get out of a recession.

Keep in mind that India's space program is a profit-center. It actually _earns_ more money than the govt. spends on it. That's because placing satellites into orbit is big business, and high-tech services like satellite launches sell for hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars.

South Korea and India were of similar economic situations in 1950, the difference being that S. Korea poured money into technology, and India did what you suggested. Guess what? Getting homeless people to fish just creates lots of poor fishermen instead of lots of poor beggars. Big whoop. The goal is to create more jobs for scientists, physicists, researchers, lab assistants, programmers, etc.

Plus, India's tax rate is far lower than in Western Europe, and 90% of people are not taxed. So the amount they spend is a tiny drop in the bucket of the annual income of people.

Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_India#Tax_Rates
"about 10 per cent of the population meets the minimum threshold of taxable income"
So 90% of the population pays 0% taxes. And the progressive tax rates for the remainder of the population go from 10% to a maximum of 30% tax.

As for literacy, the "majority" of Indians are not illiterate, 32% are illiterate as of 2007, which is still a big number, but not a majority. Much of that illiterate population was born circa 1950. In the age group 7-15, literacy is 90% (10% illiterate).

Moreover, your presumption that they "prefer to spend their money being number 6, than cleaning up their house" is childish if not outright moronic. India's economy is $1.2 trillion dollars, and the project costs $270 million. That's 0.02% of the economy. To put that in perspective, that's equivalent to a 19 second bathroom break a day. And let's not forget that the project could be profitable, and in the very least provides good high-end jobs for their increasingly educated population.

Compare $270 million with the numerous welfare and social programs India provides to poor people. $13 billion to subsidize food for low-income families. $12 billion to subsidize fertilizer for poor farmers. $7 billion for education (at the federal level, states pay more). The list goes on for social programs that are all near $10 billion each.

In the end, they have a democracy and if folks don't like the budget, they'll elect other folks in. Every nation's budget is going to have cutting-edge R&D. It's ludicrous to suggest otherwise. Overall, their nation is doing fine, rapidly progressing with envious growth rates. It's not _your_ tax money being spent (and even for Indians, it's only the tax money of the upper 10%), so relax and let them build a nutrino research facility. If you're interested in nutrinos, I'm sure they'll love for you to pay them money to use their research center.

WindowsNT/WindowsXP has vastly better security than Windws95/WindowsME, even though they all run windows applications. The big difference is that Windows95/WindowsME lacked a memory model that sandboxed each application's memory. That meant one rogue application on Windows95/ME could start modifying kernel memory, or other applications' memory. Instead, under WindowsNT/WindowsXP, an application exits with a general protection fault.

There are stricter security models that go beyond merely sandboxing memory pages. Windows Vista introduced privilege escalation dialogue. It allows you to run applications with lower privileges (non-admin), and when the application attempts to do something that requires admin privileges, a dialog is brought up to prompt you for approval. I can imagine finer grained capabilities. E.g. your web browser should only have file access to its caching directory. If it attempts to read or write anywhere else, the operating system pauses the application and prompts the user for approval.

Most attacks can be avoided by having a secure firewall. The cyberattacks were all successful because the machines were connected to the internet "naked" - no firewall device.

First we have flash memory can that only be written to N number of times, and now they're building a cpu that can only do N computations?

The Karman line is the defined boundary for space. Your claim that "there is no clear 'line' ..." can applied to most anything, including boundaries between land and sea.

There is no clear line, or particular grain of sand, that divides land from sea. There is a wetness gradient, where you go from completely dry, to moist sand, to ever more moist sand, to fairly wet sand, to very wet sand, to sand with frothy puddles, to turbid water, ankle high water, knee high water... you get the drift.

Everything in nature lacks a clear boundary - due to planck's constant and such. All you can say is, with error bars, what the boundary is. We know the coastal boundaries of nations, within +/- 25m error. Similarly, the Kamran line is a decent boundary for when space stars from the Earth's surface. Is it exact to the millimeter? No, doesn't have to be. But the property is that buoyant crafts (bouyant due to density or due to propulsion with wings) cannot exist at the Kamran line. Just as the coastal boundaries of nations, while not defining the exact grain of sand land stops and sea begins, generally define the point at which you're dry or wet, within +/- 25m.

You didn't point out that the OP gave a terrible summary. 75,000 sell orders were not issued; a single 75,000 e-mini contract sell order was issued by a single trader to the firm's execution platform (that slices and piecewise sells, rather than issue a single large sell to reduce market impact). The firm's execution platform ultimately sold 35,000 e-mini contracts in 7 minutes before the firm shut it down. The program did what it was instructed to do -- the trader made a fat-finger error of selling $4.1 bn worth of e-mini futures (75,000 contracts).

If a driver presses the accelerator pedal while there's a brick wall in front of the car, you can't blame the engine or wheels for crashing through the wall. Can technology prevent this from happening? Sure, a car can have proximity sensors to prevent stupid users from crashing into a wall. Just because technology can fix the problem doesn't mean technology was the cause of the problem. It usually always is human error, and indeed in this case of fat-fingering in a sell order of 75,000 e-mini contracts.