Mainly, most immediately, it gives you an additional way to make a diode or diode-based structure when you're designing your fabrication sequence. Fabrication on the foundry / mass-production level occurs through processes which give you pretty much a set sequence of layers (deposited materials, treatments, patterning, etching, etc.). You can make anything you can design within that process...and most anything else usually stays in a research lab.

The extraordinarily common CMOS process involves numerous metal layers "high" above the wafer (numerous layers intervene). These are separated by insulators. Normally, you make diodes at the wafer layer where you're doing your doping.

MiM means you can put diodes in regions of your chip where they couldn't practically be fabricated before without a lot of time doing a one-off chip in a lab. With "a lot" often being several months to a year, assuming everything turns out perfectly, assuming your lab even HAS all the necessary equipment, and assuming you don't have something better to do - which is rare if you're not still a grad student.

* You have to buy a new system and probably sign a support contract for it
* It ties up personnel with deployment
* It doesn't work any better than the old system
* It raises significant privacy issues not present in the old system
* It raises huge data security and disposal issues not present in the old system
* Adding a new student is more invasive and time consuming than in the old system
* Fingerprint biometrics can track an arbitrarily large set of individuals...but they can only distinguish a few hundred

Yep, that sounds like a textbook example of educational bureaucracy.

* It costs more since you have to buy a new system and probably sign a support contract
* It ties up personnel with deployment
* It doesn't work any better than the old system
* It raises significant privacy issues not present in the old system
* It raises huge data security and disposal issues not present in the old system
* Adding a new student is more invasive and time consuming than in the old system
* The method can track an arbitrarily large set of individuals...but it can only distinguish a few hundred

Yep, that sounds like a textbook example of educational bureaucracy.

An analogous case:

In the event of a bomb threat, the President should be allowed to respond by carpet-bombing the city in question with nukes.

All the research on the subject points to this being an idea that isn't anywhere near ready for the prime time. Even if you use high-quality PDFs and assume people are reading on a laptop rather than a dedicated reader (to get around technical issues that reduce usability like lack of color, small size, lack of diagram support, etc.)...you still have one giant learning-related problem which no one has really done anything to solve yet.

When you study in a textbook, you unconsciously form a cognitive map of the material both in terms of where it is in the book and in terms of where it falls in relation to other topics and in relation to your study experience over the term.

When you study from an ebook, all of that goes away.

Does it have Linux on it? --no--> Install Linux. Is Linux installed? --no--> Modify Linux until you can install it. ----> Install Linux.

It's Linux. Installing it is always obvious.

Actually, the abstract nails what the actual news here is.

You can't confine a Dirac electron electrostatically. They show that it can be done with magnetic fields. This is sort of cool because it has potential ramifications for incorporating nanotechnology into electronics.

After the wharrgarbl, it mutates into a headline about creating mass and using it to power FTL starships from video games.

Wait, I get it now.

blame = attention

More plausible option: there exist rich government officials.

The rest of this is a sociopolitical rant. Feel free to tl;dr at this point.

It would be interesting to see statistics on how the income and assets of politicians measure up to those of their constituents. But I don't know enough about finance to know the right terms to pin down a mostly honest answer. What are we looking for here, net worth? And how do you account for less substantial factors like political power and connections?

I can guess at this much...there are probably no homeless or unemployed congressmen. BLS.gov currently puts national unemployment at 9.6% - and remember, that's just people who fit a narrow criteria. There are numerous approaches taken to effectively hide people. It doesn't count people who have given up, or part-time students, or people flipping burgers 10 hours a week who can't get a better job or enough hours to live off of. It doesn't count the homeless, the indigent, the undocumented immigrant, the prisoner...there are countless ways to shrink this number. What's the real statistic, if the published version is 9.6%?

Hitler: the happy medium between Nazi Earth and Nuclear Winter Earth. There's a long-standing ban against assassinating him.

Not that people don't try. Damn time travel noobs. Even so, there are a lot of assassination attempts against him which couldn't get fully corrected and so got left in the timeline as "miraculous escapes"...oh, and also the three times a contemporary assassin tried to pull it off.