If you live long enough, you tattoo will turn into a shapeless blob of ill defined colors.

I had a friend who was in the Marines when he was in this late teen years in the early 1950's. In the mid 80's he showed it to me. I was just a round blotch of blue/gray.

Tattoo ink migrates over time. Muscle and skin age and change their shape. It's guaranteed that a tattoo will not stay the same as time passes. It will only look worse.

By the way, the reason that sailors and marines get tattoos is in case they are blown to pieces. A distinctive tattoo on a limb makes it more likely that that body part will be recognized by the survivors. That's why there are often tats on different limbs.

Whens someone gets a tat, and then says that it's to mark a point in their life, I often wonder if that means they are planning for future senility, or being blown apart. Just wondering...

MongoDB is Web Scale.

You can walk to the Port Chicago site; I've been there. It's a nice walk by the Suisin Bay on the Carquinez Straight between Martinez and Pittsburg. There is a national historical monument to the disaster, but it's not at the explosion location.

The speculation that it was an atomic explosion is a paranoid fantasy. Given the technology of the time, a ground level explosion would have produced so much radioactive fallout that it would still be detectable today.

Then there is the issue of the situation at the loading docks. This was the era of the racially segregated US military, and the majority of the sailors at the installation were African American sailors, with white officers. Most of the people killed were the black sailors. Afterwards, some of the men refused to resume work under such dangerous conditions, and were courts-martial for mutiny and jailed.

Given the reality of a segregated Navy, it is inconceivable that something as important as an atomic weapon would be assigned to the Port Chicago facility. In the real world, the nuclear components of the bombs dropped on Japan were accompanied by scientists and technicians from Los Alamos for assembly on Tinian before the flight missions.

While this training was taking place, the components of the first two atomic bombs were shipped to Tinian by various means. For the uranium bomb code-named "Little Boy", fissile components consisted of a cylindrical target and nine washer-like rings that made up the hollow cylinder projectile. When the bomb detonated, these would be brought together to create a cylindrical core. The uranium-235 projectile and bomb pre-assemblies (partly assembled bombs without the fissile components) left Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, California, on 16 July aboard the cruiser USS Indianapolis, arriving 26 July. The Little Boy pre-assemblies were designated L-1, L-2, L-3, L-4, L-5, L-6, L-7 and L-11. L-1, L-2, L-5 and L-6 were expended in test drops. L-6 was used in the Iwo Jima dress rehearsal on 29 July. This was repeated on 31 July, but this time L-6 was test dropped near Tinian by Enola Gay. L-11 was the assembly used for the Hiroshima bomb. On 26 July three C-54s of the 320th Troop Carrier Squadron left Kirtland Army Air Field, each with three of the uranium-235 target rings, and landed at North Field on 28 July.

The components for the bomb code-named the Fat Man arrived by air the same day. The bomb's plutonium core (encased in its insertion capsule) and the beryllium-polonium initiator were transported from Kirtland to Tinian by C-54 in the custody of Project Alberta couriers. Three Fat Man high explosive pre-assemblies designated F31, F32, and F33 were picked up at Kirtland on 28 July by three B-29s, two from the 509th and one from the 216th AAF Base Unit, and transported to North Field, arriving 2 August. The B-29s were Luke the Spook and Laggin' Dragon of the 509th, and 42-65386, a phase 3 Silverplate of the 216th AAF Base Unit. F33 was expended during the final rehearsal on 8 August, and F31 was the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. F32 presumably would have been used for a third attack or its rehearsal.

Assembled nuclear bombs were never shipped in a configuration where a nuclear explosion could occur. Claiming otherwise is ridiculous. It's the fantastic logic of a day dreaming 9 year old boy.

So I suggest that you perform an experiment. Get a radiation detector and go to the site. Spend a day looking around. If the weather is nice you will have a wonderful time. And you will find no trace of radiation, or any sign of an explosion at all. Then you can take the radiation detector home and look for the radioactive mind control scorpions that the CIA has planted in your basement.

There's a lot of flamebait here. I wonder if it would be as much if the example language was something other then Java?

This is far from the first time Cameron and the Tories have elevated a corrupt right winger to a high government position.

Remember the News of the World phone hacking scandal? Cameron appointed Andy Coulson, former News of the World editor, to be his official Press Secretary. Coulson was eventually sentenced to 18 months in jail for conspiracy.

Do you think that anything has really changed since then with any Murdoch new organization? Of course it hasn't. They are just more careful about not getting caught. The same goes for HBSC. Some underlings may be thrown under the bus, but no one of high rank will ever be brought to account.

They will fail no matter what, because the education system is dominated by religious fanatics.

Since Judge Overton’s 1982 ruling, the concept of evolution has been covered in the biology textbooks on the Arkansas Department of Education’s approved list and appears, though is not emphasized, in its Science Curriculum Framework. However, there is evidence that despite this, evolution continues to be minimized or even ignored in most of the state’s schools. Many science teachers quietly complain that—given the danger of provoking the anger of parents, administrators, and school board members—they teach little if any evolution. Others shy away from the subject because they themselves have never received the needed instruction on evolution. A survey of the state’s biology teachers conducted by state education officials showed that only fifty percent cover evolution at all, with most of those just glossing over it. The other fifty percent either ignore the subject completely or teach some form of creationism. This persisting situation has raised many questions about Arkansas’s commitment to giving its young people the best possible education in the biological sciences. The state’s struggle over the teaching of evolution, it would appear, is far from over.

Former Arkansas Governor Huckabee wants to run for president and is currently beating the drum denying climate change.

The former Arkansas governor mocked Obama's elevation of climate change as a critical issue. Huckabee says a greater threat is violent radical elements stoking fear around the world.

Arkansas is a state where verifiable scientific facts are ignored in favor of religiously endorsed stupidity. Trying to drop a high technology mandate into such a system will not work. Critical thinking has been replaced by magical thinking. Keeping rational thinking unpolluted by fanatical belief is a loosing battle. The best that they will get is skilled technicians.

Think about it. Would you hire someone who was primarily educated in a madrasa, a place where religion was emphasized over any other subject? Hiring a person who was mostly educated in Arkansas is the American version. No matter how smart a person is, unless they are capable of critical thinking they will never be in the top tier. So unless someone from Arkansas leaves the state and overcomes their bad early training, they are not someone who can be trusted to make rational decisions.

Although this sounds harsh, if you think about it rationally it's difficult to come to any other conclusion.

Ohh, you're reading Slashdot, and you are asking "so many" people are jerks? Really, you should pay more attention to what goes on here.

Slashdot is jerk central. More jerks then you can shake a stick at. Being here means you have a 100% probability of seeing jerk behavior all the time. At this point you should expect people to be jerks. It's normal.

All though this does not necessarily answer the question of why, it does show that this behavior is normal and should be expected. I hope this helps you out a bit.

This demonstrates the use of graphene in a band gap structure. Diodes and transistors work because of band gaps, which is achieved in silicon by doping into N type and P type regions. There is no easy way to do the equivalent in graphene, so building active components is hard.

They created a structure with band gaps by layering multiple materials including graphene.

We describe light-emitting diodes (LEDs) made by stacking metallic graphene, insulating hexagonal boron nitride and various semiconducting monolayers into complex but carefully designed sequences. Our first devices already exhibit an extrinsic quantum efficiency of nearly 10% and the emission can be tuned over a wide range of frequencies by appropriately choosing and combining 2D semiconductors (monolayers of transition metal dichalcogenides). By preparing the heterostructures on elastic and transparent substrates, we show that they can also provide the basis for flexible and semi-transparent electronics.

The technique they used was van der Waals epitaxy.

On the other hand, such layered materials as graphite, mica, MoS2 or GaSe, have a lamellar structure consisting of two-dimensional unit layers. Each unit layer is formed via strong covalent or ionic type bonds, while there is no strong bond between two unit layers; they are bound together via van der Waals-type weak interaction. Then layered materials can be easily cleaved and the clean cleaved surface has a very wide and flat terrace without an active dangling bond. When the thin film growth is investigated on such an inactive surface of a layered material, only weak interaction works between the substrate and the grown material. This results in far small lattice-mismatch distortion in the grown film even if it has a different lattice constant or a crystal structure from the substrate.

If you want pretty pictures, look here. This one is very unusual, because it exhibits a spiral pattern.

At the start, it talks about using reactors to generate thermal thrust and using reactor generated electricity for ion propulsion. Then everything is limited to advocating thermal thrust. That's because thermal thrust reactors make manned exploration of the solar system much more feasible. Using reactors for ion propulsion is more suited to robotic exploration, because ion thrust means longer travel time. So the point of the article is to justify nuclear propulsion in space for manned missions, but they never really say this directly, it's implied.

Not being up front about this seems intellectually dishonest. If you want to use this kind of nuclear energy is space for manned programs, you are advocating a risk vs. reward tradeoff. Don't sidestep the issue.

Here's the Wikipedia article about nuclear power in space.

Remember, no matter what happens at the end of the movie, and who or what is destroyed, there can always be a sequel. And then there are the reboots, and new actors stepping into existing roles. How many times has there been a new Batman, or Joker, or James Bond?

So just because Balmer has decided to go throw chairs on a basketball court, that doesn't mean that Microsoft can't gen up a new super villain. Just sayin...

Why should things be any different this time?

The NSA has metadata (and most likely recordings) of most of the phone calls in the entire world. The FBI (and a bunch of other unnamed government agencies) can and do tap phones without court orders. Cell phones can be used to track individuals 24/7. And yet somehow between the FCC and all the phone companies no one can figure out who is making robocalls. Really?

What's actually going on is that phone companies love robocalls because they make money on them and the FCC doesn't give a damn and/or is too "pro-business" to do anything for consumers.

Just stop lying and pretending that this is a hard problem. It's bad enough that this crap goes on in the first place. Pretending that nothing can be done is adding insult to injury. STFU and admit that it happens on purpose and nothing will change because you like the status quo. Stop lying to us!

A paranoid fantasy depicting a world threatened by the forces of evil, where only a few decent people with traditional values fight hoards of near zombies who want to degrade everything. Rated PG for mild violence.

Do you mean have we become like Wall Street and expect the government to bail us out when we are greedy, stupid and incompetent?