A couple of people have raised this issue, and it relies on a fundamental mis-understanding of how the universe works on a molecular scale.

  Suppose that I have my colander and I wash some vegetables in it. Gunk can get stuck in the holes and it has to be washed off, which requires a fair amount of work because I have to break the interaction between the gunk and the surface. That's your macroscopic intuition about how filters and such work.

  But your macroscopic intuition will lead you astray in this case. The individual holes in graphene do not work that way; yes, occasionally, molecules of one kind or another will spend some time stuck to the graphene (a useful phenomenon in other circumstances - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-performance_liquid_chromatography) but, on the scale of atoms, they are effectively in a high-powered washing machine ALL THE TIME.

  Can't find quite the movie I want... this'll do:
http://protonsforbreakfast.wordpress.com/2012/04/11/brownian-motion-observed-in-milk/

  So you see those oil bubbles wiggling around? Given that amount of constant wiggle, are you worried about having them "stuck" anywhere? That's thermal vibration from being at room temperature. Those milk bubbles are over 1,000 water molecules across, so each of those "wiggles" is 10 or 100 times the size of an individual graphene pore; are you worried about anything another 1000x smaller being "stuck" anywhere? It would be like worrying about gunk stuck in your colander while your colander was sitting in a fire-hose 24/7.

  Anyway- to cut to the chase:
obviously you could have you take the graphene and you run the sea water *past* it at high pressure. Occasionally some gunk gets in there but it washes away sooner or later; and nothing spends any appreciable amount of time stuck in an individual graphene hole.

And the reason that the federal reserve is more concerned about keeping inflation below 2% than about keeping unemployment below 8%?

  Because the 0.1% don't need jobs - but they have piles of money which they do not wish to inflate.

  It's really that simple.

My comment was perhaps more incendiary than saying that MS is strong-arming people into not shipping Linux (which everyone knows to be true):
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2906477&cid=40275125

Re:The big difference here is, posted to History Will Revere Bill Gates and Forget Steve Jobs, Says Author, has been moderated Flamebait (-1).
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  People keep modding it back up to 5; we'll see if it crashes to -1 right before the mod deadline passes.

In the 1990s, there was still demand for biology PhDs in the private sector, which has significantly dried up since. It's not GONE, but it's greatly reduced. That's why the emergency-of-people-whining (because couldn't get professorships, had to work in industry) is now an emergency-of-people-in-serious-trouble (because can't get JOBS AT ALL.) For the balance, I'll be using the terms Pharma, Biotech and Industry interchangeably - they're not exactly the same thing but the basic argument applies whether the company is making drugs or medical devices or developing new diagnostic biomarkers or whatever they do employing PhDs in the life sciences.

  On top of this, the research that the biotech companies are doing is mostly me-too research which doesn't benefit the public. In spite of this, industry is continuing to milk the public of their subsidy from patent protection on products that were ~50% developed at public expense anyway. The solution to this is a fairly simple reallocation:
* End patent protections for medical technologies. Because of capitalism, and markets, and other realities which sensible people accept, this will drive prices through the floor.
* Take the savings to the rest of the economy, and raise people's taxes (should be balance-sheet-neutral on average for the general population)
* Give the extra tax revenue to the NIH, and expand the NIH mission to include drug development, medical device development, etc. as needed to bring such to market.

  To be blunt, I do not respect the opinion of people who defend drug patents at this point, especially since such people are generally ideologically committed (as opposed to persuaded on relative merits, no the same thing), to "capitalism". The commitment of "capitalists" to intellectual property protection (instead of market competition) shows them to be craven, deceptive and fraudulent: they're really committed to oligarchy and to the preservation of privilege, not to the market as an instrument of efficient allocation of economic resources. Such people are deeply shameful and depraved - they are not worthy of respect out of any need to promote ideological balance.

  Anyway, even during the 90s, the price paid by the public for patented medical treatments was not really justified given the amount that the Pharma industry spent on R&D:
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/press-releases/press-releases/cepr-releases-report-on-prescription-drug-research/

  Now a days, with drug expenditures being a larger share of GNP, and pharmaceutical R&D being a smaller share of GNP, the cost:benefit relationship is even more drastic. To put it another way - biotechnology patents, generally speaking, do not meet the constitutional test of being beneficial to the public or of promoting the useful arts. So they should be done away with, and the public sector (which is far more efficient at funding scientific research than the private sector, due primarily to the better information available to the people making decisions) should simply assume that function, producing a significant cost savings for the general public as well as accelerating the pace of research and finding useful employment for our best and brightest.

Nobel prizes aren't grants, they don't fund projects. The prize is cash money you get to keep yourself; although I think most people donate it to charity. Unfortunately, google is swamped with discussion of what Obama did with his, but Smoot donated his(http://phys.org/news93885786.html), which I understand to be typical.

In fact, no.

  I accidentally posted this anonymously farther down, but in fact Bill Gates has done tremendous harm with his so-called "philanthropy"; his real contribution is "leveraged philanthropy", where you use philanthropic donations to control something so that you make more money. This is true with his vaccine so-called "charity" - which forces poor nations to spend money from other sources on expensive foreign vaccines, rather than on development of local vaccine manufacturing or of general public health infrastructure, and thus actually degrades the quality of 3rd world health care while making Bill Gates his "charitable" money back and then some. This is true of his education so-called "charity" - which forces poor school districts to spend money from other sources on high-tech gadgets and expensive consulting services, which are sold by Bill Gates' various partners, but which are actually worse than no services at all.

The Gates' foundation has announced a partnership with Pearson (for profit-education company) to develop and market materials aligned to the common core. These are the materials that your school district must agree to purchase (this particular test cost $32 million state wide) in order to qualify for Race to the Top.
http://articles.nydailynews.com/2012-04-19/news/31369375_1_answer-silly-question-pineapple
    So, Bill Gates is using a small amount of his "charitable" money to force public money in much larger amounts, to be wasted on this crap.

Bill Gates wants to fit teachers with galvanic bracelets:
http://dianeravitch.net/2012/06/09/just-when-you-thought-it-couldnt-get-crazier/

Bill Gates needs vaccines to be a "profit center" for his pharmaceutical buddies. I spelled this out above but read the comments.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2011/11/10/what-bill-gates-says-about-drug-companies-2/

Oh, hey, Bill Gates is using his agricultural charity to force the 3rd world to buy Monsanto's crops:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2010/sep/29/gates-foundation-gm-monsanto

As a current academic, I can tell you that I have no idea what it means for [b]non[/b]-University jobs.

  So if you have a job as a professional programmer, and you want to hire your just-graduated CS Master's Student, you may have to publish the job, yeah? But then you just hire your former student anyway. Is that very different from filling a job internally in the private sector? Or in a secret dungeon?

  Then for various administrative staff vacancies, there's often a policy to favor filling the job internally, but again I think they have to advertize. I'm less clear on that one.

Many public institutions - Universities, National Labs, Secret Prisons - are required to publish/advertize job openings even if they plan to fill them internally.

  So they want to promote Mustafa out of sales to a newly created torturer position, but they can't just hire him. They have to publish an advertizement and pretend to do a search and then, bang!, they thank everyone else for their interest and hire the best candidate, Mustafa; this was the plan all along.

  So don't get your hopes up, is all I'm saying.

Truth1: Chemistry reporting is as bad as all other science reporting.
Truth2: The Chemical industry is as unconcerned with "externalities" as any other business.

  Reporters will get you to panic even if they don't have a good reason; the reason that reporters are capable of spreading panic easily is because chemical manufacturers will poison you in order to make a buck. So, from a certain standpoint, the response of the general public is rational - they don't trust the chemical industry, and they shouldn't, so why not err on the side of caution when dealing with certified professional liars (marketing, PR and advertising people). Particulates are bad for you; the chemical industry (and domestic manufacturing generally) denies this, but they're lying. Vaccines are not harmful; but they are a big emerging profit center for pharma. If vaccines were harmful (again, they aren't), would pharma lie about it? Damn straight they'd lie through their teeth. So it becomes a double problem - it's difficult to educate the public about what is safe (vaccines are safe), and at the same time it's difficult to get robust action on what isn't safe (airborne particulates are not safe; neither are most chlorinated organics, heavy metals, etc.)

This is why programmers (or software architects, or applications developers, or whatever - I prefer "technology professionals" except that some people think that means someone with an MBA who works at a technology company) need unions. Or needed unions, before silicon valley was more or less gutted under the Bush II administration.

  Now, unions would only have provided a temporary respite from all this; the unions would be under constant assault, with promises from management that the union was just getting in the way. "Of course," says management, "we treat you with respect out of our magnanimous appreciation for the good work you do, and the union just muddies up the issue with red tape, and takes your money and..." bleah-de-bleah-de-bleah. But unions would've held the worst of the off-shoring at bay for a few years, which would've kept the industry in much better shape since off-shoring has been on balance a tremendous waste of money. But management likes it (regardless of the impact on the bottom line) because it gives them more power.

What if I'm a petty, vengeful, jealous God?

The military-industrial complex would much prefer to operate with no oversight at all.

  We have a perverse system where such oversight is acceptable only if it does not compromise security (rather than the other way around.)

  So by screwing this up on purpose, the military can plead security concerns and never publish anything at all, because any public oversight whatsoever will be too risky.

  Never ascribe to malice what can be explained by incompetence? Well, malice exists, even though incompetence is so powerful it can explain anything.

Actually, no.

  China's solar companies are doing well because they get *tremendous* subsidies, as is always the case for nascent, high tech industry.

  if it weren't for massive government subsidies - paying for R&D costs directly, and providing a huge protected market mainly through the defense department - then the computer revolution which drove the 1990s boom WOULD NOT HAVE HAPPENED.

  All you free market fantasists need to get that into your thick skulls - or, you could go love on Ayn Rand's island! Please do, so that we can run our country like sane people. In 10 years, when solar power is viable, it will be the Chinese who are reaping the benefits because free market fanatics in the US aren't willing to make the basic investments required.

Mod parent up.

  However, I wouldn't discount the possibility of a prosecutor doing" the wrong thing, institutionally". The kind of places with an excess of bored civil rights attorneys also have an excess of activist/liberal DAs. So if the Oberlin DA gets such a case he, ight push it just to lose.