There was a project going on, first at Carnegie Mellon University and then at Stanford's Rapid Prototyping Laboratory, where a very similar but more sophisticated process (Shape Deposition Manufacturing) was investigated to make precise metal parts with full strength (unlike the sintering methods mentioned here and elsewhere). A number of methods were used or tried to melt the metal, including TIG welding, laser fusing and induction heating.
The biggest hurdle to success was the huge internal stress that built up in the process. Remember that one puts layer after layer of molten metal on top of the previous one. The new metal layer solidifies and shrinks, creating lots of compressive on the previous layer. Put down enough of these layers and the part will crack.
And no, doing this process with Invar won't help, because Invar doesn't have this beautiful near zero thermal expansion close to its melting point.
Lets hope the blogger reads what has been published about this process before he commits more effort and resources to his project
Amazon: Big on Net Neutrality, not so much on Book Neutrality.
And biggest hypocrits, too. Remember the wikileaks saga? Wikileaks was hosted on Amazon cloud - for a few days, until some congress critters gave Amazon a nice phone call.
Amazon and net neutrality my ass. That was the day I decided to no longer do any business with Amazon. A bookstore and hosting service that engages in politically motivated censorship does not deserve my business, and the story posted here shows how far Amazon is willing to go.
These people filling the coffers of fraudulent exchanges are not necessarily clueless people storing their assets there like they would in a regular bank account.
There has been a large amount of "tidal trading" - where you place buy orders at a low price together with sell orders at a high price, and hope that market volatility will eventually put through both orders with some profit. This way you can profit from rises and falls in exchange rate, well, until yet another a flaky exchange runs with all your assets.
Some questions I would have for a lawyer that actually knows the ins&outs of Florida state law in this field: 1. Is the above, in fact, the case? I.e. are the charges on those accounts completely unrelated to the disclosure of what the purchased material (in this case, Bitcoin) would be used for? 2a. Does that mean that the state of Florida sees Bitcoin as a currency? 2b. If it does not, then how would this same law be applied to e.g. physical goods if used as a material for exchange (e.g. gold nuggets, diamonds, etc.) 3. Would similar apply to a travelers going in opposite directions exchanging their currencies when the value exceeds $300 (something easily possible if you forget to empty out your wallet), rather than going through the official exchange bureaus at the airport (and incurring the rather hefty exchange fees)?
I am anything but a lawyer, but TFA actually references the laws applicable to the case for everyone to read. If I read these laws correctly, then
1. Yes, you can not simply do trades between currencies or equivalent valuables without a license, and that license seems tied to stiff reporting rules as soon as higher values are involved
2. The law doesn't require that, it suffices if bitcoin is seen a payment instrument.
3. It would seem like that. Read the law yourself: http://www.flsenate.gov/Laws/S...
It would have been fairly trivial for the Germans to have rendered Enigma unreadable, possibly for the duration of the war, by a number of means they had readily at hand and could have implemented with simple commands. The result would have been at best a much longer and bloodier war. The result could very easily have been either a stalemate, or even a loss by the Allies.
The position of the Allies, their ability to sustain their war effort and avoid Britain being starved into submission, was all dependent upon the people with knowledge of the Ultra program keeping the ability of the Allies to read the German codes a secret. The Allies were able to do that. It was a shock to the Germans when they found out 30 years later that the Allies had broken the Enigma codes. At times they had suspected, but they passed it off as unlikely, and did relatively little compared to what they could have done had they known.
You imply that the modern bad guys were not aware that they were spied on until Snowden broke the news, but that's factually incorrect. Osama Bin Laden did not communicate from a home computer, did not send commands by phone, he did not store his heinous plans in the iCloud, and neither has any worthy adversary of the western world done any of that for over a decade. They all knew that western SIGINT could and would track computers and communications, and anyone reading about anti terror operations conducted during the last 10 years knew that as well.
Even the Germans must have overcome their hubris in the mean time, since monitoring of Angela Merkel's phone was long over before Snowden provided information about this. We can safely assume that Snowden did not provide anything that was not well known in the intelligence community, including both good guys and bad guys. Word about ECHOLON was out for years and assuming that the NSA suddenly stopped doing it would be very naive at best. Likewise only naive people ever assumed that a motherboard with components and CPU designed in the US or by close allies would not have an NSA back door. There's a reason why high strength crypto engines sold today are not based on PC hardware or chips made/designed in the US.
So what's left, pretty much the only ones really surprised, are members of the public in the US, who thought that government agencies and officials felt somehow bound by their constitution. Those people were the only ones really tricked by their intelligence agencies, and I wouldn't dare compare public trust in their officials to the "hubris" of the Nazi German high command. Mind you, so far the American population did not see itself as an enemy at war with the US government.
Doesn't light fall off from a point source follow an inverse square law? It's certainly not an expoential law unless you have a very lossy medium.
Looks like Vermeer knew more than the editors of Vanity Fair
Let's just ignore the inconvenient truth that nobody new has been admitted to Gitmo in years, those who are there were all captured on foreign battlefields and received the due process entitled to them under the Geneva conventions, and the titanic P/R disaster that would ensue if any American administration (never mind this administration) were to send him there.
Look at how Bradley (Chelsea) Manning was treated and you will realize that horrific abuses of the judical system appear even outside of Guantanamo Bay with the full support of the US government and in broad daylight for everyone to see. The US goverment willingly accepted the resulting "titanic P/R desaster" and currently goes through another major embarrassment with this Snowden story.
Not all inmates of Guantanamo Bay were enemy combattants, by the way, there were prominent cases of innocent inmates who were exposed to secret rendition flights, torture and other forms of mistreatment before they ended up in Guantanamo Bay, where they were held for years.
Suggesting that the US goverment has stopped treating their constitution as toilet paper or cares in the least about how the world perceives their actions is naive at best.
"Catch a wave and you're sitting on top of the world." - The Beach Boys