yes

New Spin on Graphene Makes It Magnetic

"It's almost like the summary is describing a different article" : because it is.

X-ray_microtomography is not new. What is new is :

"using partially coherent object illumination instead of previously used quasi-incoherent illumination"

which led to :

"We obtained three-dimensional reconstructions of mouse adenocarcinoma cells at ~36-nm (Rayleigh) and ~70-nm (Fourier ring correlation) resolution, which allowed us to visualize the double nuclear membrane, nuclear pores, nuclear membrane channels, mitochondrial cristae and lysosomal inclusions."

The rebuttal says nothing about the subsidies needed, and requested by the nuclear industry, to make nuclear energy "competitive".

The conclusion of the New York Times article is :

“The frantic effort of the nuclear industry to increase federal loan guarantees and secure ratepayer funding of construction work in progress from state legislatures is an admission that the technology is so totally uneconomic that the industry will forever be a ward of state, resulting in a uniquely American form of nuclear socialism.”

(Solar also needs subsidy at the moment, but less as time goes by)

USB and HDMI cables have to be really short anyway, isn't optical overkill?

It is a replacement that, because it is optical, does not need to be limited by "really short cables". If the technology is cheap enough, I would love to have webcams at 100m distance instead of expensive ethernet cameras (as an example).

The article is largely based on the analogy :

"In a smart essay in the journal Fast Capitalism in 2005, Jack Shuler shows how similar the rhetoric of the 1990s digital frontier was to that of the 19th-century frontier era."

That may be true. But there is an important difference the article does not see. The 19th-century frontier may have "seemed" infinite, but the information space (or noosphere) is for all practical purposes infinite.

What many corporations try to do is block the access to that infinite space, and make us forget that it exists. And make us pay to access their walled-in spaces.

They might still succeed, but only through "legal" trickery, not because of any natural limitation, such as the large but finite area or the "west".

The threat The Economist warns about is not to the open-source philosophy, but to "companies and consumers [that] could get locked into a cloud even more tightly than into a piece of software".

...

"This sort of problem has spawned an open-data movement. In March a group of technology firms led by IBM published an âoeOpen Cloud Manifestoâ that has since received the support of more than 150 companies and organisations. It is only a beginning, but perhaps this time around the industry will not have to go through a long proprietary period before rediscovering the virtues of openness."

The article Open-source software in the recession : Born free also expands on "open source's growing popularity". It mentions the trend "to sell proprietary extensions to an open-source core."

Yes, that whould be an interesting debate.

Is the information quantity the problem? Or is it the imbalance between those who have access to it and those who do not?

usable digital zoom perhaps ?

> then they ran out of steam (don't know why)

"The Alpha architecture was sold, along with most parts of DEC, to Compaq in 1998. Compaq, already an Intel customer, decided to phase out Alpha in favor of the forthcoming Intel IA-64 "Itanium" architecture, and sold all Alpha intellectual property to Intel in 2001, effectively "killing" the product."

from

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEC_Alpha