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Comment Who will buy your product (Score 1) 1014

if you keep paying people less and less and replace them with robots? All your profit maximizing won't help you, if there isn't anyone to pay for
your products. That is why trickle down does not work. When rich people always get richer, that implies that the money stream goes from poor
too rich. How will that turn around if you give more money to the rich?

Comment stupid studies (Score 4, Insightful) 165

Who remembers what they have eaten the last 15 days? How many of the answers were incorrect, either because the people forgot or lied for
whatever reason. These medical studies are just usefull enough to find trends that have to be backed up by real research into cause and effect.
To even publish such early results is irresponsible and might even bias other research by leading them into a wrong direction.

Comment Not really an absurd idea (Score 1) 642

Just imagine you are the company that colonizes the moon and you have a large base with some self sufficiency and a method get cargo to the moon
and back to earth. This all would require some profitability like from exporting some natural resource of the moon or maybe, but less likely, from just
the tourism. In that case, in order to keep your monopoly and in absence of any supervision by a government, you would have to build up some
defenses against competitors or other entities that want to take the moon from you. And as soon as you have those defenses, why not use them to
increase profits? What could happen to you? They can't get you on the moon that easily, you have the high ground.

Comment Re:no it isn't (Score 1) 159

They cannot do that, because you are not allowed to watch US content when you are in Canada, even if you live in the US and are just on vacation. So they have to show you Canadian content or nothing, and guess how world travelers would love the latter.

Comment Where are all the foreign scientists? (Score 2) 226

It used to be that most of the scientists from US universities I met at international physics conferences or summer schools were green card holders or recent immigrants. There were hardly any american born ones. Did that change in the last 20 years or does the show slightly misrepresent that ratio.
I am asking because in his way Sheldon reminds me of some Russian physicists I used to know.

Comment I still have the raw data (Score 1) 189

that I used for my paper 15 years ago. It is on a tape, that is somewhere in a drawer, that I have no tape drive for. On the other hand, the LaTeX file and the C and FORTRAN programs I used to evaluate and create the data and write the paper are still on a hard drive that is running on a computer in my network and I can access it right now. I probably can*t compile the the program without change (was written for Solaris and DEC machines) and maybe not even run LaTeX on it without getting some of the included styles, but still it is there.
Since my work was in theoretical physics and numerical the loss of the raw data is probably not as bad as long as you still have the software, but I guess for an experimental physicist the problems would be much greater to keep the massive amount of data they sometimes have and if lost to reproduce the data.

Comment I just used (Score 4, Informative) 278

the nvidia-settings tool to set up 4 monitors on my GTX670, there is no problem with speed and I get hw accelerated 3d on every screen. The driver is NVidia's 310.19. I used the TwinView Option on the Layout selection screen and could put the monitors into the wanted configuration with the GUI. I can move windows between the monitors and xfce gives me panels on the separate monitors.
The screen section in the xorg.conf looks like this:
Section "Screen"
        Identifier "Screen0"
        Device "Device0"
        Monitor "Monitor0"
        DefaultDepth 24
        Option "TwinView" "0"
        Option "Stereo" "0"
        Option "nvidiaXineramaInfoOrder" "DFP-0"
        Option "metamodes" "DFP-0: nvidia-auto-select +0+0, DFP-1: 1920x1200 +1920+1080, DFP-3: nvidia-auto-select +1920+0, DFP-4: nvidia-auto-select +0+1080; DFP-1: 1920x1200 +0+0; DFP-1: 1920x1200 +0+0"
        SubSection "Display"
                Depth 24
        EndSubSection
EndSection

and the server layout:

Section "ServerLayout"
        Identifier "Layout0"
        Screen 0 "Screen0" 0 0
        InputDevice "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
        InputDevice "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
        Option "Xinerama" "0"
EndSection

Comment It's not a paradox (Score 5, Insightful) 128

if you forget part of the energy-momentum tensor when you transform your coordinates from a stationary into a moving frame of reference.
Special relativity really cannot "clash" with the Lorentz force law, because it is based on the Lorentz invariance of Maxwell's equations. I think a "paradox" like this keeps coming up ever so often in discussions of special relativity, form people who don't understand it. I just don't see how PRL can accept such a paper.
I admit it would make a nice problem for a physics test, but not much more.

Submission + - Megaupload Trial May Never Happen, Judge Says

Turbine2k5 writes: A US judge has put a bomb under the Megaupload case by informing the FBI that a trial in the United States may never happen. The cyberlocker was never formally served with the appropriate paperwork by the US authorities, as it is impossible to serve a foreign company with criminal charges.

Comment Re:Where is the data? (Score 5, Informative) 49

I saw the camera on NHK World and it is not what you may think is camera sized. It is a big cube with about 1 m sides. It also includes a small optical camera, so that you get a composite of the visual picture and the gamma radiation distribution. It is supposed to be used to check the buildings in contaminated areas and see where the radioaktive material is located.

Government

US Government Sets Up Online "App Store" 138

krapper writes "The Obama administration has unveiled a government 'app store' designed to push the federal bureaucracy into the era of cloud computing. The change means some federal employees will begin using services like YouTube, Gmail and WordPress, which store data on private internet servers instead of on those paid for with public money. The process will start small but will ramp up quickly, Vivek Kundra, the US chief information officer, said in a blog post on Tuesday. 'Our policies lag behind new trends, causing unnecessary restrictions on the use of new technology,' Kundra writes in the post on WhiteHouse.gov. 'We are dedicated to addressing these barriers and to improving the way government leverages new technology.' The app store is designed for federal employees doing official government business and is not intended for use by the public."

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