Are you sure you're not mistaken? A quick search online finds the statement that banks do indeed list loans they have made as assets on their balance sheets, complete with examples from Bank of America's 10K statement.

Actually there is someplace for that money to go. An awful lot of the money on corporate books is ultimately debt owed by someone else. When the economy contracts and companies start going bankrupt, a lot of money simply vaporizes due to debts that will never be repaid.

If that seems strange, remember that most money doesn't physically exist. There isn't a dollar bill somewhere for each dollar on some company's balance sheet. Not even close.

Personally, I hope this is just a pause, but I doubt it. I think we have barely begun to see the economic damage from this virus. The lockdown/shutdown is the easy part. Many businesses that were shut down will never reopen. Most of those that do will find business much worse than it is now, and many of those businesses will fail. High unemployment will depress consumer confidence. Expect 18–24 months of full-on recession before we see a real recovery.

A competent leader would have deployed enough resources for testing and contact tracing to contain the virus. We might have still needed to lock down, but the lock down could have been shorter and the death toll and likelihood of a viral resurgence lower. There are several examples of countries around the world that were able to do this. It's a shame that we were not one of them.

Yes, one who definitely had it and one who was sick with the right symptoms but was not tested.

Keep in mind that the report probably took some time to prepare. When they started working on it, the US was effectively doing nothing. It's great that we are doing something now, but note that we are still not doing nearly enough to put us in the best case considered in the report.

You're correct. Even the fact that they are doing this with an aspheric singlet lens isn't really unique. Any optical designer can generate a custom aspheric singlet with complete correction of spherical aberration in under an hour, and you can buy lenses like this off the shelf. What is unique about Acuña and Romo's work is that they found a formula for finding the correct surface shape. Normally these kinds of lenses are designed by having a computer trace ray paths through the lens and tweak the shape until all the rays converge correctly.

I doubt that there will be any immediate technological impact from this discovery, since modern computers can do the required raytracing very quickly. Deployment of aberration-corrected aspheres is limited more by the difficulty of fabricating the required surfaces than by any difficulty in designing them. Still, having a closed-form expression for the solution is bound to have some applications and may enable other steps that could have some real impact later.

Actually, the Nazis laughed at Einstein.

The US has a no-spam-call list too, and it worked very well for a while, but with telephone number spoofing the callers are too hard to catch now.

Because somebody canceled the project to design the specialized reentry bus a few years ago.

Their case stayed in court because they delayed introducing the evidence for as long as possible. They foot-dragged for years before submitting their list of infringing code. Once it was finally submitted, the Court pared the list down to just a few hundred lines of possibly-infringing code. The court never ruled on whether any of that code actually infringed, because SCO declared bankruptcy and got the case stayed.

Actually the cellphone makers agreed to standardize their power connectors a few months ago, at least in Europe. All smartphones will have a common power connector, and you'll be able to use any power supply. Eventually, phones won't come with a power supply, you'll just keep using the old one. I believe the new standard is one of the small USB connectors.

Good thing the Founders wrote Copyright into the Constitution, so it is on an equal footing with Free Speech, then. This is not an accident. Copyright is an intentional restriction of the public's rights to communicate and express themselves.

I defer to your greater knowlege of the subject.

Nuclear plants won't run without an external power source. It's a safety feature. If the plant can't get power from the grid, the reactor shuts down automatically.

A properly-designed system would have the data sent by the terminal encrypted, so to compromise the system the hacker needs not only the geometric information on your finger or retina, but also the terminal manufacturer's private encryption key.