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[Putnam]

I'll tl;dr for you, since reading seems to be too much trouble.

All electromagnetic radiation is light. They are literally the same thing, they are synonymous, they are one. Visible light is only special in that we can see it. Gamma ray lasers can be made just as blue ones can.

All electromagnetic radiation has no mass, but it does have momentum. Momentum matters because e=mc² is a simplification of the actual equation, e²=m²c⁴+p²c², where m = rest mass (0, in the case of light), c is the speed of light and p is the momentum.

Things don't increase in mass as they increase in size, they increase in energy. The difference may mean nothing to you right now, but it should after an explanation. "Mass" usually refers to rest mass. This is the mass of a particle at no momentum. This is a constant and cannot be increased or decreased.

[da_nang]

Upsalite is apparently a thing now.

[10ebbor10]

It's interesting to see how much things are invented by accident.

[Sergarr]

Upsalite is apparently a thing now.

"some of the chemistry details necessary for understanding the reaction mechanism was only available in an old Russian PhD thesis."
Yay for Russian science!

[XXSockXX]

Paper pay-walls are only a problem if you want to access stuff from home. Most universities offer access to all relevant sources in their networks or libraries. And most stuff that does not exist in electronic form and is not present in the library can be accessed through interlibrary loan.

It can be an issue for the libraries themselves. Every once in a while you hear about them dropping certain overpriced journal subscriptions. Sometimes it's part of a boycott, sometimes it's purely for budget reasons. A lot of smaller colleges and universities can't justify the cost of journals that charge an arm and a leg while only being marginally useful.

Obviously big research universities need to have access to as many journals as possible for their research community (you'd be surprised how far afield some articles can end up), but those with less research focus can drop a great many of their subscriptions without too much harm.

That is of course true. I guess it depends a lot on how specialised and well-funded you uni is. Also depends on your field of research. Some fields, like economics, are moving very fast and churn out massive amounts of papers. Others, like history, are moving kind of slow, so it's possible to find only a few papers on a subject and these papers might be decades old.

[palsch]

So this is murky still but worth a little attention.

The most significant part of this article;

UC Berkeley is now developing printed transistors at 180nm. The technology could deliver chips costing $25 a square meter, not the $25,000 per square meter of current processes, again a huge cost reduction that is mind boggling.

Even if this cost reduction was off by a factor of a hundred, a ten-fold decrease in chip costs would be huge.

There doesn't seem to be much published on the topic, but a two year old PhD thesis covers what appears to be the early work on this and suggests it's more than possible the claim is true. Or at least partially true.

[Sergarr]

So this is murky still but worth a little attention.

The most significant part of this article;

UC Berkeley is now developing printed transistors at 180nm. The technology could deliver chips costing $25 a square meter, not the $25,000 per square meter of current processes, again a huge cost reduction that is mind boggling.

Even if this cost reduction was off by a factor of a hundred, a ten-fold decrease in chip costs would be huge.

There doesn't seem to be much published on the topic, but a two year old PhD thesis covers what appears to be the early work on this and suggests it's more than possible the claim is true. Or at least partially true.

Watch as this won't result in computers getting cheaper because any profits from new technology will go straight into corporation's pocket. Or hell, maybe they will buy this technology from them, copyright it and forget about it.

[10ebbor10]

Well of course not. Computer use transistors which are often 3 times smaller.

[kaian-a-coel]

Chips WILL be cheaper if this goes out, because competition. If only one corporation halve its chips price, every other will be forced to do the same or perish.
How cheaper it will get is debatable, but no right-minded CEO would pass an opportunity to try and screw over all others while still increasing per-sale profit.

[palsch]

While 180nm is 1999 technology, that doesn't mean this isn't astoundingly useful.

The big change here is scale of production. Using old chip designs and scales today is pointless because they don't actually get cheaper or easier to produce. The machines used to make them may be slightly cheaper to buy second hand, but the fabrication process doesn't change so much between 180nm and the 22nm architecture being sold in top line processors today that you are making any real savings producing the old chips.

Being able to churn out even outdated chips at a far higher rate on a larger scale suddenly makes such older designs worth looking at again. You can do a lot with a 1999 era CPU if you have one lying around. If suddenly you can buy such CPUs for pennies it opens up whole new options for mass computation.

I'll try to dig them up if people are interested, but there have been speculative articles in the past about what could be done with such technology. One comparison was that, if certain predictions on price and scale could be met, you could literally carpet London in such chips (with relevant sensors) for the price of one year's chewing gum removal budget. The possibilities of computation on that scale are pretty incredible.

[Lagslayer]

Chips WILL be cheaper if this goes out, because competition. If only one corporation halve its chips price, every other will be forced to do the same or perish.
How cheaper it will get is debatable, but no right-minded CEO would pass an opportunity to try and screw over all others while still increasing per-sale profit.

In the states, setting prices too much lower than the competition could be considered illegal.

[MonkeyHead]

Which is totally absurd, considering the USA's devotion to free market economics.

[palsch]

In the states, setting prices too much lower than the competition could be considered illegal.

Read the link;

... because the antitrust laws are ultimately intended to benefit consumers, and discounting results in at least short-term net benefit to consumers, the U.S. Supreme Court has set high hurdles to antitrust claims based on a predatory pricing theory. The Court requires plaintiffs to show a likelihood that the pricing practices will affect not only rivals but also competition in the market as a whole, in order to establish that there is a substantial probability of success of the attempt to monopolize. If there is a likelihood that market entrants will prevent the predator from recouping its investment through supra competitive pricing, then there is no probability of success and the antitrust claim would fail. In addition, the Court established that for prices to be predatory, they must be below the seller's cost.

TL:DR; it's only illegal if you are selling below cost in a manner that will destroy the possibility of competition in the market so as to create a monopoly, at which time they will recoup the losses involved in creating that monopoly.

The most blatant attempts at such predatory pricing and monopoly building (Amazon, Walmart, Microsoft) haven't been shut down, so there is no reason to believe these laws have any teeth at all.

[Pnx]

Which is totally absurd, considering the USA's devotion to free market economics.

The USA has actually pretty much always been a mixed market economy. The, "We are a free market nation" stuff seems to have just been invented because of communism, and has never actually been true (except under certain circumstances when people have wanted it to be true).

[Sheb]

Paywalls cause problems beyond research. My grandfather has one of those nasty degenerative disease for which no effective treatment is available. It's so bad that there is actually no solid evidence that the current treatment do any good at all. Luckily I was able to access that info thanks to my uni, but some other papers I wanted (like a review of the genetic causes of that disease) are behind paywalls. I'd like to know those things.