Slashdot Mirror

The "space is just too big" argument doesn't work. First, there are no physics barriers to visiting other stars, purely engineering ones. Second, many stars are relatively close together. If you have a cluster of stars which are at most a light year away from each other and with many on the order of light months, the idea that one couldn't go from one to the other is the height of arrogant assumptions that technology isn't going to improve. Third, many of the signs of a lack of civilizations are far stronger than not just meeting them. We see no attempts by anyone to apparently communicate with other civilizations We also see no signs of any sort of megastructures like Ring Worlds and Dyson Spheres. See https://home.fnal.gov/~carrigan/infrared_astronomy/Fermilab_search.htm. But if spreading out isn't possible, then the incentive to make large systems in one's own star system to make efficient use of the resources there goes up massively.

Yes, I get your point.
- Parent poster points about rainbow table (tables that point hashes back to strings that can generate the same hash).
- You point that a well designed (=non borked design) hashing function should give two different hash for two dissimilar short passwords. Thus you would need a giant rainbow table that gives a password for *every single possible 160bit hash* (that's ~10^48 entries, i.e.: within an order or two from the number of atoms on earth). Fat chance.

BUT!
Even if the hash->password direction is *hard*.
password->hash direction is easy.

All the algorithm you mention (MD5, SHA1, SHA2 and let's throw SHA3/KECCAK in the mix too) are all extremely *fast hasing functions* (They are ultra fast, and have very low ressource requirement by design).
Meaning you can take a GPU running a special compute shader/OpenCL/Cuda code that can process millions of them in a second.
So you could scan through ALL the common password (based on frequent leaked passwords and/or on frequent paterns, etc. and their substitutions) within a reasonable time until you find a match.
As the summary points out, we humans are bad at picking-up password, we definitely use less than 2^ ${whatever bits used by current popular hash} different passwords.
Even if you use salt (so your hash doesn't match any other precedent hash in any rainbow table), and even if you use the latest *hashing* function (SHA3 - well okay, it's a sponge function, but basically works the same), it's definitely within the reach of a reasonable budget to loan GPU compute time on the cloud and brute force the passwords.

So if a database containing SHA{n}-hashed (and optionally salted) passwords get leaked, you can consider that all except the most unusual passwords can be brute-forced.

So in short DO NOT USE HASHES. USE KEY DERIVATION FUNCTIONS.

Things like bcrypt, scrypt or the current competition winner argon2, are on purpose designed to be slow and resource intensive.
(By iterating multiple rounds, by require significant memory, etc.)
For you, it doesn't change much if loging in take now a third of a second - you only log once, after all, it won't kill you to wait for 300ms just once at the beginning of your session.
But for potential brute-forcers, not being able to quickly go through million of tests is suddenly a huge blocker.

So in short :
do NOT use SHA2 for your password database.
use bcrypt/scrypt/argon2 instead.

First, a complete lack of evidence on a large scale of anything we'd expect to see. We have some pretty concrete ideas about construction of megastructures, such as Dyson spheres, the more plausible Dyson swarms, stellar engines (where the Class A version https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_engine#Class_A_.28Shkadov_thruster.29 is essentially doable if one has enough material and doesn't require any exotically strong materials or the like), and many more. But we don't see any signs of any of those. And most of those will *last* for very long times once constructed. And we have searched for them both here http://home.fnal.gov/~carrigan/infrared_astronomy/Fermilab_search.htm and in other galaxies. In a similar context, we've looked for signs of K3 civilizations in about 100,000 galaxies and found essentially no signs of them https://arxiv.org/abs/1504.03418.

The second problem is that if a species does survive even a relatively small amount of time, it should be able to spread throughout a galaxy. Yes, galaxies are really big, but the space is not as big as the time available. For example the Milky Way is about 100,000 light years across. That means that if a species starts on one end and travels spreading throughout planets at around 1% of light speed (which certainly looks doable) then it takes around a 10 million years for them to spread throughout. That's a tiny amount of time. But we don't see any signs of anything like that.

So there really does seem to be some sort of Great Filter or series of Filters, and the question is whether it is early (e.g. life is hard to arise or intelligence arises rarely) or late (civilizations wipe themselves out). And if it is the second, then we need to figure out what is going on since we don't get a do-over.

Honest question, why do you think we should be able to see megastructures even if they do exist? We can barely see galaxies and there's no way a megastructure is going to be the size of a galaxy! Additionally, lets say there's a megastructure the size of a solar system. Why would we be able to see it exactly? Are they going to cover the thing with lights and make it glow brighter than a star?

We can easily see galaxies, I'm not sure where you get the idea that that is tough. Megastructures change the resulting light curve of stars, making them dimmer (and if one is using it to harvest energy at all) redder. We know pretty well what they would look like. There's been a lot of thinking about this. See e.g. http://home.fnal.gov/~carrigan/infrared_astronomy/Fermilab_search.htm. Moreover, if a large fraction of the stars (say around 1%) of the stars in a galaxy have substantial megastructures, then the infrared signature of the galaxy as a whole will change. This is how they tried to look for K3 civilizations in the link I gave above that looked at 100,000 galaxies.

Remember, that's what they'd have to make it visible. Planets are only visible because they block the light from stars. They show up as absence of light, we don't actually see them.

Right, planets are much harder to detect than Dyson swarms because if they aren't in the way, they are very hard to see. But if you for example took something even the size of Mercury and broke it up in an orbit about where Mercury is now, it would be very noticeable from many parsecs away- we could spot that sort of thing out to at least 10,000 parsecs and probably farther if one had the highest quality instruments available.

As for radio waves, how do you know we don't see them. Remember, seeing them isn't enough, we'd also need to recognize them. I'd be very surprised if a far off civilization received our TV broadcasts and had any idea they were artificial and what the hell to do with them.

The for radio waves is actually even more severe than that, because of spread spectrum techniques https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spread_spectrum which would make it even harder to recognize that a broadcast was artificial, although classical broadcasting techniques would be very easy to notice. But yes, radios are one of the harder things since they'd very likely require some sort of deliberate beacon. As I said, the primary issue by far is the lack of large scale structures.

The Fermi Paradox is really pseudoscience. There are many big problems with it.

I'm not sure what you mean by this and your following statements. Your primary point seems to be that intelligent life might be less likely than we think. But that's not a criticism of the Fermi paradox but a possible resolution of it. Your point about signal detection is certainly correct if that were our only way of detecting civilizations. In particular, we see no ring worlds, or Dyson spheres or other large scale constructions despite systematic searches http://home.fnal.gov/~carrigan/infrared_astronomy/Fermilab_search.htm. We don't in general see any signs of large scale energy use. We've looked at around 100,000 galaxies and found zero full-scale galactic civilizations. See http://phys.org/news/2015-04-advanced-civilizations-earth-obvious-galaxies.html. The universe looks natural. And yes, there are many possible explanations for this, but we need to ask how likely they are. If there is a Great Filter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter then it doesn't go away simply because we've found a semiplausible alternate explanation.

Yeah. It's not a science ghetto just yet. Still a cool place to visit too. http://www.fnal.gov/

In these 10 years since launch, they could have precomputed every possible picture, hash them, and then the probe could have simply sent the hashes instead of the full size pictures.

Just for fun, let's see what it would take for them to pull this off. The LORRI image sensor is 1024x1024 pixels with 12 bits per pixel.

So the number of distinct images divided by the timespan available gives 2^(12*20) / (10 years) = about 5.6 * 10^63 hashes per second.

Let's say you had a CPU capable of computing one such image hash per nanosecond (very optimistic), you'd need 2^(12*20) / (10 years) / (1 nanosecond) = about 5.6 * 10^54 CPUs to pull this off.

For comparison that's an order of magnitude or so more than the number of nucleons in our earth.

If those CPUs consumed 50W of power computing these hashes (again very optimistic), the entire project would consume 2^(12*20) / (1 nanosecond) * (50 watt) = 8.8 * 10^64 joules.

For reference that's two orders of magnitude more than the total mass-energy (including dark matter) of the Virgo supercluster, the supercluster which contains our Milky Way galaxy.

Unless I messed up the calculations that is...

I absolutely agree with you: the submitter has no clue about statistics. This type of problem has been solved use simple Bayesian statistics where you calculate the probability distribution function for the fraction of people agreeing with X. This gives you all the information you need to calculate the probability that two datasets are consistent. We use this in particle physics for efficiency calculations all the time. There is even a detailed write up here.

Actually, the good news is that the experiment is definitely happening! They moved the ring to Fermilab last year and are busy setting it up to run. You can read more about it here: Muon g-2 at Fermilab. They even have a Facebook page.

Higgs Boson was a race and if the Feds had funded Fermilab's tevatron accelerator a bit more you may have seen it discover Higgs Boson before the LHC.

That is a very very big if. The Tevatron operated at about 1 TeV which meant that a heavy Higgs would not be created at all. A lighter Higgs would decay into bottom quark pairs which would be swamped by background noise. The Tevatron certainly helped limiting the possible phase space where the Higgs might be found but it is not very likely that it would have found it.

So who exactly are you saying is anti-science? I'm just anti-international cooperation especially where it really isn't in any nation's best interest. ITER has laudable goals but look at the players and ask yourselves if it will seriously be successful. Nope, it'll be a run into the ground project that won't produce anything.

Higgs Boson was a race and if the Feds had funded Fermilab's tevatron accelerator a bit more you may have seen it discover Higgs Boson before the LHC.

Colin Williams of D-wave spoke at Fermilab. His presentation was recorded http://vmsstreamer1.fnal.gov/L....

To be accurate, the search in Gran Sasso is a search for WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles), which are one microphysical explanation for dark matter. I personally do not like the common conflation of dark matter (for which there is abundant evidence) with WIMPs (for which there is no evidence at all).

A lot of the interest in WIMPs comes from particle physics, due to the "WIMP miracle" (that hypothetical particles at the electro-weak scale, i.e., ~ 100 GeV, apparently have the right mass to explain dark matter) and the hypothesized connection between WIMPs and supersymmetry (i.e., that the WIMP could be a supersymmetric neutralino). After much experimental work, the WIMP miracle is almost dead experimentally, and the supposed connection to supersymmetry is not doing so well either.

However (not that you would know from reading most articles on the subject), there are a number of other viable theories for dark matter. These include axions, primordial black holes (maybe), and macroscopic quark nuggets, which would have important practical implications should they be detected.

To be accurate, the search in Gran Sasso is a search for WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles), which are one microphysical explanation for dark matter. I personally do not like the common conflation of dark matter (for which there is abundant evidence) with WIMPs (for which there is no evidence at all).

A lot of the interest in WIMPs comes from particle physics, due to the "WIMP miracle" (that hypothetical particles at the electro-weak scale, i.e., ~ 100 GeV, apparently have the right mass to explain dark matter) and the hypothesized connection between WIMPs and supersymmetry (i.e., that the WIMP could be a supersymmetric neutralino). After much experimental work, the WIMP miracle is almost dead experimentally, and the supposed connection to supersymmetry is not doing so well either.

However (not that you would know from reading most articles on the subject), there are a number of other viable theories for dark matter. These include axions, primordial black holes (maybe), and macroscopic quark nuggets, which would have important practical implications should they be detected.

mod up.

From the GP, "why we don't see any signs of civilizations other than our own, not just no radio transmissions but no Dyson spheres (and yes, we've looked http://home.fnal.gov/~carrigan/infrared_astronomy/Fermilab_search.htm [fnal.gov], stellar uplifting, ringworlds"

What would you expect to see? Realistically? We've been listening for about 50 years (less, on a semi-professional basis). That's fifty years. Civilsation on Earth has been going about 5000 or so (very roughly, I'm not in the mood for pointless arguments about what constitutes "civilisation" when we compare Neolithic with Mesolithic, thanks). Mankind has been around for very roughly 100,000. 100,000 years is *nothing*, and yet for almost all of that time we've been totally invisible. It's only in the last 100 years that we've been blasting radio waves out to the cosmos. For the last decade or so, much of that has been encrypted and therefore looks like noise. It may not look like *random* noise, but it looks like noise. How do you expect an alien race, less than ten light years away, to possibly decrypt communications sent in a language they don't speak, through a character set they don't use, through mappings that make no sense to their computers, passed through encryption they don't have a handle on? They can't, it's a foolish belief. Even without encryption, modern digital transmission is refined enough that it's unlikely an alien race would be able to rapidly decode our transmissions, if at all.

So if you accept this line of argument, we've basically transmitted approximately a century's worth of information out to the heavens, in a very thin shell of expanding radiation. That radiation grows horrifically weak very quickly and would be hard to pick up over the Sun's background noise. What we're expecting, if an alien race is to even know of our existence, is that they are at the exact point in their development that they can somehow pick out our unencrypted transmissions above the Sun's natural noise, and then somehow decode those transmissions and make sense of them. Most of those transmissions are crappy 1970s sitcoms, or endless radio adverts. Fortunately no-one will know this, because it relies on there being a civilisation extraordinarily local to us, at exactly the same level of development as us, and actually listening to the outside world. Those chances are excruciatingly poor.

That goes the other way round.

For the rest, Dyson spheres? A myth. Freeman Dyson is close to a legend, but Dyson spheres are not a realitic proposition - not for us, and not for anyone.

Ringworlds? Lol.

I don't even know what is meant by "Stellar uplifting". If it involves doing anything to do with manipulating the Sun... yeah, you go ahead, I'll do something less likely to kill me.

This is pretty scary. One of the major unsolved problems right now is the Fermi problem- why we don't see any signs of civilizations other than our own, not just no radio transmissions but no Dyson spheres (and yes, we've looked http://home.fnal.gov/~carrigan/infrared_astronomy/Fermilab_search.htm, stellar uplifting, ringworlds or the like. Whatever is blocking this is the so-called Great Filter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter. Now, some of the Filter could be in our past. It may be tough for life to arise or for multicellular life to arise, etc. However, the more disturbing possibility is that it exists in our future: maybe civilizations before they can spread out manage to wipe themselves out with their technologies, such as through nuclear war, bad nanotech, engineered bioweapons, resource depletion, environmental damage, or something we haven't even thought about before.

Over the last few years, more and more evidence has suggested that a lot of the obvious filtration events in the past aren't serious filters. For example, we've found that planets are common. This is not only an example of more such evidence, but it suggests that if life got started it would have had billions years more to evolve, meaning that evolutionarily based filters will be substantially less effective. Worse, it undermines one of the easier ways to try and get around a filter, to suggest that the conditions for complex life didn't arise until recently. There are serious problems with that idea already (especially the fact that life on Earth spent hundreds of millions of years in near stasis), and this makes those problems even more severe. If this checks out, it will be strong evidence that a substantial portion of the filter is in the future. If so, it is likely that the Filter is something that is going to happen to us within the next few hundred years, since it gets harder to wipe out a civilization once they spread beyond their initial planet, and most obvious things that would do so are also more noticeable.

I used to work on data taking for the CMS detector at the LHC. We were using Storagetek tape silos [http://computing.fnal.gov/cdtracks/2009/january/images/robot.jpg] for long-term storage of data at Tier1.

Tape allows for cheaper storage and large capacities, but you're then fighting contention issues (there are only so many robotic arms and tape drives for your tape library) as well as having data on tapes go bad without knowing it. When data is on disk, I can at least verify it immediately. Bit rot is definitely alive and well on tape.

That makes the case for a tape cartridge the size of a station wagon (or a 747).

I used to work on data taking for the CMS detector at the LHC. We were using Storagetek tape silos [http://computing.fnal.gov/cdtracks/2009/january/images/robot.jpg] for long-term storage of data at Tier1.

Tape allows for cheaper storage and large capacities, but you're then fighting contention issues (there are only so many robotic arms and tape drives for your tape library) as well as having data on tapes go bad without knowing it. When data is on disk, I can at least verify it immediately. Bit rot is definitely alive and well on tape.

http://lss.fnal.gov/archive/2013/conf/fermilab-conf-13-035-cd.pdf

They're using M2070 (Fermi) GPUs. Kepler would perform even better, the latest one has > 6GB of memory.

Here is a URL to a presentation on the issue of GPU-Based Network Monitoring.

BTW, with PF_RING and a DMA-enabled NIC driver (PF_RING DNA), one should have no problems capturing 10 Gbps on a single CPU modern server. I can capture/playback 4.5 Gbps no problem using this with four 10kRPM HDDs - 8 drives should give you 10 Gbps rate capture/playback.

On Fermilab: "It has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to help make it worth defending."

Ah, Los Alamos. Once it had more great scientists in one place than anywhere else in the world. There was a tradition in the early days that the head of Los Alamos must have a Nobel Prize. That ended in the 1980s when Ronald Reagan put a lawyer in charge.

The US has a strange approach to "national laboratories". The original ones (Los Alamos, Lawerence Livermore, Sandia, Oak Ridge, Savannah River, etc.) were originally all Atomic Energy Commission operations. The Department of Energy got the AEC operations when it was formed. So the US still has a huge nuclear weapons R&D operation, despite the fact that the US hasn't built a new nuclear weapon in decades.

This project sounds more like an excuse for funding basic research than a component needed in a nuclear weapon. EMP shielding isn't that hard. This MEMS device doesn't seem to be a likely choice for the firing switch in a nuclear weapon. Nuclear weapons require a symmetrical implosion squeeze, which is initiated with multiple detonators, all of which have to go off at the same time within 1ns or so. This is done with a setup like a photoflash, but more powerful - a capacitor bank is charged up, and then dumped into thin wire detonators when the discharge switch closes. It's a few KV at a few thousand amps for a nanosecond or so. That discharge switch is what the article probably refers to.

The classic device for that is a krytron. Although using a gas-filled tube is kind of retro, it works. It's probably possible to build some MOSFET device to replace krytrons, as this work at SLAC indicates. But a microscopic MEMS device? Too tiny to handle the current.

We usually prefer airplanes to buses (lots cheaper, given the time value of money.....)

The cost of running the experiment again at Brookhaven (which had been our initial idea) would be significantly higher than moving it to Fermilab, because of the cost of required accelerator upgrades at Brookhaven. Fermilab has protons to spare, and the experiment fits into the larger muon program at the Lab. http://www.fnal.gov/pub/science/experiments/intensity/

If there was life there that escaped the current destruction it had to have left millions (or billions) of years ago (since the star has been a white dwarf for a long time and has been being obnoxious to its inner planets for a long time also). That means they would have likely colonized near space (not at all limited to our own solar system). Keep in mind that even the Voyager probes, which aren't even designed to go to other stars will reach nearest stars on the order of 100,000 years. And systems using ion drives and deliberately timed gravity assists could put that in the range of 30,000 years for something to spread out, or a few hundred with nuclear drives of the right type. See for example the summary here http://www.universetoday.com/15403/how-long-would-it-take-to-travel-to-the-nearest-star/.But of course we see no sign of anyone from a nearby system doing much.

Moreover, if they've had millions of years to spread out, that means that projects like Dyson spheres and ring worlds are obvious things to do. Systematic searches have been done and we're very certain we don't see any Dyson spheres in 300 parsecs (about 1000 light years) http://home.fnal.gov/~carrigan/infrared_astronomy/Fermilab_search.htm. While we can't be as certain, near ring worlds would likely have been noticed by Kepler. Other forms of engineering projects on that scale would be noticed, especially because this is in our back yard. This makes it unlikely.

In this case, the extremely close nature of the system, and the system's current state means that we can make with a high confidence much higher than just "we saw nothing."

Who says we'd even notice them with a 150 year delay between their actions and our ability to perceive them?

I'm not sure what you mean by this. The presence of a delay doesn't interfere with noticing things. It isn't like it is 1 second goes by, wait a 150 years, and then another 1 second goes by. There's just a fixed 150 year delay (just as there's an 8 minute delay from the sun).

Putting some rough numbers on this:
At lower energies, neutrino cross sections scale roughly proportional to energy with sigma/E ~ 10^-38 cm^2 / GeV. At high energy, the cross section at 10^15 eV is around 10^-33 cm^2. Thus, compared to an ~1MeV neutrino with a cross section on the order of 10^-41 cm^2, the PeV neutrino has ~10^8 greater cross section. You are about 10^-7 the thickness of the earth. Thus, you are roughly 10x more likely to be hit by a PeV neutrino passing through than the earth is to be hit by an MeV neutrino passing through (a rather good chance of being missed in either case).

The energy of the tevatron collider at Fermilab is much lower than at CERN, making it very difficult if not impossible to observe the Higgs or measure its properties there. The collider has been shut down for more than a year anyhow as they transition to other physics experiments. http://www.fnal.gov/pub/tevatron/

It's only arrogance if you're wrong. If you are correct, it's knowledge. If you're wrong, it's arrogance. Sadly, many employers do not understand this little bit of wisdom. [Jane Q. Public, 2012-10-25]

Jane, are you sure you want to use that criterion? Let's reminisce...

How do they know they were the same neutrinos they launched out? [Dr Max]

... they know the beginning ratio and ending ratio of the different types. If they are not the same, then some must have flipped (or rotated, or whatever language the neutrino guys use these days). [global_diffusion]

Not necessarily. They could be different neutrinos, caused by atoms in the way absorbing some neutrinos and emitting others. I am not sure but I suspect that is what GP [DrMax] was getting at. Rather than evidence of neutrinos actually changing from one type to another, it seems just as likely (more likely?) that intervening matter performed a conversion. Just as, say, a crystal or a gas can "change" a laser's color by absorbing photons and then emitting others of a different frequency, maybe matter is absorbing these neutrinos and emitting others with different properties. [Jane Q. Public, 2011-06-17]

Nonlinear crystals can change a laser's color by absorbing photons and then emitting others of a different frequency because photons are mediators of the electromagnetic force, so they interact with comparatively large (~10^(-10) m) electron clouds. But neutrinos only interact via gravity (irrelevant here) and the weak force which has a comparable range of ~10^(-18) m. Since the cross section determines how likely interactions are, neutrinos are roughly ten thousand trillion times less likely to interact with matter than photons. This is just an approximation, but experiments yield similarly tiny cross sections.

If neutrinos have to interact with intervening matter before hitting the detector, an extra interaction is involved. That's why Chris Burke pointed out that detecting neutrino flavor change due to an interaction with intervening matter would depend on the square of the interaction probability. Detection in the conventional flavor oscillation theory just depends on the interaction probability because it only involves a single interaction, so it's trillions of times more likely to explain the observed electron neutrino events.

In fact, that T2K paper acknowledged a much bigger source of noise on page 8: the muon neutrino beam was slightly contaminated by electron neutrinos. This contamination doesn't invalidate their results because it only explains ~1.5 out of 6 observed electron neutrino events.

Anyway, the processes that change a laser's color are given names like "second-harmonic generation" (where a crystal combines two photons into one, commonly used in green laser pointers) and

Actually there is still neutrino production at Fermilab. The Tevatron main ring was shut down but the Main Injector is still operating for the NOvA project, a long-baseline neutrino experiment.

http://www-nova.fnal.gov/how-nova-works.html

Seems to be about 90 seconds to 3 minutes max (100 seconds for LTO4).
http://www.smallersystems.com/blog/2011/06/tape-does-anyone-care-about-tape-anymore/
http://www-ccf.fnal.gov/UserPerformanceGuidlines.html
http://www.for-a.com/products/ltr100hs/professional_server_p.html

http://www.fnal.gov/pub/presspass/press_releases/2012/Higgs-Tevatron-20120702.html

Why don't they call a 'radiation detector' by its name? It's a Geiger Counter. Way to make a name for something fall out of common usage...

There is not much description in the article, but I don't think it is a Geiger tube, as that requires high voltages and is fairly bulky. This is probably some sort of silicon detector.

So what? We already know those numbers are wrong and they were wild guesses at the time they were made.

The problem is that every single one of those numbers where we've been able to confirm it was wrong moves in one direction, and not the direction of making intelligent life less common.

Our telescopes aren't that good. A Dyson sphere, especially a red-shifted one is going to be practically invisible in most of the spectrum we observe at.

In order to be in equilibrium a Dyson sphere needs to be putting out as much energy as the star itself would, but red-shifted. We should be able to detect that. There's in fact a project specifically to search for them http://home.fnal.gov/~carrigan/infrared_astronomy/Fermilab_search.htm. Further discussion here- http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2008/12/02/no-dyson-spheres-found-yet/. The project in question by 2010 had searched systematically for Dyson spheres or partial Dyson spheres within 300 parsecs (around 1000 light years), primarily using data from IRAS which is almost 20 years old. Other projects have tried to look further out. Spitzer time isn't being directly devoted to this, but it is sensitive enough that if there were any Dyson spheres that went across its field of view out to the edge of our galaxy they likely would have been noticed, and similar remarks are potentially true for nearby galaxies.

Not sure why this should be surprising. Someone has to be first and it may well be us.

Sure we could be first, and someone has to be. But that's not likely, since we've arrived on the scene very late as far as we can tell.

Non-standard fonts are uploaded with the job. Many drivers upload all fonts anyway, and I'm fine with that. The applications that push too much of their own data structures through were written by people who didn't bother reading the green book (Postscript Lanugage Program Design). Ch. 5.3 is quite on topic, but the entire book is pretty much required reading if you want to generate PostScript within an application. Those applications do not represent what's wrong with Postscript, but merely what was wrong with the PS-spitting code.

Care to explain this then? That was from 1997 and was not the last SGI purchased for physics use on D0 which was one of the two major experiments on the Tevatron and so highly relevant to a topic on Tevatron computing. I'd hazard a guess that the machines you refer to were primarily for non-Tevatron users.

They even have an online store.

When you are distracted while driving you are not using your full attention to focus on the task at hand, which is guiding about a ton or so at high speed where merely the errant twitch can kill or permanently injure someone.

There are many, many studies in cognitive science that have shown that any distraction while driving reduces your ability to react, your reaction time, and the quality of your judgement. Your brain has a finite amount of resources and you are expending them on paying attention to the phone. In any case, cell phones are currently one of the most avoidable distractions out there. It stands to reason they'd be the first targeted for "banning."

Turn your phone off while driving. It could save a life.

mangu: "if there's an effect here, it should probably be related to neutrinos-through-matter vs neutrinos-through-vacuum"

Cerenkov radiation shows ordinary matter can travel faster than light in a non-vacuum. This would be different but not that different.

http://lbne.fnal.gov/neutrino-beam.shtml indicates another experiment is possibly coming soon

This also would imply that the gravitational radius of a black hole is smaller for a neutrino than for light, so it might imply that black holes could evaporate a bit quicker than previous estimates.

Unfortunately for us, replicating the experiment with a second team in a second location entirely from scratch will be extremely expensive, given that this CERN location used for the experiment is unique.

There are other long-baseline neutrino experiments out there, such as MINOS.

Just looking at the old data will prove nothing from the old MINOS experiment because it suggests that CERN did it right with the OPERA experiment. The problem before is the margin of error on the MINOS test is far too high causing the measured speed to be faster then the speed of light with a margin of error overlapping the speed of light. They need to do a slight upgrade and redo the tests to get the Margin of Error down.

Particle Physics: Benefits to Society

Off topic: Still feel little off remembering the day my logo was not selected for Fermi Linux ... http://computing.fnal.gov/unix-users/Fermi_Linux_Logo_Contest_Winners.html

This is a message of Connie Sieh, who originated Feimi Linux and Scientific Linux (FNAL)
http://listserv.fnal.gov/scripts/wa.exe?A2=ind1108&L=scientific-linux-users&T=0&P=33214
Scientific Linux is an eternal distribution.

http://listserv.fnal.gov/scripts/wa.exe?A2=ind1108&L=scientific-linux-users&T=0&P=30820

Hi,
I have loved all the years that I have been a developer and architect for Scientific Linux, but it is time for me to move on. I have accepted a job offer from Red Hat to work on their new openshift project. ( https://www.redhat.com/openshift/ )
My last day working for Fermilab, and on the Scientific Linux project will be September 2, 2011.

Thank you to everyone who has encouraged, thanked, and helped me over the past 8 years that I have worked on Scientific Linux. I have said it before, and I'll say it now, The Scientific Linux community is one of the best communities there is.

Troy

If you'd prefer a link to the actual release instead ofconceivablytech's take on it:

http://www.fnal.gov/pub/presspass/press_releases/2011/CDF-Xi-sub-b-observation-20110720.html

does anyone have the arXiv link to the actual paper, not the PR fluff?

I'm way behind on this discussion but it looks like people are misinterpreting this report. The CDF experiment at Fermilab had reported last April on a possible observation of a new particle. They say that it is *not* a Higgs candidate, but could be something else (even more startling than a Higgs, such as a supersymmetric particle). Something with a mass of about 140 MeV/c^2 appears to be decaying into W and two quarks. This report is here: http://www.fnal.gov/pub/today/archive_2011/today11-04-07.html

TFA is a report from the D0 experiment that they do not see this same thing. They should have been able to see it if it were real, but they did not. If D0 had also seen the same kind of signal that CDF did, then things would really get exciting! But for now I guess one could say that results are inconclusive on whether or not there is new physics here.

1) This is (probably) not about the Higgs at all.
2) This is not (yet) about CERN/LHC. D0 and CDF are the two collider experiments sitting on Fermilab's main ring, and they share a healthy kind of rivalry. The LHC at CERN hosts six experiments: http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/lhc/LHCExperiments-en.html . The beams at these accelerators are designed to intersect (collide) at certain points around which various impressive arrays of detectors are built. Hence we have multiple experiments with independent data sets and their own unique strengths and systematics running in parallel at the same lab.

Disclaimer: I'm not really current on any of this but I can at least point out that all this discussion is off-topic and even the /. post title, "Data Review Brings Major Setback In Higgs Boson Hunt", is completely off the mark.

This comment should be emphasized. The summary and title are way off the mark.
1. This was not a data "review," but rather an entirely new analysis. Fermilab has two experiments that study proton-antiproton collisions, named CDF and D0. CDF published the original paper, and then D0 tried to verify their claims. Reproducibility of results is a tenet of science; having multiple ~independent experiments at Fermilab allows results from one experiment to be verified at another. This story demonstrates exactly why we need independent verification to be confident in a result.
2. This is not a setback. The CDF bump was unexpected and quite exciting, but not vital to the progress or science, nor anybody's daily business in the particle physics world.
3. This never had anything to do with the Higgs. Generally, people have not been regarding the CDF bump as a possible Higgs signal, but rather an indication of something new.

See D0's paper. And...let's stay away from FoxNews for science writing.

SL will have 5.6, 6.0, and 6.1 and CentOS. SL 5.6 beta

Kind of hard to use CentOS 6.0 when it does not exist. But I guess you are right since there are no improvements in 6.0 that you need or want then there must not be any thing 6.0 that I need or want.

It is being duplicated there: DM-Ice

...to the thesis which is the basis for the paper that is cited by the newspaper that mentions...

It shall henceforth be known as the pleaseExtendOurFunding-ion.

No it's far too late for something that petty, that day has already passed. The Tevatron collider run will not be extended:

"Unfortunately, the current budgetary climate is very challenging and additional funding has not been identified. Therefore, based in part of the P5 recommendation, operation of the Tevatron will end in FY 2011, as originally scheduled." - W. F. Brinkman; Directior, Office of Science, U.S. Department of Energy

Fiscal year 2011 ends September 30, 2011. There is not yet a decommissioning plan.