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Here are some organizations that have been working to provide alternatives to authors and libraries, the rapid success of PLOS: Biology has certainly demonstrated that the traditional publishing models can be changed

SPARC - Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition Group affiliated with the American Research Libraries organization
http://www.arl.org/sparc/

Highwire Press A major non-profit publishing initiative linked to Stanford University
http://highwire.stanford.edu/

Create Change Organization working to inform authors/researchers about their options in publishing
http://www.createchange.org/

You might want to note that the footnote at the end of the letter indicates that it isn't actually an open letter. :)

He made it public back in 2003:

http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/news03.html

Few months ago I read Donald Knuth's open letter to publisher on the exact same topic - increase in price.
The letter is dated 2003, but I believe is it as actual today as it was back then.

the link to this comprehensive letter is:
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/joalet.pdf

if you find it tl;dr, I can only suggest to read at least first 2 pages to get the insight on what he wanted to share with other people...

I think you have failed to understand the study which the article alleges to explain. This is not entirely your fault. The author of the article has crammed in a bunch of irrelevant and somewhat misleading anecdotes in an attempt to add human interest. (This is an often-misused journalistic technique.)

I urge you to read this press release about the study: "Media multitaskers pay mental price, Stanford study shows". It is rather drier but explains the actual methods and findings much more clearly.

The study naturally has its limitations, so one ought not to draw inappropriate conclusions from it. Nevertheless, it is an interesting result and has convinced me that some common practices can de-train a person's capacity for focus without their realizing it.

After you read the press release, you may want to try out the Flash game which is linked from the NYT article's page. You can compare your own performance to the 'high' and 'low' multitaskers' results.

We used a Stanford project called Clack in my Networking and Internet Protocols class. We could setup virtual networks and visualize traffic. The meat was implementing a virtual router in software and using that to route traffic in the virtual network.

Clack Homepage:
http://yuba.stanford.edu/vns/clack/

Part of the Virtual Network System
http://yuba.stanford.edu/vns/

We used a Stanford project called Clack in my Networking and Internet Protocols class. We could setup virtual networks and visualize traffic. The meat was implementing a virtual router in software and using that to route traffic in the virtual network.

Clack Homepage:
http://yuba.stanford.edu/vns/clack/

Part of the Virtual Network System
http://yuba.stanford.edu/vns/

I had a similar problem finding ways to teach basic networking such as addresses and masks and routing to non-computing students. Having looked into NS2 and similar things and finding them powerful but way too complicated (for the student's level), I settled on Clack:

Clack Graphical Router Project

It's written in Java, graphical and easy to use and does quite well at showing many of the important things. You can also extend it yourself if necessary (open source).

The STL definitely can make your code run faster. For instance, the standard way to sort an array in C is with quicksort(), which requires a function pointer argument. This function is called for each comparison.

In C++, with the STL, you would use the sort() algorithm, which is inlined by the compiler. No function call. The resulting code can be an order of magnitude faster !

Read this report for some code and illustrations. The C++ code is easy to write and in their example still faster than a hand-designed sort routine.

Finally STL has little to do with OOP, but everything to do with *generic* programming.

Sorry, that source was biased. Let's try another:

http://www.2001principle.net/2005.htm (yes, it's a site about 2001. The article was revised by a MIT scientist)

Wiki stand by:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine-tuned_Universe

http://quake.stanford.edu/~bai/finetuning.pdf (pdf warning)

That should get you started. If nothing else, you can glean some search terms somewhere in there.

No, it's not an ancient belief. It's roughly 22 years old.

Yes, it is an ancient belief. It's roughly 2360 years old. Read Plato's Timaeus. Perhaps you're thinking of the term "intelligent design" which is roughly 21 years old. The concept is far older.

I not quite sure what you're suspicious of. If you need evidence that ID has been around in some form or another for thousands of years, it is readily available. Have a look through Plato's Timaeus. Just because the term was invented recently doesn't mean that the idea hasn't existed for quite a while.

I'm suspicious because they don't say specifically what they're going to teach about it. I'm guessing that the religious groups supporting this know more about it than is presented in the article. Without knowing more about what they're going to teach, I can't say whether it's a valid decision or not.

I not quite sure what you're suspicious of. If you need evidence that ID has been around in some form or another for thousands of years, it is readily available. Have a look through Plato's Timaeus. Just because the term was invented recently doesn't mean that the idea hasn't existed for quite a while.

Reciprocal altruism is a concept, introduced into evolutionary biology by Robert Trivers, which explains the evolution of cooperation as instances of mutually altruistic acts. The concept is close to the one of Tit for Tat known in game theory.

(Source, check the citations at the end for more authoritative sources.)

Kin selection, trait group selection, and reciprocity are all explanations for altruism in animals. Each theory has its limitations, so there are several of them to cover the wide variety of altruism seen in nature.

I think the problem lies in that I've basically only used the biological definition of altruism and not the philosophical one. Since the topic is about behavior (self-serving behavior no less), I underestimated the need to clarify that I wasn't discussing motivations.

Here is a decent primer into evolutionary altruism if you're interested. It doesn't go into trait group selection though.

If you're gonna open it up like that, Folding@Home would almost certainly take first place.

http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=osstats

AMD and nVidia's workstation cards are the same as their gaming cards, the only difference being that the workstation ones are certified to produce 100% accurate output. If a gaming card colours a pixel wrong every now and then it's no big deal and the player probably won't even notice. For CAD and other high end applications the cards have to be correct all the time.

Actually, someone at Stanford did some testing on this and found that it wasn't true. One of the sections claims that the professional boards had the same error rate as the consumer boards.

Here's one of my favorite essays on the subject.

TFA fails on basic mathematics. Let's take as given that there's 2117 cubic meters of water per capita per annum for each Chinese citizen.

The average person needs about 2 liters of water a day. Let's suppose they get all of that by drinking bottled water and soda from Coke's bottling plants. That amounts to less than 1 of those cubic meters per year.

Let's suppose the average person buys one new computer chip per week. Probably most people go weeks or months between purchases, but each device has many chips, so 1/week is about right. From this press release, it takes 10 gallons of water to make 1 computer chip. Oh gosh! That's two cubic meters per year!

To a rough approximation, all fresh water is used for farming. Water use for all other purposes is quite literally a drop in the bucket. Yes, wars have been fought over water, and they may be fought again in the future. But we're talking about agricultural irrigation here: everything else is negligible.

Now, in certain areas, water availability can be orders of magnitude less than the 2000 m^3/year average in the article, so water conservation there is a serious issue. But you don't grow crops in those areas ... and you don't build a chip fab plant there either.

I think you're definitely on the right track. A nitpick before moving on, philosophy existed prior to science. Philosophy still exists despite the emergence and evolution of science because science doesn't address everything.

Parent is completely right that science is a model that is logically consistent, given a certain set of premises. These premises are, for the most part, uncontested in their utility value. Although utility value says little about truth value. Take cause/effect reasoning, for example, a fundamental pillar in the scientific method. The problem of induction (summarized at Wikipedia and discussed at greater length in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) is a classic question arising from the early modern (16th/17th centuries) era of philosophy that called into question the logical validity of induction. The general philosophical consensus is that induction is a very useful tool of reason that works pretty well for us, but it's not logically valid in the sense that deduction is logically valid.

Science can't prove that induction is true, because science takes induction as one of its core premises. Using science to prove induction is just begging the question, assuming what is to be proven. Here, we get a clue as to what sorts of things science cannot "eff". Anything that the scientific method takes as a premise cannot ever be proven by science. It's simply a logical fallacy to try to do so.

This second premise that I want to talk about is probably the more poignant in this conversation. The scientific method assumes that every physical effect can be traced back to a physical cause. This stems from the fact that science is based on observation, and we can only observe the physical - a largely practical assumption. This may seem to be a given for many of you, and that's precisely the point. Causal closure of the physical is philosophically contentious (I'd like to link you to a quick and dirty explanation, but this topic is not easy to breach. The best link I can give you is probably this article on physicalism.). Now, let's try to focus on one thing at a time. Forget about all the religious hoopla and obviously false empirically verifiable claims that the bible (or whatever other religious text) makes. Let's just talk about the possibility of a non-physical god or deity. If a non-physical god existed that could create physical effects, science would not be able to explain or discover that god. As mentioned above, science is based on observation, and we can only observe the physical. We cannot observe anything non-physical, regardless of its existence. In this case, science is the wrong tool to discuss the potential existence of such an entity. Science simply cannot say anything about it. To assert the deity's non-existence would be logically fallacious (since the deity is non-physical and we have chosen to assume causal closure). To assert the deity's existence would not be scientifically valid.

It is here that religion, or perhaps more accurately philosophy, can step in to try to explain what's going on in the non-physical realm. Of course, such explanations won't be as exact as the explanations of physical phenomena given to us by science, but at least we haven't pre-supposed the non-existence of non-physical things in the aforementioned disciplines.

As an aside, I think that basic and fundamental philosophy of science should be studied by everyone who studies or works in the sciences. We have to recognize that as useful a tool as science is, it is not appropriate for every single job. There are some things that cannot be explained by science, because they are assumed by science. To try to explain such things is logically fallacious. Yet many men of science, who claim to be rational and logical, fail to see the fallacies they commit when they try to explain (or deny) things outs

I think you're definitely on the right track. A nitpick before moving on, philosophy existed prior to science. Philosophy still exists despite the emergence and evolution of science because science doesn't address everything.

Parent is completely right that science is a model that is logically consistent, given a certain set of premises. These premises are, for the most part, uncontested in their utility value. Although utility value says little about truth value. Take cause/effect reasoning, for example, a fundamental pillar in the scientific method. The problem of induction (summarized at Wikipedia and discussed at greater length in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) is a classic question arising from the early modern (16th/17th centuries) era of philosophy that called into question the logical validity of induction. The general philosophical consensus is that induction is a very useful tool of reason that works pretty well for us, but it's not logically valid in the sense that deduction is logically valid.

Science can't prove that induction is true, because science takes induction as one of its core premises. Using science to prove induction is just begging the question, assuming what is to be proven. Here, we get a clue as to what sorts of things science cannot "eff". Anything that the scientific method takes as a premise cannot ever be proven by science. It's simply a logical fallacy to try to do so.

This second premise that I want to talk about is probably the more poignant in this conversation. The scientific method assumes that every physical effect can be traced back to a physical cause. This stems from the fact that science is based on observation, and we can only observe the physical - a largely practical assumption. This may seem to be a given for many of you, and that's precisely the point. Causal closure of the physical is philosophically contentious (I'd like to link you to a quick and dirty explanation, but this topic is not easy to breach. The best link I can give you is probably this article on physicalism.). Now, let's try to focus on one thing at a time. Forget about all the religious hoopla and obviously false empirically verifiable claims that the bible (or whatever other religious text) makes. Let's just talk about the possibility of a non-physical god or deity. If a non-physical god existed that could create physical effects, science would not be able to explain or discover that god. As mentioned above, science is based on observation, and we can only observe the physical. We cannot observe anything non-physical, regardless of its existence. In this case, science is the wrong tool to discuss the potential existence of such an entity. Science simply cannot say anything about it. To assert the deity's non-existence would be logically fallacious (since the deity is non-physical and we have chosen to assume causal closure). To assert the deity's existence would not be scientifically valid.

It is here that religion, or perhaps more accurately philosophy, can step in to try to explain what's going on in the non-physical realm. Of course, such explanations won't be as exact as the explanations of physical phenomena given to us by science, but at least we haven't pre-supposed the non-existence of non-physical things in the aforementioned disciplines.

As an aside, I think that basic and fundamental philosophy of science should be studied by everyone who studies or works in the sciences. We have to recognize that as useful a tool as science is, it is not appropriate for every single job. There are some things that cannot be explained by science, because they are assumed by science. To try to explain such things is logically fallacious. Yet many men of science, who claim to be rational and logical, fail to see the fallacies they commit when they try to explain (or deny) things outs

http://codingbat.com/ -- free little online coding puzzles, just click and go (python and java)

http://code.google.com/edu/languages/google-python-class/ -- a complete basic python class, complete with pretty neat coding problems ready to go

http://nifty.stanford.edu/ -- tons of fun, medium sized coding projects

Disclaimer -- I had a part in creating all of these.

Rationalism can be a school of philosophical thought opposed to empiricism.

Perhaps more illustratively, in Jerry Pournelle's chart, rationalism "refers to the extent which a political philosophy is compatible with the idea that social problems can be solved by use of reason."

the whole point is that there is no defined classical state the system is in.

Are you sure about that?

Heck, while I'm at it, I found some studies for you. Here's a reference to a study that found exercise even keeps your telomeres in your cells longer. This one at Stanford that lasted 20 years found that running specifically helps keep you healthy, they said, "Elderly runners have fewer disabilities, a longer span of active life and are half as likely as aging nonrunners to die early deaths."

And then there's this one, a study of over 100,000 people that basically found the more you run each week, the less likely you are to develop high blood pressure, diabetes, or high cholesterol, although the study author thinks (for whatever it's worth) that a similar effect would be found for swimming or cycling or any other aerobic exercise.

So yeah, there's tons to back up what I said. You may disagree with those studies, and no science is perfect, but there's a good bunch of evidence.

Much like the initial debate over the existence of black holes there seems to be lots of wiggle room when it comes to declaring whether the Universe is in a runaway state, whether it's just expanding, or, whether it will collapse. This Standford Uni link gives a quick overview and suggests in ~15bn years it'll collapse to the size of a proton. The Yale Astrophysics Course, IIRC, is strongly steeped in black hole theory and so speaks to the same issues.

There's no denying it, C is the basis of everything in computing.

If you consider 'everything in computing' to have begun on 1 January 1970, sure.

But strange as it is to contemplate now, there was life before Unix.

Now, if you said 'is the basis of every buffer overrun 0-day security flaw in computing...' then I'd have to agree.

Citation?

I have one. http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Papers

Regarding running home processors at full tilt, I agree it is sub-prime. But it is also probably their best available option for high performance computing resources. If a home user was going to leave their computer on anyway, the difference between no CPU load and full load is probably 20 watts. That greatly increases the effective efficiency. Even if people are leaving their computer on when they otherwise wouldn't for F@H, Stanford doesn't have to go out and drop tens of millions of dollars in capital and hundreds of thousands a year for compute resources. They get resources donated from people with sunk capital costs, and individually a small increase in their electric bill. Regarding pollution, a lot of them probably would have been off at night and on anyway during the day. In that case, they are absorbing nuclear base load, and the extra pollution is negligible.

Personally I have a MythTV box on all the time. I run F@H on it as part of the charitable giving I do each year.

makes ya wonder what will happen to the Folding@Home client stats as PS3s die off and aren't replaced.

And who suffers in the end? Sick kids.
Oh, will someone think of the children!

Nope. If you're saying a quantum computer can solve NP-complete problems, that's generally believed not to be true (in the same sense that it's generally believed than P != NP). Even if that's not what you're saying, you would have to show that a quantum computer could break, say, AES, in polytime. Grover's algorithm can cut the number of bits required to brute-force in half, but to guard against it, just double the number of bits - 256-bit AES should still be hard to break. So private-key encryption (AES and the likes) are safe unless shown otherwise susceptible.

That leaves public-key crypto, which is probably what you're thinking about. True, with a quantum computer, one can factor numbers in polynomial time (Shor's algorithm), and thus break RSA. But RSA isn't the only public-key cryptography algorithm around. First, even in the worst of worlds short of BQP containing NP, one can make digital signatures using any sort of one-way function: the construct is called a Lamport signature. Second, there are public-key cryptosystems that seem hard to break using quantum computers - the McEliece system, which is based on error-correcting codes, is one of them.

If it turns out BQP contains NP, then there's always quantum cryptography, using the laws of physics to hide the message. However, the practical implementation of quantum cryptography is quite difficult, since if the laser emits more than a single photon for each "burst" (entangled bit), the scheme can be broken. To get over the loss rate implied by single photons, the crypto would either have to be by the use of lasers in free air, or have lots of quantum repeaters along the fiber - more than would be the case for a traditional message.
In any case, if BQP contains NP, we'd have a magic machine that can solve any puzzle that can be quickly verified. Finding optimal solutions to general engineering problems would just be a matter of churning the specs through the machine. The world would change -- very quickly and very radically -- and concerns about crypto would seem slight in comparison.

that's because there aren't any high profile web sites written in Java - they're too slow, buggy and useless. Even assuming what you say is 100% true, how come vendors patch security flaws in Java itself and they never get exploited?

We had our corporate system breached due to a flaw in a very big, expensive 'Enterprise' java web system so I know it from experience.

How about a quick google for information. This one has a table of java web framework security features. This one (pdf) describes "Our static analysis found 29 security vulnerabilities in nine large, popular open-source applications, with two of the vulnerabilities residing in widely-used Java libraries. In fact, all but one application inour benchmark suite had at least one vulnerability."

as well as "A recent penetration testing study performed by the Imperva Application Defense Center included more than 250 Web applications from e-commerce, online banking, enterprise collaboration, and supply chain management sites [54]. Their vulnerability assessment concluded that at least 92% of Web applications are vulnerable to some form of hacker attacks"

Ho hum. I guess you think Java is completely secure. What a fool. Hope no-one hires you to write any of them, well, not until you go to java.net and look up all the 'how to make your java app secure' tutorials. Sounds like "fucking morons" like you need them more than most.

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/12/23/0046258&from=rss

Or you could go http://crypto.stanford.edu/ssl-mitm/

and get it's cert signed - what you say? it has to be a signing cert?

http://www.win.tue.nl/hashclash/rogue-ca/

sure it might take a little setup.. but again.. if you own the router you own the network..

You're judging a scientific paper on the basis of a slashdot paraphrase?

Rather than giving good feedback on your code functionality Obj-C fans just go on about how your coding style isn't the one true way.

This is true. I've found that programming for the iPhone a lot revolves around following convention and best practices. I kind of like it, maybe because I'm not that experienced a programmer, it provides a guide.

Don't believe that they'll have you coding iPhone apps in a week. Even as an experienced programmer it took me longer than that to get familiar with Obj-C and learning Cocoa and Touch is more involved than they tell you. XCode is okay but stay away from their crappy Interface Builder as it's a complete waste of time.

Check out the free Stanford course on iTunesU (videos available through iTunes). It's probably the best resource out there if you've already got the necessary background (some C and OOP and design pattern knowledge). You won't be doing The Next Big Thing in under a week, but you can be creating simple demonstration apps in that time.

I agree with much of what you said, and the overall feeling - I prefer common sense instead of corner case laws.

Gays at the prom? Because there is no equal protection under the law for gays, and too many people in american society still view gay relationships as evil. Allowing gays in the right conservative school district will get you just as sued.

I just wanted to point out many states (as well as Canada) have outlawed discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity entirely and the US recently recently passed ENDA. Civil Rights from Stanford Encyclopedia Employment Non-Discrimination Act

"US recently passed ENDA" Actually, I don't think ENDA (with lgbt inclusion) is settled law yet. I don't think it's actually passed (or even been voted on) in the senate.

Gays at the prom? Because there is no equal protection under the law for gays, and too many people in american society still view gay relationships as evil. Allowing gays in the right conservative school district will get you just as sued.

I just wanted to point out many states (as well as Canada) have outlawed discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity entirely and the US recently recently passed ENDA.

Civil Rights from Stanford Encyclopedia
Employment Non-Discrimination Act

what part of rule set deontology did you not get? try http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deontological_ethics then head on over to http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-deontological/ oh and while you are at it please take note of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies.

Why do I even bother?

When available, I try and donate through Folding@Home. It will cost you in an increased power bill (try running it 24/7 for a month, made a huge dent). Not that I mind. But if and when people decide to donate to this project, CPU cycles are not free.

To donate by CPU, go http://folding.stanford.edu/

To donate by direct funding, go http://pgnet.stanford.edu/goto/foldinggift

When available, I try and donate through Folding@Home. It will cost you in an increased power bill (try running it 24/7 for a month, made a huge dent). Not that I mind. But if and when people decide to donate to this project, CPU cycles are not free.

To donate by CPU, go http://folding.stanford.edu/

To donate by direct funding, go http://pgnet.stanford.edu/goto/foldinggift

Thanks for simplifying that for us. If you're interested in a more nuanced view google 'the qualia problem'.
There is no satisfactory physical account of consciousness yet. Epiphenomenalism [wikipedia.org] and emergentism are attempts that leave us wanting more.
Your faith in the all-explaining power of physics is just that: faith.

Couldn't afford free Really?

There's plenty of free GIS data out there.

Does that include high quality data for South Africa (near Johannesburg) or were you planning to ask that prehistoric man be relocated to near San Jose so can take advantage of the free GIS data for California?

You've got to map things where they are, not where it's convenient for you to map. Moreover, Google's data is free to use, global in scope, and their application is easy to use too.

... I think it's because many departments run on shoe string budgets, and GIS was often an expense they couldn't afford.

Couldn't afford free Really?

There's plenty of free GIS data out there.

I worked on a project with a different approach where you use crappy sensors but then a lot of them.

I heard on NPR that a group from UC Riverside and Stanford started Quake Catchers to take advantage of the accelerometers included in most new laptops. A sort of "quake@home." They distribute their sensor software to anyone who volunteers and then receive relevant quake data. They also have more accurate USB sensors that they sell, and provide at a discount to K-12 schools. If schools are willing to participate, it should create a geographically distributed source of data. And it doesn't hurt that kids get to learn a bit more about earthquakes too.

The guest on NPR also talked about the USGS testing early warning systems for earthquakes, using several forms of mass communication(sans the summary's laser-in-the-sky). XKCD is always relevant.

Low carb diet is the best diet for losing weight because it works with the body's systems.

No research supports your statement.

Actually there is. Watch this video: The battle of the diets: Is anyone winning at losing? by Christopher Gardner, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Medicine at Stanford University, a vegetarian, who presents the results of the largest and longest-ever comparison of four popular diets showing that Atkins was the most effective.

There is also this research study that shows that even short-term consumption of a paleolithic type diet (low-carb) improves various health markers such as blood pressure, insulin sensitivity, and lipid profiles even if no weight was lost.

The part of the article where Probert discusses the operating system becoming something like a hypervisor reminds me of the Cache Kernel from a Stanford University paper back in 1994. http://www-dsg.stanford.edu/papers/cachekernel/main.html

The way I understand it, the cache kernel in kernel mode doesn't really have built-in policy for traditional OS tasks like scheduing or resource management. It just serves as a cache for loading and unloading for things like addresses spaces and threads and making them active. The policy for working with these things comes from separate application kernels in user mode and kernel objects that are loaded by the cache kernel.

There's also a 1997 MIT paper on exokernels (http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/papers/exo-sosp97/exo-sosp97.html). The idea is separating the responsibility of management from the responsibility of protection. The exokernel knows how to protect resources and the application knows how to make them sing. In the paper, they build a webserver on this architecture and it performs very well.

Both of these papers have research operating systems that demonstate specialized "native" applications running alongside unmodified UNIX applications running on UNIX emulators. That would suggest rebuilding an operating system in one of these styles wouldn't entail throwing out all the existing software or immediately forcing a new programming model on developers who aren't ready.

Microsoft used to talk about "personalities" in NT. It had subsystems for OS/2 1.x, WIn16, and Win32 that would allow apps from OS/2 (character mode), Windows 3.1 and Windows NT running as peers on top of the NT kernel. Perhaps someday the subsystems come back, some as OS personalities running traditional apps, and some as whole applications with resource management policy in their own right. Notepad might just run on the Win32 subsystem, but Photoshop might be interested in managing its own memory as well as disk space.

The mid-90s were fun for OS research, weren't they? :)

Actually, this goes in steps. They went from ~1.18TeV (which was already the highest energy for a proton beam ever achieved in lab) to 3.5TeV. The experiments will run at 3.5TeV for some time, then another shutdown to get them to the design energy of 7TeV per beam (14 TeV per collision). All is happening as planned.

The "problems" you mention happened with every single collider, ever. When you get to a new scale, you expect things to happen differently from your original idea; so you plan to allow time to solve problems. The accelerator itself is an experiment, and one that is going very well.

You want hard results? ALICE published a science paper on collisions almost four months ago. You can see more from ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb. Lots of simulations, descriptions and detection methods, but at least the two "smaller" groups (LHCb and ALICE) have measurements already, at one sixth of the energy they were designed to work on. In fact, LHCb will only have actual b hadrons to see when they start colliding protons at 3.5TeV; but they still could find a meaningful result to publish, sooner than anticipated by anyone with even passing understanding of collider physics. Is that enough? Or do people actually believe things go like this?

Actually, this goes in steps. They went from ~1.18TeV (which was already the highest energy for a proton beam ever achieved in lab) to 3.5TeV. The experiments will run at 3.5TeV for some time, then another shutdown to get them to the design energy of 7TeV per beam (14 TeV per collision). All is happening as planned.

The "problems" you mention happened with every single collider, ever. When you get to a new scale, you expect things to happen differently from your original idea; so you plan to allow time to solve problems. The accelerator itself is an experiment, and one that is going very well.

You want hard results? ALICE published a science paper on collisions almost four months ago. You can see more from ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb. Lots of simulations, descriptions and detection methods, but at least the two "smaller" groups (LHCb and ALICE) have measurements already, at one sixth of the energy they were designed to work on. In fact, LHCb will only have actual b hadrons to see when they start colliding protons at 3.5TeV; but they still could find a meaningful result to publish, sooner than anticipated by anyone with even passing understanding of collider physics. Is that enough? Or do people actually believe things go like this?

Actually, this goes in steps. They went from ~1.18TeV (which was already the highest energy for a proton beam ever achieved in lab) to 3.5TeV. The experiments will run at 3.5TeV for some time, then another shutdown to get them to the design energy of 7TeV per beam (14 TeV per collision). All is happening as planned.

The "problems" you mention happened with every single collider, ever. When you get to a new scale, you expect things to happen differently from your original idea; so you plan to allow time to solve problems. The accelerator itself is an experiment, and one that is going very well.

You want hard results? ALICE published a science paper on collisions almost four months ago. You can see more from ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb. Lots of simulations, descriptions and detection methods, but at least the two "smaller" groups (LHCb and ALICE) have measurements already, at one sixth of the energy they were designed to work on. In fact, LHCb will only have actual b hadrons to see when they start colliding protons at 3.5TeV; but they still could find a meaningful result to publish, sooner than anticipated by anyone with even passing understanding of collider physics. Is that enough? Or do people actually believe things go like this?

Actually, this goes in steps. They went from ~1.18TeV (which was already the highest energy for a proton beam ever achieved in lab) to 3.5TeV. The experiments will run at 3.5TeV for some time, then another shutdown to get them to the design energy of 7TeV per beam (14 TeV per collision). All is happening as planned.

The "problems" you mention happened with every single collider, ever. When you get to a new scale, you expect things to happen differently from your original idea; so you plan to allow time to solve problems. The accelerator itself is an experiment, and one that is going very well.

You want hard results? ALICE published a science paper on collisions almost four months ago. You can see more from ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb. Lots of simulations, descriptions and detection methods, but at least the two "smaller" groups (LHCb and ALICE) have measurements already, at one sixth of the energy they were designed to work on. In fact, LHCb will only have actual b hadrons to see when they start colliding protons at 3.5TeV; but they still could find a meaningful result to publish, sooner than anticipated by anyone with even passing understanding of collider physics. Is that enough? Or do people actually believe things go like this?

I run the Folding@home GPU client on my GeForce 8800 GTX. On Vista and later OSes (pre-Vista, the driver model wasn't well adapted to GPGPU and this leads to a polling driven communication scheme which is really inefficient), the effect on resources is unnoticeable aside from during games (where I kill the client to reduce jerkiness); the GPGPU work is lower priority and gets shunted aside from rendering, though the latency involved is a problem for graphics intensive games. For less demanding work and general usage, it's unnoticeable; the GPU is perfectly capable of drawing the screen and curing Alzheimer's at the same time. :-)

I run the Folding@home GPU client on my GeForce 8800 GTX. On Vista and later OSes (pre-Vista, the driver model wasn't well adapted to GPGPU and this leads to a polling driven communication scheme which is really inefficient), the effect on resources is unnoticeable aside from during games (where I kill the client to reduce jerkiness); the GPGPU work is lower priority and gets shunted aside from rendering, though the latency involved is a problem for graphics intensive games. For less demanding work and general usage, it's unnoticeable; the GPU is perfectly capable of drawing the screen and curing Alzheimer's at the same time. :-)

Sorry, wrong link, here's the correct link to relevance logic.

Hax.