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LHC Repair To Cost At Least $21 Million
ThanatosMinor writes "September's quench at the Large Hadron Collider is going to cost CERN at least $21 million and delay future collisions until June of 2009 at the earliest. Enjoy your last few months outside of an event horizon."
ouch... :(
...that the LHC's generated particles from the future will not let it function.
Any life is made up of a single moment, the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.
We are already in another reality! They ran it and in this reality it won't work and therefore we're stuck here! I have proof! I'm not crazy! In another reality, I have an account and my user # is double digit! In my reality, get this, the US is a capitalist country and the President elect is white!
Professor Farnsworth's doomsday devices are a lot more expensive and they haven't even been invented yet!
...they should fire that thing at a small gold pin. What could possibly go wrong?
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
What ever happened to real bulletin-board systems?
First off, I'd like to make it perfectly clear that I cannot ... who's become a boyish programmer
be objective in these notes. These are observations, but they
are from 1) a Sysop
2) a user of 8BBS, the greatest BBS ever evolved
3) a boy
4) an old timer....1977 was when I first started
using BBS systems.
5) the author of a BBS system
If you're expecting objectivity, then don't bother reading on. I have a
rather unique perspective on the entire BBS scene. I've been around since close
to the beginning, and I'm wondering what has happened. Have BBS's gone the way
of CB? Is the entire system in a slump? Is there anything wrong at all?
I'm going to try to present these questions and show how things have
changed...for the better, and for the worst.
HISTORY:
A long time ago, in a city far-far away, two men had an insight. Ward
Christensen and Randy Suess wanted a way to leave notes and messages to their
programmer/engineer friends. Back then, modems were used by field-engineers and
some high-level executives to talk to their companies computers. A 300 baud
modem was extremely fast, as most people were using 110 baud TeleTypes. Ward
and Randy devloped the concept of the BBS. They called it CBBS, for "Computer
Bulletin Board System." CBBS was the first of its kind. It was an enormous
program written in 8080 assmebly language. By our standards today, it was
kludgy and bug-ridden, but back then it was heavenly. Users could enter
messages and read messages... that was about it.
CBBS was a wonderful concept, but it was localized to the Chicago area. Ward
and Randy were the only ones who were running the program. Then Bill Blue came
along and wrote ABBS, which was designed to "emulate" the CBBS system. I feel
it was ABBS, rather than CBBS which made the real breakthrough. While ABBS was
much less powerful, and more difficult to use, it could be run on a "universal"
machine: --The Apple ][--
Anyone with an Apple ][ and a D.C. Hayes MM][ modem could run ABBS. This
program could be installed in a matter of minutes, and anyone could have their
own bulletin board system. Soon after the release of ABBS, several other BBS
programs (for various computers) soon followed. ABBS was the king for many
years, just because there were more ABBS systems than any other BBS program
available.
It is this time that I would like to refer to as the "Golden age of the BBS."
It wasn't as golden as you might think. Most Sysops would come home every
evening from work to find that their BBS had crashed because of yet another bug.
Even back then, user's logged in under false names and left obscene messages.
The one point that made that age golden was the users. Without users, a BBS
is just a program. With users, it gains a personality, and if I may be
metaphysical, a soul. The users MAKE the BBS. A Sysop may have the greatest
BBS program in the world, but without active users, he just has a computer
wasting line-current.
LIFE IN THE "GOLDEN AGE"
A user would think nothing of spending his Saturday helping "The Sysop" find
an intermittant bug in the BBS program.
A user would not only answer his or HER mail, but also butt into other
people's conversations and throw in his/her two cents worth.
A user would suggest improvements to make the system easier to use.
A Sysop would care for his BBS like a baby. He'd spend 2 hours each ni
If you worked at the LHC you too would be happy to hear "The repair will cost at least $21 million."... ... If the last comment before that was "Dear God it's all falling appart!".
Dear kdawson,
Please stop submitting sensationalist crap to the main page.
Kind regards,
AC
bbc reported the same thing...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7734251.stm
I like their quote "The cost of the work will fall within the Cern's existing budget" though it does make me idly speculate on the size of their budget and how large a secret fortress I could build with it....
Large Hadron Forever?
I record my sleeptalking
Complete sense-of-humor failure over there. It's also in a couple of the above replies.
Rob
Great work if you can get it. Need 20 million in funding? Drop a wrench into something that looks complicated. :)
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
They should have planned for this kind of thing and taken it into account, like by having a few months of performing shake-down tests and finding any problems then!
Oh, wait...
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
want to admit that Carmen Sandiego managed to steal the whole thing.
They are gonna get me a black hole for my birthday!
--Thomas J. Owens
The parallel universes in which the LHC works without failure are already wiped out by the LHC, that's why any concious being, like you, can only be in a universe in which the LHC fails!
Which will completely implode first: the planet's economy or the planet itself?
If the economy goes first then there'll be no money for LHC. If the planet goes first it will be a significant disruption to normal economic activity.
"The media portrayal of the LHC experiments has been branded as irresponsible and sensationalist by psychologists - especially since the death of a 16-year-old Indian girl, who killed herself after being distressed by the coverage on an Indian news channel."
The threat to human life from people like KDawson posting sensationalist anti-LHC garbage to places like /. is real and documented. At least one person has actually, demonstrably died due to the precise behaviour that KDawson is exhibiting on this story.
The supposed threat from the LHC, on the other hand, is a fantasy made up and promoted by irresponsible, money-hungry media shills like KDawson to sell ads.
The LHC is safe. People like KDawson kill.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
CERN's budget is not secret at all. It is something like 800 million EUR per year.
What intrigues me is that the numerical value has remained the same, despite inflation eating up its worth through the years...
..it has to be Gman..
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/nov08/6931/2
Surely one hour's R&D expenses could be spared for the LHC.
Why not? They can afford to spend that much every minute on Iraq.
I like to think of online DRM as something akin to a college -- you pay for lessons until you learn something.
Enjoy your last few months outside of an event horizon.
It's been my life long dream to experience an Event Horizon. The only shame is I won't be able to contemplate such a great experience afterwards. ;)
for not buying the extended warranty!
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
The total cost of the is estimated to be somewhere between 3 billion to 7 billion. A couple of tens of millions will increase the overall cost by less than 1%.
Yes, but compare results! Bush succeeded in turning Iraq into a black hole, sucking in blood, money, and the least important thing, his reputation, the LHC has yet to create any!
Monstar L
At least one person has killer herself because she went into an irrational panic, and did something stupid and rash. That's often a sign of psychological problems.
Yeah, the media coverage has been sensationalist and dumb. But it didn't kill anyone.
I'm guessing that /.'ers know that the LHC is not going to form a black hole. In case you don't here's the math.
Mass of a intermediate black hole = 1000x the mass of the sun
Mass of the sun = 332,946x the mass of the Earth
Mass of the Earth = 6x10^24 kg
Therefor mass of black hole = 2x10^(33) kg
Mass of a proton = 1.67x10^(-27) kg
The crushing force of a black hole is caused by its density, a large mass in a small volume (1000x the mass of the sun in a 1,000km diameter ball -> ~size of the Earth).
So flinging around 40 or so protons in a 27km diameter tunnel is not going to destroy our solar system (or reshape the galaxy).
One sucks, the other sells vacuum cleaners?
One swallow does not a fellatrix make
The time when the black hole jokes was funny has passed. Please move on.
Yeah there was a group voting in kerrang magazine and tried to make LHC the best villian of 2008. They were doing it for the lulz.
Tell me - what are you three going to do after January 20, 2009? What will fill the gigantic void in your life and ability to express thoughts and feelings? Because, sooner or later, people are going to get tired of the constant, droning, repetitive rant that makes up your daily existence...Oh, wait - that's already happened.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Clearly, they won't really get all of the kinks worked out of this thing until December 2012 (see http://www.december212012.com/).
GUESTS. SOME PEOPLE Fel7ow travellers? when done playing 40,000 coming clearly become confirmed that *BSD
I guess they really have managed to create an actual black hole!!
This is not the Sarah Conner you are looking for.
This message brought to you by Speedy Boson Delivery Service -- "If it's not there by yesterday, it will never be there."
Yeah the only problem is that it's cost him billions of dollars to do the same thing. With the LHC we're at least getting more bang for the buck! ... or more suck for the buck
Although Bush sucks pretty hardcore himself.
Holy god people, kdawson's last sentence is just about drowning in sarcasm, but half the people posting are taking it as serious.
What, are we supposed to end things with /sarcasm tags to keep the ridiculously literal from being offended?
At least if you have a precisely shaped-charge nuke, you just blow it up in front of the black hole. Sheez--everybody knows that.
I am anticipating further delays until December 2011.
Here is a picture of a simulated collision in the ATLAS detector that creates a black hole:
http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/936914
This happen all the time near earth and is not dangerous at all. This is nothing unknown, or mystic or strange. AFAIK the LHC is not even the first accelerator to create black holes.
Is that the date that's been set to withdraw from Iraq? If so, then of course we'll stop complaining about the ongoing cost of the war in Iraq. Otherwise, we'll continue complaining until the withdrawal takes place.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
The repercussions of the Bush admin will last for years, if not decades. There's plenty of fodder to pick on for a long time! Obama will inherit big bailouts, the FED giving out trillions in loans secretly, warrant less wiretaps (Obama did vote for that one), two wars, and whole lot more.
(With high pitched voices.) We noticed the helium leak when Bob's voice changed. Everyone rushed in to join in on the fun.
Have you ever seen a mini black hole? Everything gets sucked in. It's like a nuclear compression charge going off. Looks good! From a distance.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
as a joke. Maybe the reason some people don't see it as funny is because the scientists involved aren't doing a very good job explaining how what they're doing isn't dangerous.
The fact that you thought the submitter was being serious would indicate that you aren't sure that there couldn't be serious consequences to making little black holes.
Work Safe Porn
You should make a fake machine with no windows, and have someone pick up the machine and leave it in a deserted area to make her think you're the last man on earth once it's "safe to come out". I don't think just a few hours in the dark in a confined space would do it, even then you'd be taking a lot of the fun out of it. If she finds out that civilization hasn't been destroyed, you can make up something leading to your explanation and she'll still think you saved her life, making her less repulsed by you. Win-win!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I remember reading about a Large Hadron Collider at CERN(?) in that book Angels & Daemons by Dan Brown. Never did any research about it but it's damn scary that it's possible. That said, I can't wait until the media finally releases where the REAL Jurassic Park is located.
Frankly, I'm quite surprised that the repairs aren't costing $23 Million...
First rule in government spending: why build one when you can have two at twice the price?
Great work if you can get it. Need 20 million in funding? Drop a wrench into something that looks complicated. :)
... for some values of "something". For others, it might not be such a good idea.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Big numbers! Soo - this works out as what, around 0.3% of the construction budget so far? Or about 3% of their yearly operating budget?
All in all it sounds to be about equal to paying $2.50 for a spare power cable for the $800 pc you just bought.
I am surprised it didn't cost more - I suspect that replacing coolant takes quite a significant part in that sum.
Radtea, you murderer!
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
I surmise, that the LHC, so far, is already acting like a black hole. I look at my blank BIONC screensaver daily with disappointment. Oh well, switching back to boring grid computing problems like world health and hunger.
what the budget for the Death Star might be like. Imagine Luke and the Rebel Alliance saved by technical difficulty. :)
Which kinds of racism do you approve of?