If the content of the paper is deemed acceptable by the ATLAS Collaboration after significant scrutiny, which will be at least a month if I had to guess, then yes, we should be really excited about this. It's not just an anomaly, it's a pretty clear bump in the data over the background. Even if it's not a Higgs, it's still a sign of interesting new physics if everything gets approved.
But again, that's only if the ATLAS Collaboration approves the result. It takes time to verify
Very nice summary. IIRC, they're using the same continuous background estimate that is recommended by the official ATLAS Higgs group. Of course, I could be wrong, but that's why the note is undergoing review (like all notes do) before it's approved as an ATLAS internal note.
My hope is that the group did actually find the Higgs. There's not much meat in the paper, but they do provide a lot of references to official Higgs group notes, so there's a chance that they did everything properly and made a real discovery. The paper is under review, and the normal timeline for that is maybe a couple of weeks or more, so we just need to wait and see.
It's the first time that such a clear Higgs result has been found. This case is interesting for a few reasons
1) It's in the mass-range that was excluded by LEP and Fermilab 2) The cross section is ~30x higher than the Standard Model prediction 3) It was produced as an internal communication (ie it was posted Wednesday so that the ATLAS Higgs group could look at it), but then ATLAS physicists posted and talked about by ATLAS physicists in departments around the country and on blogs around the internet. This indicates that all of the secrecy and careful step-by-step approval processes in order to prevent embarrassing false-positives is meaningless; if there's a really exciting bump in the data, then physicists will want to talk about it before all of the details have been checked over by other experts. This is both good and bad; it's good because these are scientists who are clearly very interested in their craft, but it's bad because now if the paper turns out to be wrong then it's going to make the entire ATLAS Collaboration look bad because the information was not meant to be shown publicly yet (ie if there's a mistake in some code somewhere and it gets caught during the coming weeks of review before the paper is even approved for internal ATLAS distribution, and months before it's approved for public consumption, then the ATLAS conveners will look stupid simply because a lot of scientists got a little too excited and jumped the gun)
The author obviously doesn't own a Wii or hasn't bothered to check the number of games with local coop released today versus the number of games with local coop released 10 years ago. The average number of local coop games released per year seems about constant to me. Off the top of my head, this year on the PS3 alone we saw Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light, Rock Band 3, Army of Two: The 40th Day, and a bunch of other cheap PSN games like Scott Pilgrim. Last year we saw the release of Borderlands and Resident Evil 5, both games that were practically made for local coop.
For instance, you could try just doing this with 5 computers over a period of 6-12 months and see what the costs are relative to the Dell computers. Immediately trying to do this with 1000+ computers is a terrible, terrible idea.
This is not true, most corporations keep countless outdated computers and generally won't purchase new hardware until old hardware breaks or a large number of users need an upgrade. Government is in the same boat most of the time, but since funding is often a matter of "use it or lose it" they can sometimes upgrade more quickly, meaning users get computers when they need them rather than whenever the boss says that it's okay.
In general, generic corporate PCs are way too old.
The point of a demo is to convince people to purchase your game. If you force people to also purchase the demo, then they'll likely not bother purchasing anything.
The only effect this can have is a decrease in revenue for EA followed by some long-winded rants about "piracy is decreasing our revenue" when in actuality it's EA releasing poor-quality games and making boneheaded decisions like this one that are causing them to lose revenue.
LHC physicist checking in - yes, that will make the collisions 7 TeV. Note that there are no collisions yet, we're still doing work to make sure that the beams are stable and focused properly. Once we have collisions, we'll run at this energy for about a year and a half before shutting down for a year to perform maintenance.
The LHC never produced 14 TeV collisions, the highest collision it will perform this year is 7 TeV. It is designed to produce 14 TeV collisions, and it will hopefully do that after we finish taking data at 7 TeV. It is true, however, that cosmic ray collisions completely kill the "LHC will destroy the world" bullshit.
It's electromagnetic radiation that you're talking about, in other words light. You are in fact talking about photons. Radiation from cell phones = photons = light.
Because the two machines operate at different collision energies. The Higgs cross section is going to be different at each collider due to this energy difference, so when you go to measure this cross section you're going to get different results.
You can perform a meta-analysis, whereby you make a "best measurement" at different colliders and energies in order to better understand the measurements. However, that's not what you're proposing; you're proposing that they combine data in order to get a result in the first place, which you can't do.
They cleaned up the desktop icons, but they didn't remove any of the programs that created those desktop icons in the first place. The junk is still there, but now the user doesn't see it. How is that good?
What are you even talking about? I just got my oil changed at a Jiffy Lube last month and they didn't try to push anything else on me. It was $20 out the door with a $12 rebate that I just received last week.
The author mentioned that Palm's new OS is a huge hit, but why was there no mention of Android in the same paragraph? It has stormed the cell phone market across several carriers and has brought a new "hybrid" model of software that is partially open source to the table. How is this not a bigger deal than Palm's OS? Palm has been making mobile operating systems and placing them on phones for years; this is hardly new.
There are countless backup generators and numerous failsafes that will safely redirect the beam into one of the many beam dumps, which are basically big blocks of concrete.
The worst that can happen: all of the failsafes fail, backup generators fail, and the LHC damages itself, requiring several years of repairs. That's the biggest disaster that the LHC could possibly ever produce. Keep in mind, it's already 100 meters underground, a length through which the particle beam couldn't penetrate even if it somehow scattered straight upward.
Actually, most engineering tools are designed by scientists and improved upon by engineers. Scientists tend to invent things that work well enough, engineers tend to improve them.
Then tax the university, don't tax the students who have no disposable income. If the university is really the problem here, then why are you supporting a tax on the students?
Haven't we already established that the university employs its own private police and fire force, like most universities? I find it hard to believe that they don't pay for water and sewage; you're going to have to prove that.
1) Pittsburgh the city is doing this, and they have no say on state university fees or funding
2) That money actually goes to the CA universities, rather than the cities in which these universities reside. Raising fees is a silly way of raising tuition without calling it tuition
He never said any of that, you twit. Taxing people who don't have any disposable income doesn't make any sense; all it does is force them out of the city, so in the end you don't earn any money AND you lose all of the additional tax revenue that those students provide just by coming to your city.
Slashdot Mirror
If the content of the paper is deemed acceptable by the ATLAS Collaboration after significant scrutiny, which will be at least a month if I had to guess, then yes, we should be really excited about this. It's not just an anomaly, it's a pretty clear bump in the data over the background. Even if it's not a Higgs, it's still a sign of interesting new physics if everything gets approved.
But again, that's only if the ATLAS Collaboration approves the result. It takes time to verify
Do you actually know how much the LHC costs per year?
Very nice summary. IIRC, they're using the same continuous background estimate that is recommended by the official ATLAS Higgs group. Of course, I could be wrong, but that's why the note is undergoing review (like all notes do) before it's approved as an ATLAS internal note.
My hope is that the group did actually find the Higgs. There's not much meat in the paper, but they do provide a lot of references to official Higgs group notes, so there's a chance that they did everything properly and made a real discovery. The paper is under review, and the normal timeline for that is maybe a couple of weeks or more, so we just need to wait and see.
It's the first time that such a clear Higgs result has been found. This case is interesting for a few reasons
1) It's in the mass-range that was excluded by LEP and Fermilab
2) The cross section is ~30x higher than the Standard Model prediction
3) It was produced as an internal communication (ie it was posted Wednesday so that the ATLAS Higgs group could look at it), but then ATLAS physicists posted and talked about by ATLAS physicists in departments around the country and on blogs around the internet. This indicates that all of the secrecy and careful step-by-step approval processes in order to prevent embarrassing false-positives is meaningless; if there's a really exciting bump in the data, then physicists will want to talk about it before all of the details have been checked over by other experts. This is both good and bad; it's good because these are scientists who are clearly very interested in their craft, but it's bad because now if the paper turns out to be wrong then it's going to make the entire ATLAS Collaboration look bad because the information was not meant to be shown publicly yet (ie if there's a mistake in some code somewhere and it gets caught during the coming weeks of review before the paper is even approved for internal ATLAS distribution, and months before it's approved for public consumption, then the ATLAS conveners will look stupid simply because a lot of scientists got a little too excited and jumped the gun)
Actually, it's only too high by a factor of 30
And this does not mean that it is not a Higgs particle; it only means that it is not the Higgs boson predicted by the Standard Model
How many games have 16 players playing cooperatively?
The author obviously doesn't own a Wii or hasn't bothered to check the number of games with local coop released today versus the number of games with local coop released 10 years ago. The average number of local coop games released per year seems about constant to me. Off the top of my head, this year on the PS3 alone we saw Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light, Rock Band 3, Army of Two: The 40th Day, and a bunch of other cheap PSN games like Scott Pilgrim. Last year we saw the release of Borderlands and Resident Evil 5, both games that were practically made for local coop.
For instance, you could try just doing this with 5 computers over a period of 6-12 months and see what the costs are relative to the Dell computers. Immediately trying to do this with 1000+ computers is a terrible, terrible idea.
This is not true, most corporations keep countless outdated computers and generally won't purchase new hardware until old hardware breaks or a large number of users need an upgrade. Government is in the same boat most of the time, but since funding is often a matter of "use it or lose it" they can sometimes upgrade more quickly, meaning users get computers when they need them rather than whenever the boss says that it's okay.
In general, generic corporate PCs are way too old.
The point of a demo is to convince people to purchase your game. If you force people to also purchase the demo, then they'll likely not bother purchasing anything.
The only effect this can have is a decrease in revenue for EA followed by some long-winded rants about "piracy is decreasing our revenue" when in actuality it's EA releasing poor-quality games and making boneheaded decisions like this one that are causing them to lose revenue.
LHC physicist checking in - yes, that will make the collisions 7 TeV. Note that there are no collisions yet, we're still doing work to make sure that the beams are stable and focused properly. Once we have collisions, we'll run at this energy for about a year and a half before shutting down for a year to perform maintenance.
The LHC never produced 14 TeV collisions, the highest collision it will perform this year is 7 TeV. It is designed to produce 14 TeV collisions, and it will hopefully do that after we finish taking data at 7 TeV. It is true, however, that cosmic ray collisions completely kill the "LHC will destroy the world" bullshit.
It's electromagnetic radiation that you're talking about, in other words light. You are in fact talking about photons. Radiation from cell phones = photons = light.
Because the two machines operate at different collision energies. The Higgs cross section is going to be different at each collider due to this energy difference, so when you go to measure this cross section you're going to get different results.
You can perform a meta-analysis, whereby you make a "best measurement" at different colliders and energies in order to better understand the measurements. However, that's not what you're proposing; you're proposing that they combine data in order to get a result in the first place, which you can't do.
If gravity is truly not fundamental and works as described by the paper, then you can kiss the antigravity machine goodbye!
None of the computers are optimized until you bring them to Geek Squad.
They cleaned up the desktop icons, but they didn't remove any of the programs that created those desktop icons in the first place. The junk is still there, but now the user doesn't see it. How is that good?
Students can get Retail Windows 7 (not just upgrade) for $30 for the ISO or I think $35 if you want them to ship you the box.
Computers don't come with stock OEM windows anymore, the only way to get that is to buy the software and install it yourself.
What are you even talking about? I just got my oil changed at a Jiffy Lube last month and they didn't try to push anything else on me. It was $20 out the door with a $12 rebate that I just received last week.
The author mentioned that Palm's new OS is a huge hit, but why was there no mention of Android in the same paragraph? It has stormed the cell phone market across several carriers and has brought a new "hybrid" model of software that is partially open source to the table. How is this not a bigger deal than Palm's OS? Palm has been making mobile operating systems and placing them on phones for years; this is hardly new.
There are countless backup generators and numerous failsafes that will safely redirect the beam into one of the many beam dumps, which are basically big blocks of concrete.
The worst that can happen: all of the failsafes fail, backup generators fail, and the LHC damages itself, requiring several years of repairs. That's the biggest disaster that the LHC could possibly ever produce. Keep in mind, it's already 100 meters underground, a length through which the particle beam couldn't penetrate even if it somehow scattered straight upward.
Actually, most engineering tools are designed by scientists and improved upon by engineers. Scientists tend to invent things that work well enough, engineers tend to improve them.
Arizona State is a shit school anyway, U OF A!
Then tax the university, don't tax the students who have no disposable income. If the university is really the problem here, then why are you supporting a tax on the students?
Haven't we already established that the university employs its own private police and fire force, like most universities? I find it hard to believe that they don't pay for water and sewage; you're going to have to prove that.
1) Pittsburgh the city is doing this, and they have no say on state university fees or funding
2) That money actually goes to the CA universities, rather than the cities in which these universities reside. Raising fees is a silly way of raising tuition without calling it tuition
He never said any of that, you twit. Taxing people who don't have any disposable income doesn't make any sense; all it does is force them out of the city, so in the end you don't earn any money AND you lose all of the additional tax revenue that those students provide just by coming to your city.