I will confirm this. The Particle Data Group is the source of all current particle physics data and general "knowledge" on the subject. It is an enormous book containing thousands of pages of facts, figures, and speculation. They print copies for free, since they're meant to be a resource for scientists.
They also offer the book on their website, the same place that you order your physical copy, in the form of several nicely organized PDFs. I don't know of anyone who uses these PDFs, preferring to have a physical copy of the book.
The scientific community has been doing quite well with free, collective content aggregation. Some journals use subscription models, but most scientific papers are publicly available.
The authors of such papers, some of which easily rival textbooks for length, typically don't receive sale revenue from these papers even if they end up in a subscription-based journal.
And yet these papers continue to be written and published at an exponentially growing rate.
Not really. Enrolling in a course is not the same as having to use the textbook. It's very easy to get around and not use the "required" textbook. No one is forced to acquire or even use is book. There are plenty of other books (and free sources) on the same subject that probably approach the exact same subject matter but perhaps in different ways.
Furthermore, you're assuming that only the enrolled students are downloading the book. Why is that? I know of people who download books just to have them around; they never read them, they just like having a bunch of e-books on topic X "just in case".
Data shows that good books will sell more physical copies if you give out free digital copies. It's counterintuitive, but it's difficult to argue with hard numbers. This applies to good textbooks, too.
Seriously, this is possibly the most ridiculous thing I've ever read. If anyone really needed proof that the MPAA doesn't care about consumers in any way, look no further.
And since high schools are essentially a glorified legally mandated babysitting service, it's unlikely that they will disappear as well.
So really, if anyone is going to do this it will probably be community colleges, but I still don't see any motivation for it. There are certain things that you just can't do with teleconferenced lectures. Testing is much more difficult, accepting homework is much more difficult (assuming it's not just a series of essays), and helping struggling students becomes more difficult as well.
This professor sounds like he has never taken or taught a correspondence course. It's nice being able to learn/teach at a distance, but these types of courses carry their own difficulties.
University professors tend to be resistant to change. This is why 99% of classes feature enormous lecture halls, a mode popularized by the ancient Greeks, when there are other lecture styles that have been proven to be more effective. There are countless other examples of universities being lower on the learning curve.
2020 he claims, but how long will it take for universities to actually implement video classrooms, and what motivates them to do this? There are a few universities that have published lectures on the internet, but in most cases it's unnecessary.
Perhaps general introductory courses can become obsolete due to their very generic qualities, but higher courses and graduate courses will still need to be taught in person. Each university tends to teach its students in different ways, choosing which subjects might be important from an infinite wealth of information, and no one can agree on which way is best. Thus, it will take much more than a mere 11 years for classrooms to become truly obsolete.
And as someone else pointed out, I don't know of a single truly paperless office, yet such a thing was supposed to become reality a decade ago.
If the maximum fee for exceeding the cap is $75, then what prevents someone from ordering the cheapest plan ($29.95) and going over the limit as much as they want? If you really plan on downloading 500GB per month, it would be cheaper to order the cheapest plan and exceed the limit than to order the priciest plan, since the maximum fee is the same anyway.
Unless the slashdot post was just poorly worded, of course
You're confused. The scientists there are conducting experiments for the sake of science. That is pure science.
The people who fund them see the benefit. That does not, however, make the science "impure". It just means that there are additional reasons for conducting these experiments.
They're observing nuclear fusion. That is as pure as science gets.
You don't seem to understand how little land use Solar would actually use. The entire nation could be powered by solar 24 hrs/day (using storage obviously) with plenty to spare if we used only 1% of land deemed "arid wasteland" in the southwest. In other words, it's land that nobody wants and that nobody can even use unless you want to build a highway through it.
Plop down some high voltage DC lines (nearly lossless long distance transmission) and you're done. No fuel, just mirrors and cheap synthetic oils (ie solar troughs). The best mirror lab in the world is already located in the southwest (Arizona), so very little infrastructure would need to be developed in order to actually build a large scale solar power plant. Nobody wants to fund such an effort because it's trendy to support fission even when better alternatives are available (solar cost/kWh dipped below fission recently).
I don't think this means that we should neglect other energy research, it's just sad that solar power is so misunderstood. The cost/kWh has dipped below fission, for christ's sake.
that ONLY work on internet explorer for some stupid reason
Once enough Jim Bobs send pissed off e-mails places that require Internet Explorer, maybe they'll finally allow the rest of us to use ONLY something else
And don't forget that there were numerous songs that were simply unavailable on certain albums. Particularly notorious cases would let you download 3 unpopular songs from an album, but the rest would be unavailable.
Keep in mind, the Apple Store also uses ads and DRM, albeit not as much anymore. The only real problems with Ruckus had to do with the poor client software (which wasn't that buggy, it just had a poor layout).
Your claim of a monetary conflict in interest is completely illogical. Even if the experiment cost trillions of dollars, if it had a decent chance of destroying the world it would never be activated. Your life's work is meaningless if the world is destroyed by it.
"never-before-seen" is inaccurate: in man-made colliders that's true, but nature has been making collisions at energies several orders of magnitude greater than this since the beginning of time. By comparison, what we're doing at the LHC is commonplace.
You may ask why we need to build a collider at all, but it's because detecting such high energy particle collisions is made easier if you build your own. This way you know exactly where the collisions are occurring, the center of mass energy, and you can construct your detector appropriately.
Having done the math, read the papers, and attended the seminars, I'm confident that the LHC will do nothing more than what nature hasn't done already. If there was any chance of the LHC destroying the world, we wouldn't be having this conversation today. There are countless very real, very carefully conducted studies and experiments, some of which were even contributed by the astronomy community, indicating approximately 0 chance of the LHC destroying the world. The same studies were conducted when we built the Tevatron, and the same concerns were raised; we don't KNOW what will happen, but we're almost 100% certain that it won't be bad.
That's the difference between you and I. Whereas you are completely certain that I lack expertise on the subject and "blinded" myself to logic, I'm at least willing to admit that nothing in life is a complete certainty. The only certain things in life are death and taxes.
And please don't compare the LHC to a centrifuge. The LHC is as much like a centrifuge as a NASCAR track.
In summary: Take your ignorant self-righteousness elsewhere. Your assumption that I'm listening to LHC physicists, my colleagues, because they "wear lab coats" (which isn't even true) is not only insulting but outright moronic.
I don't even know what else to say. Your response was just so... stupid. It's wise to ask questions, but to ignore evidence? You were clearly given a large brain by mistake.
Everything has a finite probability. There is a finite probability that I'll teleport across the room the next time that I want a coffee break. It's a virtual impossibility, but it has a finite probability.
A better example is using thermodynamics. There's a finite probability that all of the oxygen in a room clumps up in one corner of the room. It's still a probability that is approximately zero.
10^-999999999999 is a finite number, but it still may as well be 0
But you have to remember how much energy was required to produce that black hole. The LHC isn't exactly an efficient way of doing that.
The starting mass of the black hole is based on the energy you put into colliding the particles, which you've already expended. I think it's dubious that you'd ever get out as much energy as you put into the creation of an artificial black hole, and that's assuming you could make it big enough to interact with anything, keep it in place and extract energy from it in an efficient way.
Means that there is a much greater than zero probability? Sorry, either the paper is wrong or your interpretation of it is wrong. Publishing a probability is not a determination of that probability.
There is no published figure regarding the probability of your computer turning into chocolate pudding before it reaches warranty. The probability is still approximately zero despite that.
The probability of a black hole at the LHC swallowing the Earth is approximately zero, and it doesn't matter how many sensationalist journalists try to misconstrue real science in an effort to drum up sales.
Why would she even do this? They're NOTES. I could understand if she didn't want you giving finished tests to future students, but notes?
They're hopefully getting the same or similar lectures, and thus approximately the same notes. If future students want to borrow/copy/purchase old notes, it's to their detriment anyway.
I guarantee that 99%, probably 100%, of the content in those notes is 1) Freely available on the internet under public license in various forms 2) Available in the class textbook that they have to purchase anyway 3) Available in notes/homeworks/tests that other students/professors have posted on the internet
This is such a stupid thing to demand of students that it's not even funny. And isn't it the middle of the semester? Won't you be using those notes for homework and tests?
This makes no sense and it's illegal. If she doesn't get fired for this it will be amazing.
Slashdot Mirror
I will confirm this. The Particle Data Group is the source of all current particle physics data and general "knowledge" on the subject. It is an enormous book containing thousands of pages of facts, figures, and speculation. They print copies for free, since they're meant to be a resource for scientists.
They also offer the book on their website, the same place that you order your physical copy, in the form of several nicely organized PDFs. I don't know of anyone who uses these PDFs, preferring to have a physical copy of the book.
Physical references > digital references
Ah, the good old argument of "it costs a lot, so you know it's worth it!"
The scientific community has been doing quite well with free, collective content aggregation. Some journals use subscription models, but most scientific papers are publicly available.
The authors of such papers, some of which easily rival textbooks for length, typically don't receive sale revenue from these papers even if they end up in a subscription-based journal.
And yet these papers continue to be written and published at an exponentially growing rate.
I prefer pulling the book from a pocket inside your jacket. You should always carry around at least one signed copy of your book!
Not really. Enrolling in a course is not the same as having to use the textbook. It's very easy to get around and not use the "required" textbook. No one is forced to acquire or even use is book. There are plenty of other books (and free sources) on the same subject that probably approach the exact same subject matter but perhaps in different ways.
Furthermore, you're assuming that only the enrolled students are downloading the book. Why is that? I know of people who download books just to have them around; they never read them, they just like having a bunch of e-books on topic X "just in case".
Data shows that good books will sell more physical copies if you give out free digital copies. It's counterintuitive, but it's difficult to argue with hard numbers. This applies to good textbooks, too.
Seriously, this is possibly the most ridiculous thing I've ever read. If anyone really needed proof that the MPAA doesn't care about consumers in any way, look no further.
And since high schools are essentially a glorified legally mandated babysitting service, it's unlikely that they will disappear as well.
So really, if anyone is going to do this it will probably be community colleges, but I still don't see any motivation for it. There are certain things that you just can't do with teleconferenced lectures. Testing is much more difficult, accepting homework is much more difficult (assuming it's not just a series of essays), and helping struggling students becomes more difficult as well.
This professor sounds like he has never taken or taught a correspondence course. It's nice being able to learn/teach at a distance, but these types of courses carry their own difficulties.
University professors tend to be resistant to change. This is why 99% of classes feature enormous lecture halls, a mode popularized by the ancient Greeks, when there are other lecture styles that have been proven to be more effective. There are countless other examples of universities being lower on the learning curve.
2020 he claims, but how long will it take for universities to actually implement video classrooms, and what motivates them to do this? There are a few universities that have published lectures on the internet, but in most cases it's unnecessary.
Perhaps general introductory courses can become obsolete due to their very generic qualities, but higher courses and graduate courses will still need to be taught in person. Each university tends to teach its students in different ways, choosing which subjects might be important from an infinite wealth of information, and no one can agree on which way is best. Thus, it will take much more than a mere 11 years for classrooms to become truly obsolete.
And as someone else pointed out, I don't know of a single truly paperless office, yet such a thing was supposed to become reality a decade ago.
If the maximum fee for exceeding the cap is $75, then what prevents someone from ordering the cheapest plan ($29.95) and going over the limit as much as they want? If you really plan on downloading 500GB per month, it would be cheaper to order the cheapest plan and exceed the limit than to order the priciest plan, since the maximum fee is the same anyway.
Unless the slashdot post was just poorly worded, of course
You're confused. The scientists there are conducting experiments for the sake of science. That is pure science.
The people who fund them see the benefit. That does not, however, make the science "impure". It just means that there are additional reasons for conducting these experiments.
They're observing nuclear fusion. That is as pure as science gets.
You don't seem to understand how little land use Solar would actually use. The entire nation could be powered by solar 24 hrs/day (using storage obviously) with plenty to spare if we used only 1% of land deemed "arid wasteland" in the southwest. In other words, it's land that nobody wants and that nobody can even use unless you want to build a highway through it.
Plop down some high voltage DC lines (nearly lossless long distance transmission) and you're done. No fuel, just mirrors and cheap synthetic oils (ie solar troughs). The best mirror lab in the world is already located in the southwest (Arizona), so very little infrastructure would need to be developed in order to actually build a large scale solar power plant. Nobody wants to fund such an effort because it's trendy to support fission even when better alternatives are available (solar cost/kWh dipped below fission recently).
I don't think this means that we should neglect other energy research, it's just sad that solar power is so misunderstood. The cost/kWh has dipped below fission, for christ's sake.
that ONLY work on internet explorer for some stupid reason
Once enough Jim Bobs send pissed off e-mails places that require Internet Explorer, maybe they'll finally allow the rest of us to use ONLY something else
Safari is awful. Please try other web browsers before you spread more misinformation
And don't forget that there were numerous songs that were simply unavailable on certain albums. Particularly notorious cases would let you download 3 unpopular songs from an album, but the rest would be unavailable.
It was pretty ridiculous
Seriously? If you really use Linux, you should know how to remove DRM by now.
DRM + ads = free music, which is fantastic
Keep in mind, the Apple Store also uses ads and DRM, albeit not as much anymore. The only real problems with Ruckus had to do with the poor client software (which wasn't that buggy, it just had a poor layout).
Your claim of a monetary conflict in interest is completely illogical. Even if the experiment cost trillions of dollars, if it had a decent chance of destroying the world it would never be activated. Your life's work is meaningless if the world is destroyed by it.
"never-before-seen" is inaccurate: in man-made colliders that's true, but nature has been making collisions at energies several orders of magnitude greater than this since the beginning of time. By comparison, what we're doing at the LHC is commonplace.
You may ask why we need to build a collider at all, but it's because detecting such high energy particle collisions is made easier if you build your own. This way you know exactly where the collisions are occurring, the center of mass energy, and you can construct your detector appropriately.
Having done the math, read the papers, and attended the seminars, I'm confident that the LHC will do nothing more than what nature hasn't done already. If there was any chance of the LHC destroying the world, we wouldn't be having this conversation today. There are countless very real, very carefully conducted studies and experiments, some of which were even contributed by the astronomy community, indicating approximately 0 chance of the LHC destroying the world. The same studies were conducted when we built the Tevatron, and the same concerns were raised; we don't KNOW what will happen, but we're almost 100% certain that it won't be bad.
That's the difference between you and I. Whereas you are completely certain that I lack expertise on the subject and "blinded" myself to logic, I'm at least willing to admit that nothing in life is a complete certainty. The only certain things in life are death and taxes.
And please don't compare the LHC to a centrifuge. The LHC is as much like a centrifuge as a NASCAR track.
In summary: Take your ignorant self-righteousness elsewhere. Your assumption that I'm listening to LHC physicists, my colleagues, because they "wear lab coats" (which isn't even true) is not only insulting but outright moronic.
I don't even know what else to say. Your response was just so... stupid. It's wise to ask questions, but to ignore evidence? You were clearly given a large brain by mistake.
Everything has a finite probability. There is a finite probability that I'll teleport across the room the next time that I want a coffee break. It's a virtual impossibility, but it has a finite probability.
A better example is using thermodynamics. There's a finite probability that all of the oxygen in a room clumps up in one corner of the room. It's still a probability that is approximately zero.
10^-999999999999 is a finite number, but it still may as well be 0
But you have to remember how much energy was required to produce that black hole. The LHC isn't exactly an efficient way of doing that.
The starting mass of the black hole is based on the energy you put into colliding the particles, which you've already expended. I think it's dubious that you'd ever get out as much energy as you put into the creation of an artificial black hole, and that's assuming you could make it big enough to interact with anything, keep it in place and extract energy from it in an efficient way.
Means that there is a much greater than zero probability? Sorry, either the paper is wrong or your interpretation of it is wrong. Publishing a probability is not a determination of that probability.
There is no published figure regarding the probability of your computer turning into chocolate pudding before it reaches warranty. The probability is still approximately zero despite that.
The probability of a black hole at the LHC swallowing the Earth is approximately zero, and it doesn't matter how many sensationalist journalists try to misconstrue real science in an effort to drum up sales.
Why would she even do this? They're NOTES. I could understand if she didn't want you giving finished tests to future students, but notes?
They're hopefully getting the same or similar lectures, and thus approximately the same notes. If future students want to borrow/copy/purchase old notes, it's to their detriment anyway.
I guarantee that 99%, probably 100%, of the content in those notes is
1) Freely available on the internet under public license in various forms
2) Available in the class textbook that they have to purchase anyway
3) Available in notes/homeworks/tests that other students/professors have posted on the internet
This is such a stupid thing to demand of students that it's not even funny. And isn't it the middle of the semester? Won't you be using those notes for homework and tests?
This makes no sense and it's illegal. If she doesn't get fired for this it will be amazing.
it's still something I'd hope somebody would have thought of before trying to switch the machine on.
We've thought of it
We're good to go
I love seeing all of the non-scientists coming out of the wood work, eager to show off their lack of knowledge.
Rather than ask questions to better understand the situation, let's use hyperbole and conjecture based on our gut feelings! HOORAY FOR SCIENCE!
Possibly, potentially, maybe, under certain conditions, they might be longer lived than expected. They still can't grow.
This needs to be modded up, it's only 4 right now. Longer lifetime noninteracting black holes are still non-interacting