I wonder what the judge thinks this will do to the tens, if not hundreds of thousands who already have the software?
It will get a story posted on/., prompting millions of users to simultaneously fire up their existing KaZaA software to see if the network is still up, thus melting the servers and shutting down the network...
I found the article kind of sensationalist. I mean, I'm sure there are physicsists who act like that, and I'm not surprised these are the ones that make it into newspaper articles. But I don't think most physicists are so violently opposed to each other's ideas.
I mean, okay, most of us are at least a little arrogant. We're revealing the secrets of the Universe -- how could our heads not swell, at least a little? But for most of us it's a little tongue-in-cheek, too.
Now the ideas in the article intrigue me. I'm in Particle Physics, and I was indeed under the impression that fundamental particles are, well, fundamental. The idea that this could all be quasi-particles ("effervescence in the vacuum" as the article puts it) like phonons (the sound equivalent of photons) in matter, is really cool.
I will agree with this much: there isn't enough discussion between the various disciplines. Scientists in general need to talk to each other more.
As an Experimental Particle Physicist, I can attest to this. We've already determined Murphy's Law is fundamental to nature; just ask any experimentalist. It's just not something we like to admit.:)
I've used PAW quite a bit for my work. It's quite effective at stuff, but the documentation is abyssmal. I found it really really painful to learn, and as a result I didn't get very far into it.
Something almost as hard to learn but somewhat easier to actually use is Physica, developed at TRIUMF. It's the main program I used to do my M.Sc. analysis work.:)
For data aquisition (and generally running an experiment), I strongly suggest looking into MIDAS. It's really powerful, and has a web interface (with optional password protection), electronic log book, etc, which is really helpful for experimenters to keep tabs on things from home. Especially when "home" is in another city (or even country).
Incidentally, K2K is sort of the other half of Super-K's job. It's an experiment where the KEK accellerator creates a neutrino beam and fires it through Japan (through the ground, through towns, farmers' fields, through the Japanese people...) at Super-K. The nice thing about neutrino beams is that you know what you're starting with and you can control the rate.
(I imagine it's probably also kind of hard to aim, since neutrinos are so hard to see in the first place... They have a "front detector" at KEK which gives them an idea of how many neutrinos they're starting with, and I think where they're shooting them. KEK and Super-K are 250 km apart, so even a slight miss can have a big impact on whether they hit Super-K or not, I think.)
I see that The Tea Party's new CD is listed among the broken ones. I've seen tracks from it available on filesharing networks for a couple of weeks, at least. Obviously it isn't terribly effective.
On the other hand, spotting those tracks is the reason I know they've got a new disk out. Because somebody ripped the tracks and distributed them, The Tea Party has made a new sale.:)
I think Ice Cube can measure neutrinos with much higher energy than SNO can. I'm having a hard time finding SNO's energy range on their site, so someone in the know should please correct me, but it seems IceCube can measure well into the 100 TeV range -- that's about a thousand to a million times higher than SNO measures (I think SNO only gets up into the GeV's, but again I"m not sure; this is coming from my poor memory of some of the
neutrino talks I've been to).
At this energy, IceCube is then sensitive to all three types of neutrinos (e, mu, and tau); SNO can only see the first two, because the tau lepton (that the neutrino has to turn into to be detected) is so huge it's way outside SNO's energy range.
I know that SNO has about 9600 phototubes, and IceCube has about 5000, so SNO might be a bit more accurate for this reason.
Besides that, IceCube is huge. SNO is a sphere 12 metres across, or just under 2000 cubic metres. IceCube is a cubic kilometer, or 1000000 cubic metres. So it'll see a whole lot more neutrinos! (This may be related to why IceCube has a higher energy range.)
Doesn't the fact that increased traffic causes you to lose money faster tell you something?
I don't run/., of course, but it tells me that bandwith costs money, and more traffic requires more bandwidth. It also tells me that the cost of bandwidth goes up faster than the ad revenue goes up when traffic rises.
If you have no money, you run a smaller site.
If you have no money, it means nobody can see your site because your servers are melting and you can't afford to upgrade them. It means you pay someone for bandwidth and hit their monthly N GB transfer limit in about 30 seconds. I guess the site might start to shrink after a while, if nobody can get at it, but that'd take a while. (The site goes down for days at a time, as it is; I bet traffic hardly drops even though no pages are coming out!) One option would be to just unplug the site for a few months, then plug it back in and don't tell anybody. But as soon as word got out, traffic'd spike back up pretty quickly -- you'd slashdot slashdot!
I use FVWM2 as my window manager of choice. It's fast. It gives me amazing and easily-customizeable control over everything. What's "weak" about it? What more do you need in a window manager? (I've never found myself saying "I wish FVWM could do foo...")
I'm not trying to disagree with you or berate you or flame you or anything. I'm honestly curious -- what's FVWM2 missing? What's wrong with it? What would you do to it?
I recently aquired a 90 MHz Pentium laptop with 40 MB RAM. I put Mandrake 7.2 on it. Granted, the graphical install choked on me (and text mode needs some work), but once I got what I needed on there and what I *didn't* need off there, it just flew. I was using FVWM2, same as on my 500 MHz desktop box. I was using it as my main office machine on a network for the last couple of months, so the serious number-crunching took place on other machines:) but I ran things like emacs and Netscape and LaTeX (metafont took its sweet time), and it felt more responsive than the RH system the guy next to me was using. (He had a P166 or something. But he was using KDE and stuff.) Wrote almost my entire MSc thesis on that thing.
The point is, if you pay attention to what you're using, it can be blazingly fast on really old machines. (I'd avoid StarOffice and its ilk, though...)
I've seen a lot of posts on here about how email is "so much easier" than treemail, and that we (yes, me included) are more than willing to sent piles of email but are too lazy to actually sent a piece of paper.
What's the difference? Why can't we take that email we just wrote, paste it into Abiword/ Staroffice/ LaTeX/ whatever, print it and stuff it in an envelope? You don't even need postage! (Well, in Canada, anyway.)
A number of people have posted the emails they "just sent" to whatever political group or news site or whatever. There have been a lot of great comments explaining exactly what the problem is with DMCA or whatever. Print those and mail them off. It's not that hard.
Sympathy matters
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I don't know if this is the right place to say this, but I don't know of a better one...
I'm a Canadian, but I've been as shaken up by all this as if I were American. The horror of what happened is independent of nation -- everybody (or almost everybody) on the entire planet was hurt by this. I can't imagine what the people in New York and Washington are going through, but I know it's a horrifying thing without anything resembling rational explantion.
Here in Edmonton, all flags are flying at half mast -- not just on government buildings, but anybody who has a flag is doing the same. In the Provincial Legislature Building, there are books that people are signing to express their condolences to America and tell you that you're not alone. A moment of silence has been recommended for 10am today.
Similar things are happening around the world.
And it matters. I was talking to an Arizonan friend of mine last night. We got to talking about all the ways the world is reaching out, about how people are trying to express their shock and horror and outrage all over the world, and she cried. She told me to tell everyone I could that it matters -- the books are not being signed in vain, the half-mast flags are being seen, the sympathy is felt.
I actually find it very useful to call GUI apps from the command line. It's really handy to be able to pass command line arguements so you don't have to wade through menus and dialogs to get it to do what you want.
Examples of useful command-line calls:
netscape foo.html
gimp mypicture.jpg
gv -seascape bar.ps
kpackage someprog.rpm
emacs adocument.tex
I agree that it's good to have these things in menus and such, but please don't take away ready command line access. As others have pointed out, having stuff in $PATH doesn't hurt anything.
"Unused rooms"? Here at TRIUMF we're surrounded by ancient junk. Some of it isn't identifiable. Some of it's still functional, but often the only way to find out is to turn it on. Some of it was built for some one-shot experiment. It's not uncommon to go scrounging around the place looking for something vaguely resembling the part you need, then attaching it to your apparatus with cable ties or duct tape. (And I can honestly say parts of my MSc experiment were held together with duct tape. Other parts with electrical tape -- and I don't mean wires.) Hey, it's typically a whole lot faster and cheaper than waiting for the overworked machine shop to build you something.
Of course, the really scary thing is the amount of ancient artifacts still in *use*... the control computers for the cyclotron itself apparently just got upgraded to VMS about four years ago...
Others detect a hidden agenda: an attempt by big business to stifle some of the cultural empowerment that the Internet represents.
I find this amusing. There's nothing hidden about this agenda -- stifling "cultural empowerment" (ie. empowerment of people other than corporations) is exactly what they're trying to do. They say so themselves, in several quotes in the article. (The author seems to lean somewhat toward the opinions of the business folk, too, which I find odd/unsettling...)
Does anybody remembers when exactly it all has started? The first game I remember is Wofenstein 3d, and is worse than Doom, but not that much. IMHO Doom is a better milestone than Quake.
Doom and Wolf3D are great milestones, but I was playing First-Person-Shooter type games as far back as the TRS-80 (Dungeons of Daggorath -- First person POV, wireframe graphics, and you move a cell at a time like Ultima or something). Granted, there wasn't any real shooting, but...
An even better example might be Stellar 7 or its ilk; the game where you're driving a tank around shooting up enemy tanks and cubes and things.:)
Quote the article: "Gracenote... sought to trademark a generic acronym (CDDB) by misleading the U.S. Trademark Office..."
And in their IP notice at the bottom: "...and Toast are trademarks of Roxio, Inc...." (emphasis mine)
I think they're two different situations (the generic term CDDB does apply to what Gracenote is trying to trademark it for, whereas Roxio's Toast is something different), but it's still funny.:)
...they wondered what Linux or *BSD would be like if there were some system for everyone who contributes to be compensated.
First of all, if everyone who contributed were paid cash (somehow), there would be a lot of people doing this just for the money. There would be less "itch-scratching" and more writing whatever would bring in the most cash. Probably lots more "marketing", too -- pushing to get your code included in whatever just because it means more cash for you.
Second, and more importantly, everyone who contributes does get compensated, just not (usually) in money. The compensation is in the form of: (a) having a huge and powerful system of software that you can use for Free, and that works well; (b) having people improve upon your code (and typically giving the improvements back to you, regardless of what license you used); and (c) the satisfaction that other people are finding your code as useful you did (or more!).
Ah, yes -- protons with as much energy as a thrown baseball...:)
These things are really really cool. You may be interested in the ALTA project -- they're putting cosmic ray detectors on the tops of high schools across Alberta, and letting the students there run them. The idea is to have a huge area over which to detect these things; they're pretty rare.
They're pretty mysterious, too. Nobody's really sure what sort of mechanism would throw off particles with this much energy. And it's not like we can just look up in the direction they came from, either -- the galaxy has a very slight magnetic field (but we don't know it that well), which bends the paths of charged particles (most cosmic rays), so the direction they hit the Earth from isn't the direction they really came from...
Nobody's "carefully avoiding" anything with either the SuperK or SNO results. These experiments were designed to measure neutrino oscillations. There's no way they could have designed these experiments to measure the absolute mass of a neutrino.
There isn't some great conspiracy to cover up funny results, either. If it was shown that neutrino mass was imaginary, to a high degree of certainty (and having error bars not covering zero doesn't cut it by itself), physicists would go "huh, that's funny", try and measure it again, and if it was shown true just accept it and move on. The rest of quantum mechanics is so weird, I don't think anyone would have that much trouble buying the idea of imaginary mass...
Electrons are light enough that they travel at the speed of light at relatively low momenta. The experiment I'm working with will do most of its work at 30 MeV, and for all intents and purposes the electrons (which have a mass of 0.5 MeV) are moving at c (well, 0.99986*c). So basically they move at the speed of light in the vast majority of accellerators, with the exception of picture tubes.:)
Nope. The neutrino has a whole bunch of energy, though. That energy "looks like" mass because of E = mc^2. A lot of the mass in a proton or a neutron comes from the energy holding them together, and the neutrino takes some of that away in the reaction you're talking about.
So in that sense, a neutrino has mass, in that it has energy. But this result is saying a neutrino has rest mass -- if you were to (somehow) stop the neutrino, so that it had no kinetic energy, it would still have mass, just like an electron.
They don't want to include neutrino mass in the calculations because it really does make things easier. And it works incredibly well -- which is why it was so hard to prove they have any mass at all. Hell, most of the time we assume electrons are massless. Protons, sometimes, too... Actually, you'd be rather surprised how big something's mass can be before we're forced to say "that has mass" in some of these calculations.
In physics, almost everything is an approximation.:)
Slashdot Mirror
It will get a story posted on /., prompting millions of users to simultaneously fire up their existing KaZaA software to see if the network is still up, thus melting the servers and shutting down the network...
I mean, okay, most of us are at least a little arrogant. We're revealing the secrets of the Universe -- how could our heads not swell, at least a little? But for most of us it's a little tongue-in-cheek, too.
Now the ideas in the article intrigue me. I'm in Particle Physics, and I was indeed under the impression that fundamental particles are, well, fundamental. The idea that this could all be quasi-particles ("effervescence in the vacuum" as the article puts it) like phonons (the sound equivalent of photons) in matter, is really cool.
I will agree with this much: there isn't enough discussion between the various disciplines. Scientists in general need to talk to each other more.
As an Experimental Particle Physicist, I can attest to this. We've already determined Murphy's Law is fundamental to nature; just ask any experimentalist. It's just not something we like to admit. :)
Something almost as hard to learn but somewhat easier to actually use is Physica, developed at TRIUMF. It's the main program I used to do my M.Sc. analysis work. :)
For data aquisition (and generally running an experiment), I strongly suggest looking into MIDAS. It's really powerful, and has a web interface (with optional password protection), electronic log book, etc, which is really helpful for experimenters to keep tabs on things from home. Especially when "home" is in another city (or even country).
(I imagine it's probably also kind of hard to aim, since neutrinos are so hard to see in the first place... They have a "front detector" at KEK which gives them an idea of how many neutrinos they're starting with, and I think where they're shooting them. KEK and Super-K are 250 km apart, so even a slight miss can have a big impact on whether they hit Super-K or not, I think.)
I'm not kidding. See, for example, this article.
On the other hand, spotting those tracks is the reason I know they've got a new disk out. Because somebody ripped the tracks and distributed them, The Tea Party has made a new sale. :)
At this energy, IceCube is then sensitive to all three types of neutrinos (e, mu, and tau); SNO can only see the first two, because the tau lepton (that the neutrino has to turn into to be detected) is so huge it's way outside SNO's energy range.
I know that SNO has about 9600 phototubes, and IceCube has about 5000, so SNO might be a bit more accurate for this reason.
Besides that, IceCube is huge. SNO is a sphere 12 metres across, or just under 2000 cubic metres. IceCube is a cubic kilometer, or 1000000 cubic metres. So it'll see a whole lot more neutrinos! (This may be related to why IceCube has a higher energy range.)
I don't run /., of course, but it tells me that bandwith costs money, and more traffic requires more bandwidth. It also tells me that the cost of bandwidth goes up faster than the ad revenue goes up when traffic rises.
If you have no money, you run a smaller site.
If you have no money, it means nobody can see your site because your servers are melting and you can't afford to upgrade them. It means you pay someone for bandwidth and hit their monthly N GB transfer limit in about 30 seconds. I guess the site might start to shrink after a while, if nobody can get at it, but that'd take a while. (The site goes down for days at a time, as it is; I bet traffic hardly drops even though no pages are coming out!) One option would be to just unplug the site for a few months, then plug it back in and don't tell anybody. But as soon as word got out, traffic'd spike back up pretty quickly -- you'd slashdot slashdot!
I'm not trying to disagree with you or berate you or flame you or anything. I'm honestly curious -- what's FVWM2 missing? What's wrong with it? What would you do to it?
The point is, if you pay attention to what you're using, it can be blazingly fast on really old machines. (I'd avoid StarOffice and its ilk, though...)
What's the difference? Why can't we take that email we just wrote, paste it into Abiword/ Staroffice/ LaTeX/ whatever, print it and stuff it in an envelope? You don't even need postage! (Well, in Canada, anyway.)
A number of people have posted the emails they "just sent" to whatever political group or news site or whatever. There have been a lot of great comments explaining exactly what the problem is with DMCA or whatever. Print those and mail them off. It's not that hard.
I'm a Canadian, but I've been as shaken up by all this as if I were American. The horror of what happened is independent of nation -- everybody (or almost everybody) on the entire planet was hurt by this. I can't imagine what the people in New York and Washington are going through, but I know it's a horrifying thing without anything resembling rational explantion.
Here in Edmonton, all flags are flying at half mast -- not just on government buildings, but anybody who has a flag is doing the same. In the Provincial Legislature Building, there are books that people are signing to express their condolences to America and tell you that you're not alone. A moment of silence has been recommended for 10am today.
Similar things are happening around the world.
And it matters. I was talking to an Arizonan friend of mine last night. We got to talking about all the ways the world is reaching out, about how people are trying to express their shock and horror and outrage all over the world, and she cried. She told me to tell everyone I could that it matters -- the books are not being signed in vain, the half-mast flags are being seen, the sympathy is felt.
It's as important as donating to the Red Cross.
Examples of useful command-line calls:
I agree that it's good to have these things in menus and such, but please don't take away ready command line access. As others have pointed out, having stuff in $PATH doesn't hurt anything.
Of course, the really scary thing is the amount of ancient artifacts still in *use*... the control computers for the cyclotron itself apparently just got upgraded to VMS about four years ago...
I find this amusing. There's nothing hidden about this agenda -- stifling "cultural empowerment" (ie. empowerment of people other than corporations) is exactly what they're trying to do. They say so themselves, in several quotes in the article. (The author seems to lean somewhat toward the opinions of the business folk, too, which I find odd/unsettling...)
-Erf C.
I don't suppose that's where that weird-seeming cheat code came from, eh?
(It troubles me that I actually remember it...)
-Erf C.
Doom and Wolf3D are great milestones, but I was playing First-Person-Shooter type games as far back as the TRS-80 (Dungeons of Daggorath -- First person POV, wireframe graphics, and you move a cell at a time like Ultima or something). Granted, there wasn't any real shooting, but...
An even better example might be Stellar 7 or its ilk; the game where you're driving a tank around shooting up enemy tanks and cubes and things. :)
-Erf C.
And in their IP notice at the bottom: "...and Toast are trademarks of Roxio, Inc...." (emphasis mine)
I think they're two different situations (the generic term CDDB does apply to what Gracenote is trying to trademark it for, whereas Roxio's Toast is something different), but it's still funny. :)
-Erf C.
First of all, if everyone who contributed were paid cash (somehow), there would be a lot of people doing this just for the money. There would be less "itch-scratching" and more writing whatever would bring in the most cash. Probably lots more "marketing", too -- pushing to get your code included in whatever just because it means more cash for you.
Second, and more importantly, everyone who contributes does get compensated, just not (usually) in money. The compensation is in the form of: (a) having a huge and powerful system of software that you can use for Free, and that works well; (b) having people improve upon your code (and typically giving the improvements back to you, regardless of what license you used); and (c) the satisfaction that other people are finding your code as useful you did (or more!).
-Erf C.
These things are really really cool. You may be interested in the ALTA project -- they're putting cosmic ray detectors on the tops of high schools across Alberta, and letting the students there run them. The idea is to have a huge area over which to detect these things; they're pretty rare.
They're pretty mysterious, too. Nobody's really sure what sort of mechanism would throw off particles with this much energy. And it's not like we can just look up in the direction they came from, either -- the galaxy has a very slight magnetic field (but we don't know it that well), which bends the paths of charged particles (most cosmic rays), so the direction they hit the Earth from isn't the direction they really came from...
-Erf C.
There isn't some great conspiracy to cover up funny results, either. If it was shown that neutrino mass was imaginary, to a high degree of certainty (and having error bars not covering zero doesn't cut it by itself), physicists would go "huh, that's funny", try and measure it again, and if it was shown true just accept it and move on. The rest of quantum mechanics is so weird, I don't think anyone would have that much trouble buying the idea of imaginary mass...
-Erf C.
Electrons are light enough that they travel at the speed of light at relatively low momenta. The experiment I'm working with will do most of its work at 30 MeV, and for all intents and purposes the electrons (which have a mass of 0.5 MeV) are moving at c (well, 0.99986*c). So basically they move at the speed of light in the vast majority of accellerators, with the exception of picture tubes. :)
-Erf C.
So in that sense, a neutrino has mass, in that it has energy. But this result is saying a neutrino has rest mass -- if you were to (somehow) stop the neutrino, so that it had no kinetic energy, it would still have mass, just like an electron.
-Erf C.
In physics, almost everything is an approximation. :)
-Erf C.