the obvious solution here is to add an extra step...
Click here if you see the appropriate security image THEN, AND ONLY THEN, give the user the opportunity to enter their password. Of course, you give the user an 800 number just in case they don't see their image.
Wow, that sounds like a good idea actually. Why don't they do this? One extra click isn't too bad. And maybe (though only maybe) you could hide a option in the settings on the bank page to put it back to like it is now. Someone who can find that option, could probably understand the system well enough. BoA exec and tech people, think about this!
In my field of high energy physics, there is a large need for good programmers who know some science. Almost all of my work involves writing code to try to solve a specific physics problem. You're experience in this would probably give you a nice advantage over a lot of us who are learning to code as we go. And even though it is just writing code, there is something satisfying about writing code to solve your own problems that you are interested in, not just writing code to make a buck.
Also, I know when I was taking my classes in physics as an undergrad, there were several people in your situation. People who wanted to get into a new field at 30 or 40 and picked physics. I would say try to find a field that your coding skills will shine in, but where you can use them in a way that doesn't bore you to tears. You're experience should serve you well.
Of course you may be taking a pay cut starting in a new field and all....
I would recomend that once you have a playable prototype, look into some local (or non-local if you're serious) gaming conventions. A lot of these have events for YOU. Everyone brings in a game they have designed, it is play tested, and voted on. Winner gets the game developed or something. Well the details can vary but look into it. Not to mention you could just set up your own, independent game and get lots of feedback from people. It might help smooth out some rough spots. Plus there may be booths set up where you could talk to some reps from publishing companies. At least as much as 'hey, who should I write to in your company about a new game'.
I know there is a big gaming Con in Denver Colorado, and Columbus Ohio. But there are undoubtedly more.
You forget that during proton acceleration that yes, each atom is accelerated to 7TeV, however there are about a billion protons in per 'bunch' (group of protons that get accelerated together in a tight packet to make colliding with one of them easier). In addition, there are a lot (I don't remember the number off the top of my head, but hundreds-thousands sounds right, of bunches. The number I do remember is that the total energy of the beam is about 350MJ. That is a LOT of energy even on a macroscopic scale, especially if it were to all hit at one place over the course of a fraction of a second.
There is about 1 GJ of energy stored in the magnet when it is at full strength. I don't remember my TNT converstions, but admitedly that is a lot. The energy is disapated through resistors and that heat is dumped into a LOT of mass all while actively cooling everything. Here is a pretty picture of the current as a function of time during the test (notice how fast it was shut down)
http://jenni.web.cern.ch/jenni/BT.9Nov06.jpg/
The axis are in amps and minutes by the way. And yes, that is ~20,000 amps.
As another intresting LHC note, the magnets in the accerator store ~11GJ of energy which is disapated into something like 50 tonns of steel. This is (breaking out the obscure unit conversions) the energy of something like 40 bullet trains traveling at full speed, or a nuclear aircraft carrier traveling at full speed. The energy stored in the actual beam of protons is also not anywhere near negligible and systems had to be designed to dump all of this energy as well.
IAAPP. Just so no one freaks out over this (as they so often do). The black holes that are getting created here will not destroy the earth. First off the theory tells us that black holes with less than, say the mass of the earth, will dissapate and dissapear (this is one of the things we are looking for). So for those of you thinking, what if they are wrong, I present the second argument. The experiment we are trying to set up at ATLAS and the Large Hadron Collider to smash really high energy particles together is done in nature every day. Cosmic rays smash into the earth's upper atmosphere with WAY more energy than we can every hope to achive here in Switzerland. If we can make black holes here, then many have been made in the upper atmosphere. The problem is that they are hard to observe way up there, occurring at random chance. However the fact that the earth is still here is damn good evidence that the back holes don't grow and destroy the earth when they are created.
Axis & Allies. Or AAA the open source version being developed at sf.net. It's like risk but biger, longer, more complicated, and with way cooler looking pieces. Seriously, try it out if you like RISK.
You may not like the stupid yellow foam earplugs, but there are better alternitves. Check out http://earplugstore.stores.yahoo.net/profmusearpl1 .html for instance. The idea is that they are both more comforatble and allow you to hear better even while reducing the volume. All of the musicians I have mixed for LOVE them and I've tried them and found them to be much more comfortable than regular foam plugs. In fact, I find having a large headset on, is uncomfortable for long periods and adds strain to your neck. Check them out, they aren't too expensive. (and I have no affilation with this paticular store, it's just the first site I found)
Any objects which are light enough to be put in orbit in such quantities will be blown to hell and gone off orbit by the light itself in 2-3 months. Nasa already did the experiment 20+ years back with an inflatable aluminium foil sphere and there was a similar experiment prepared by amateurs to be launched on a converted Russian ICBM lately (it failed at launch).
Since this is/. and no one reads the article let me explain. These are suppose to be more like lenses than mirrors, the idea being to defocus the light so that most of it will miss the earth and travel around it. From a conservation of momentum point of view, this means that you are not reflecting a photon and gaining twice it's momentum, but rather bending it slightly so only gaining a fraction of its momentum.
The plan is to put them at a Lagrange point and the article claims it will last about 50 years before being blown off course. I do imagine that they have taken solar wind into account.
This is not to say that this is a good idea, just that at first glance, solar wind should be less of an issue than you might think.
...been waiting for over a year for the software to be released
It is not like this is anything unusual though. Remember the switch from version.59 to.60? That took ages and ages as well, but the result was SO SO worth it. That was when gaim, in my opinion, went from being an ok IM client to being one I actually would use by choice on any platform. Now you could argue that instead of very slow released with tons of changes, that they should try to make more, less substantial changes to the code.
In fact, it's reminding me of Vista's development. Very little information, and feature scale backs
Unlike windows, this is open source, all of the information is sitting there in the CVS commits. If you want faster releases, go compile the code yourself (or find someone to do it for you http://geddeth.dk/downloads/gaim/) and use it. Much like the transition from.59 to.60 there have been many, very stable betas to help end the frustration of waiting. Both times, impatant users like myself, went and compiled the code for ourselves and were happy. In addition, the gaim developers have become more verbose about what work they have been doing (planet gaim) which is a good thing as well. Now as long as release 2.5 doesn't take 2 years more, we should (hopefully) have voice and video support one of these days too.
In any case, gaim is great piece of software and I'm enjoying using the beta4. If you haven't downloaded it, go try!
IAAPP. If (and at the moment this is the big question) they can achieve injection, in other words take electrons, accelerate them, insert them to another device and accelerate them again etc etc, then they may be able to create a 'wavefield ring. However there are other limitations to this. Curving the beam of electrons will cause them to accelerate in towards the center of the circle. A charged particle that is accelerating radiates photons (gamma rays) whichs causes it to loose energy. At some point the energy you loose going around the corner is larger than the energy gain from going through the accelerator and you can't push them any faster. In addition, to curve the particles signifigantly requires BIG magnets which are also expensive and, well, big. Seeing as these things are so short, a linear chain of them would probably be a better bet. Think if you had 2 (or 20) miles of these things lined up...
my question for any other particle physicists out there is this: Does anyone know how well polarized the electon beam is?
I did my undergraduate work at Ohio State. In my opinion it is a very good physics school. They just built a brand new physics building. The goal of this was to be able to facilitate more and better physics research. The grad students I know there seem to have benifited well from this also. If you're not planning on going to as school like MIT or Cal-Tech, but are looking at a large public school, I highly recomend OSU for physics. OSU has a big ATLAS group who are working on the pixel detector. If you want to talk to some of the professors there I would recomend K Gan or R. Kass. They both are very friendly and should respond to your e-mails about the graduate program there. In addition the computing program at the OSU physics department is top notch (good for us HEP ppl). The only downside is that OSU is a huge school with lots of politics. The physics department can shield you from lots of this though. If you have any questions you can drop me an email. I'm a grad student at Iowa State now so it is @iastate.edu with the same u/n as on./
If I recall back from my classes, at the start of the universe matter and energy flipped back and forth all of the time. However the universe was expanding, some of the energy went to inflating the universe. Sort of how when you lower the pressure in a volume, you lower the temp as well. So the energy (photons) couldn't switch back to matter. Going one step more, matter can only convert back to energy when it hits antimatter (more or less). This is where the article comes in. If you can flip between matter and anti-matter, and if you can find, for instance, that antimatter may flip to matter a bit faster or some other asymetry, you can start to explain things.
if aliens are approaching the earth and we want to know whether we are made of matter or anti-matter, there are tests we can ask them to run inside their ship that will answer the question. It is not necessary to send any matter down from the ship to see if it explodes
Unless the aliens are also traveling backwards in time and made of antimatter. Then we're screwed.
(actually there IS another part of CP called T which is time reversal, and is theorized to always cancle out the CP violation in the math)
Working as a physicist on the 'one in Geneva', there are a few answers to your question.
First bigger is better. Although we haven't even turned on the LHC (large hadron collider)it isn't hard to imagine that at some point down the road we will reach the limit of what we can easily study here (much like fermilab is now). Do you realize just how long it actually takes to design, build, and get one of these things running? Decades really. And that isn't to mention the time spent just trying to lobby for funding. In effect we need to start now if we don't want to spend 5 years sitting on our asses waiting for construction. And you don't really want 5000 physicist, bored and with nothing to do?
Secondly, the LHC is a ring collider. This means that it has a large circle that it accelerates the particles in. While this has some advantages in that it is easier to run at high energies, there are disadvantages as well. One of the larger problems is polarization of the incoming particles. Basicly spinning particles in a circle randomizes the spin direction which makes it very hard to study. There are some clever tricks to get around this (Check out 'spin flippers' at RHIC) but a linear collider can study this much more precisely.
Another reason for a new collider is that it will collide different particles. Leptons not Hadrons for you physics geeks out there. Again the idea is that it will be harder to achive the same energy but the results will have much less error (roughly speaking). The idea of the NLC (next linear collider) is to be able to study in much more detail some very subtle effects that will be lost in noise at the LHC. And by noise I don't mean noise due to poor construction, but noise due to quantum mechanics.
A last reason to build the NLC in the US and not Geneva is that all of us American's are flocking to Geneva (Yes I'm one of them). We jokingly call CERN the american brain drain. It would be good for american science as a whole I do belive to employ more of us locally.
Arg, but it is late here and if I made any serious physics errors reguarding the LHC or NLC I appologize. Also this is a very hand waving sort of argument, very light on the details, take it as such.
Maybe I am not using google base properly, but I find its navigation system awful. On the google base homepage for instance, there is no search box. Just a bunch of recomended search catagories. The first time I looked at the page I thought that those were all of the catagories available since there was no search box. However it seems that when you reload the page the categories refresh to something new. Now sure, I could go and mess with the URL untill I find the search I want, but how easy is that.
Do they actually expect any non-tech savy (read, the average ebay user) to be able to use this system effectively? Yes I realize it is in beta and likely to change and improve, but as it stands now, it isn't worth my time.
...as supernova are not well understood. First off I am not an astrophysicist, though I am a high energy physicist (and have taken some astro classes). One thing that has been discussed in nuclear classes I have taken is how little we understand just how a supernova functions at the atomic level. The number of competing effects going on during the collapse of a star is just amazing. You have gravitational pull, thermal pressure, rotational 'pressure', electromagnetic forces in a regular star. Now you start to collapse the star and you have to add in the transition of millions of individual nuclei becoming in effect one large nucleous as they all mearge. (not to mention the energy output from this). In effect the strong force comes into play along with the standard EM and gravitational forces. It gets much more complicated than that, but it has been several years since those classes.
So why do I think this is a 'good thing'? As the article speculates, it is likely that this supernova was different because of some rotational process or perhaps colliding stars, or some other exotic combination. This is exactly the sort of process that can be used as a test of supernova models to see how well they do. Over all I find this a very exciting observation and hopefully it produces more new science!
Oak Ridge Labs. The first nuclear reactor. The cesium forest. Nuclear airplane crash zone. Radioactive frogs. More too.
They actually even let you go visit the first two. The last three being failed experiments that are still a bit too hot for the everyday public. Kind of blew my mind when I first read about them. Just google for each with the prefix "oak ridge".
As a physicist though, the most interesting experiment there is the new Spallation Neutron Source http://www.sns.gov/ which is being finished (or is it done now I forget).
I tried out "Firefox, Opera, IE" and was hoping google would be cool enough that I would get a comparison of trafic from each of the browsers. No such luck. Come on all of you Google employies. One of you needs a 20% time project I'm sure. Put in a fun set of 'easter eggs' that catch browser traffic comparisons or platform traffic comparisons, or other specific comparisons for an appropriate search. I'm sure there are more interesting trends than just 'how many times did you search for x'.
If you are worried that someone will take your hard drive and try to read the valuable contents on it, I offer a simple, low tech solution. Switch the leads on the power connector! Its as simple as undoing a few screws and switching the 12V and ground leads. Two snips with the dikes, two drops of solder, and you're done. Screw everything back in place and appropriatly adjust the power connector coming out of your power supply.
Now I would recomend doing this long before you recieve any sort of court order so they can't claim you were tampering with evidence. When they go to plug your hard drive into the examining system *zap*. "sorry, um you never asked if my hardware was ATX compliant judge"
Note: I am not a lawyer and you should not think this would get you off the hook by any means. In fact frying the police department's computer may piss the judge off. Second, this will likely void your warnenty, fry your motherboard, ruin your hard drive, and end up in your death. But hey, this is slashdot, crackpot ideas on how to modify your hardware to screw the justice system seem right up our alley.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes! Great idea. I'll add my vote (since I'm out of mod points). Oh and Penny Arcade perfect for the artist. Gabe... PLEASE!
Also, I know when I was taking my classes in physics as an undergrad, there were several people in your situation. People who wanted to get into a new field at 30 or 40 and picked physics. I would say try to find a field that your coding skills will shine in, but where you can use them in a way that doesn't bore you to tears. You're experience should serve you well.
Of course you may be taking a pay cut starting in a new field and all....
I know there is a big gaming Con in Denver Colorado, and Columbus Ohio. But there are undoubtedly more.
There is no such thing as .084 seconds. Surely you mean .084 hours.
You forget that during proton acceleration that yes, each atom is accelerated to 7TeV, however there are about a billion protons in per 'bunch' (group of protons that get accelerated together in a tight packet to make colliding with one of them easier). In addition, there are a lot (I don't remember the number off the top of my head, but hundreds-thousands sounds right, of bunches. The number I do remember is that the total energy of the beam is about 350MJ. That is a LOT of energy even on a macroscopic scale, especially if it were to all hit at one place over the course of a fraction of a second.
Try http://jenni.web.cern.ch/jenni/BT.9Nov06.jpg
Bah, the muon detector 'big wheel' is way more impressive (: Ok, not that the magnets aren't cool too.
There is about 1 GJ of energy stored in the magnet when it is at full strength. I don't remember my TNT converstions, but admitedly that is a lot. The energy is disapated through resistors and that heat is dumped into a LOT of mass all while actively cooling everything. Here is a pretty picture of the current as a function of time during the test (notice how fast it was shut down) http://jenni.web.cern.ch/jenni/BT.9Nov06.jpg/ The axis are in amps and minutes by the way. And yes, that is ~20,000 amps. As another intresting LHC note, the magnets in the accerator store ~11GJ of energy which is disapated into something like 50 tonns of steel. This is (breaking out the obscure unit conversions) the energy of something like 40 bullet trains traveling at full speed, or a nuclear aircraft carrier traveling at full speed. The energy stored in the actual beam of protons is also not anywhere near negligible and systems had to be designed to dump all of this energy as well.
IAAPP. Just so no one freaks out over this (as they so often do). The black holes that are getting created here will not destroy the earth. First off the theory tells us that black holes with less than, say the mass of the earth, will dissapate and dissapear (this is one of the things we are looking for). So for those of you thinking, what if they are wrong, I present the second argument. The experiment we are trying to set up at ATLAS and the Large Hadron Collider to smash really high energy particles together is done in nature every day. Cosmic rays smash into the earth's upper atmosphere with WAY more energy than we can every hope to achive here in Switzerland. If we can make black holes here, then many have been made in the upper atmosphere. The problem is that they are hard to observe way up there, occurring at random chance. However the fact that the earth is still here is damn good evidence that the back holes don't grow and destroy the earth when they are created.
Axis & Allies. Or AAA the open source version being developed at sf.net. It's like risk but biger, longer, more complicated, and with way cooler looking pieces. Seriously, try it out if you like RISK.
You may not like the stupid yellow foam earplugs, but there are better alternitves. Check out http://earplugstore.stores.yahoo.net/profmusearpl1 .html for instance. The idea is that they are both more comforatble and allow you to hear better even while reducing the volume. All of the musicians I have mixed for LOVE them and I've tried them and found them to be much more comfortable than regular foam plugs. In fact, I find having a large headset on, is uncomfortable for long periods and adds strain to your neck. Check them out, they aren't too expensive. (and I have no affilation with this paticular store, it's just the first site I found)
Since this is /. and no one reads the article let me explain. These are suppose to be more like lenses than mirrors, the idea being to defocus the light so that most of it will miss the earth and travel around it. From a conservation of momentum point of view, this means that you are not reflecting a photon and gaining twice it's momentum, but rather bending it slightly so only gaining a fraction of its momentum.
The plan is to put them at a Lagrange point and the article claims it will last about 50 years before being blown off course. I do imagine that they have taken solar wind into account.
This is not to say that this is a good idea, just that at first glance, solar wind should be less of an issue than you might think.
"I may be a pretty sad person, but I don't make jokes in base 13" -Douglas Adams
It is not like this is anything unusual though. Remember the switch from version .59 to .60? That took ages and ages as well, but the result was SO SO worth it. That was when gaim, in my opinion, went from being an ok IM client to being one I actually would use by choice on any platform. Now you could argue that instead of very slow released with tons of changes, that they should try to make more, less substantial changes to the code.
Unlike windows, this is open source, all of the information is sitting there in the CVS commits. If you want faster releases, go compile the code yourself (or find someone to do it for you http://geddeth.dk/downloads/gaim/) and use it. Much like the transition from .59 to .60 there have been many, very stable betas to help end the frustration of waiting. Both times, impatant users like myself, went and compiled the code for ourselves and were happy. In addition, the gaim developers have become more verbose about what work they have been doing (planet gaim) which is a good thing as well. Now as long as release 2.5 doesn't take 2 years more, we should (hopefully) have voice and video support one of these days too.
In any case, gaim is great piece of software and I'm enjoying using the beta4. If you haven't downloaded it, go try!
my question for any other particle physicists out there is this: Does anyone know how well polarized the electon beam is?
I did my undergraduate work at Ohio State. In my opinion it is a very good physics school. They just built a brand new physics building. The goal of this was to be able to facilitate more and better physics research. The grad students I know there seem to have benifited well from this also. If you're not planning on going to as school like MIT or Cal-Tech, but are looking at a large public school, I highly recomend OSU for physics. OSU has a big ATLAS group who are working on the pixel detector. If you want to talk to some of the professors there I would recomend K Gan or R. Kass. They both are very friendly and should respond to your e-mails about the graduate program there. In addition the computing program at the OSU physics department is top notch (good for us HEP ppl). The only downside is that OSU is a huge school with lots of politics. The physics department can shield you from lots of this though. If you have any questions you can drop me an email. I'm a grad student at Iowa State now so it is @iastate.edu with the same u/n as on ./
If I recall back from my classes, at the start of the universe matter and energy flipped back and forth all of the time. However the universe was expanding, some of the energy went to inflating the universe. Sort of how when you lower the pressure in a volume, you lower the temp as well. So the energy (photons) couldn't switch back to matter. Going one step more, matter can only convert back to energy when it hits antimatter (more or less). This is where the article comes in. If you can flip between matter and anti-matter, and if you can find, for instance, that antimatter may flip to matter a bit faster or some other asymetry, you can start to explain things.
Unless the aliens are also traveling backwards in time and made of antimatter. Then we're screwed.
(actually there IS another part of CP called T which is time reversal, and is theorized to always cancle out the CP violation in the math)
First bigger is better. Although we haven't even turned on the LHC (large hadron collider)it isn't hard to imagine that at some point down the road we will reach the limit of what we can easily study here (much like fermilab is now). Do you realize just how long it actually takes to design, build, and get one of these things running? Decades really. And that isn't to mention the time spent just trying to lobby for funding. In effect we need to start now if we don't want to spend 5 years sitting on our asses waiting for construction. And you don't really want 5000 physicist, bored and with nothing to do?
Secondly, the LHC is a ring collider. This means that it has a large circle that it accelerates the particles in. While this has some advantages in that it is easier to run at high energies, there are disadvantages as well. One of the larger problems is polarization of the incoming particles. Basicly spinning particles in a circle randomizes the spin direction which makes it very hard to study. There are some clever tricks to get around this (Check out 'spin flippers' at RHIC) but a linear collider can study this much more precisely.
Another reason for a new collider is that it will collide different particles. Leptons not Hadrons for you physics geeks out there. Again the idea is that it will be harder to achive the same energy but the results will have much less error (roughly speaking). The idea of the NLC (next linear collider) is to be able to study in much more detail some very subtle effects that will be lost in noise at the LHC. And by noise I don't mean noise due to poor construction, but noise due to quantum mechanics.
A last reason to build the NLC in the US and not Geneva is that all of us American's are flocking to Geneva (Yes I'm one of them). We jokingly call CERN the american brain drain. It would be good for american science as a whole I do belive to employ more of us locally.
Arg, but it is late here and if I made any serious physics errors reguarding the LHC or NLC I appologize. Also this is a very hand waving sort of argument, very light on the details, take it as such.
Do they actually expect any non-tech savy (read, the average ebay user) to be able to use this system effectively? Yes I realize it is in beta and likely to change and improve, but as it stands now, it isn't worth my time.
So why do I think this is a 'good thing'? As the article speculates, it is likely that this supernova was different because of some rotational process or perhaps colliding stars, or some other exotic combination. This is exactly the sort of process that can be used as a test of supernova models to see how well they do. Over all I find this a very exciting observation and hopefully it produces more new science!
They actually even let you go visit the first two. The last three being failed experiments that are still a bit too hot for the everyday public. Kind of blew my mind when I first read about them. Just google for each with the prefix "oak ridge".
As a physicist though, the most interesting experiment there is the new Spallation Neutron Source http://www.sns.gov/ which is being finished (or is it done now I forget).
I tried out "Firefox, Opera, IE" and was hoping google would be cool enough that I would get a comparison of trafic from each of the browsers. No such luck. Come on all of you Google employies. One of you needs a 20% time project I'm sure. Put in a fun set of 'easter eggs' that catch browser traffic comparisons or platform traffic comparisons, or other specific comparisons for an appropriate search. I'm sure there are more interesting trends than just 'how many times did you search for x'.
If you are worried that someone will take your hard drive and try to read the valuable contents on it, I offer a simple, low tech solution. Switch the leads on the power connector! Its as simple as undoing a few screws and switching the 12V and ground leads. Two snips with the dikes, two drops of solder, and you're done. Screw everything back in place and appropriatly adjust the power connector coming out of your power supply. Now I would recomend doing this long before you recieve any sort of court order so they can't claim you were tampering with evidence. When they go to plug your hard drive into the examining system *zap*. "sorry, um you never asked if my hardware was ATX compliant judge" Note: I am not a lawyer and you should not think this would get you off the hook by any means. In fact frying the police department's computer may piss the judge off. Second, this will likely void your warnenty, fry your motherboard, ruin your hard drive, and end up in your death. But hey, this is slashdot, crackpot ideas on how to modify your hardware to screw the justice system seem right up our alley.