The damage in the breakdown was all caused by the energy stored in the magnets...
Which is an incredible amount of energy! From what I gather, the LHC has 1232 main bending magnets in the ring. Each has an inductance of 0.11 H and a current of 11796 A. Those who have an electrodynamics course or two in their background can do the math! (For those who don't, it's 7.7 MJ per magnet, close to 10 GJ for the entire accelerator.) For those who prefer DC (Discovery Channel) units to SI units, that's just over 2 tonnes of TNT worth of energy.
I wonder what happens to the graphite beam dumps and surrounding material after multiple exposures to the beam. There must be a lot of imperfections generated in the carbon lattice as well as a whole mess of exotic, radioactive by-products (of course, the truly exotic ones would be short-lived). I believe I read that the entire LHC tunnel becomes fairly radioactive as the occasional proton smashes into the walls of the tube and sprays a particle shower around the area of the impact.
Another fascinating example of the huge energies involved is the energy stored in the magnetic field that contains the particle ring. In an emergency it rakes about 10 minutes to dissipate the field energy, which is accomplished by attaching that magnets to enormous banks of resistors. There are all sorts of components of the accelerator that each store enough energy while running to do some serious damage; the safety systems alone are an amazing engineering accomplishment.
I don't know much about selective absorption in acoustic waves but this process relies on a waveguide. While waveguides occur in acoustics, I don't think you can get as much energy into the evanescent wave, which is critical to the large group velocity reduction. But, acoustics isn't my field so perhaps you could correct me if I'm wrong.
It was a very simple experiment to perform. It doesn't make any measurement of the group velocity or demonstration of trapped light (which would typically involve releasing it controllably and detecting it). The original proposal involved meta-materials to achieve a region with a negative index of refraction to use as the waveguide. They could then (hopefully) manipulate the meta-material to controllably store and retrieve light.
It seems this experiment used a simple meta-material the consisted of the glass surfaces, the 30-nm gold coating and the air gap in a Newton's rings setup. They may even have had the gold coated lens lying around and did the experiment over lunch (which just involved taking a picture). I don't think it's all that interesting until they get storage and retrieval.
It's usually not the industry/scientists' fault. It's the science journalists. They're the ones who take good research that's making cautiously optimistic projections for the possibilities of new technologies and turn it into "Scientists say they invented new technology that will abrogate our responsibilities!"
on anything that is driven by user content. Unmoderated content is simply useless and the more inter-connected that user accounts become, the better. A cross-site karma system would be excellent, eventually anyone who doesn't want to have to read shit from every moron with a keyboard won't have to. If karma could be propagated across news-sites, IMDB,/., etc. and linked into everyone's Facebook, we'd be better off. I just don't read unmoderated, anonymous content; it's worthless. There will always be fuckwads (sorry, reference to the Penny-Arcade comic another commenter posted) on the Internet, but it doesn't mean we can't flag them as not worth listening to.
was to punish the bullies (appropriately scaled to the age of the guilty parties)! The case against Google seems absurd in any case. It hinges on the fact that Google didn't remove the video after it was requested to. The reason was that the request was sent to the wrong address. Google may seem to be omniscient but if they didn't get the notice there is no rational case against them. In any case I doubt they're answerable to Italian law unless the prosecutors could prove to an American court that extradition is warranted.
Thanks for that:) I very much enjoyed considering how well some of your archetypes describe many of my colleagues. One in particular is a perfect example of your D type. These people are characterized by dogmatic pursuit of what they think is the best way to do something even if it blinds them to the fact there are better ways.
The emphasis needs to be to educate the parents firstly. They can then educate their children about the dangers online and then teach their kids to simply walk away from the computer when they need to. Parents must understand that leaving your child unsupervised on an unrestricted internet connection is like leaving them alone in a rough neighborhood (with an unmarked, windowless, candy-offering van called 4chan). The trouble is that the least well-informed people in the loop are the legislators.
The world is what it is and the Australian government seems to think that it can make a decree saying "no more drugs, no more prostitution, no more violence, no more liberals" and it will be so. (OK, that last one was a cheap shot;-) ). Parents need to understand that they have to be there; that their children's safety is their responsibility. Nothing the government does will ever change that.
What they could do is support (preferably open-source) software to help parents lock-down or restrict an internet connection when they're not around. They could work with many existing companies to offer a free website white-list. They're bent on imposing legislation on ISPs to save the children. Why not instead work with ISPs to develop opt-in white-listing for concerned parents. They must work with the parents.
It's an attempt to turn a difficult creative process into a trade school education.
There is a need and a place for CS trade schools to train coders. These are the poor saps that get shit hours and work conditions at EA but there is a need for those talents. Houses need to be built by framers just as much they need to be designed by architects (or architectural technologists as the case is for most cookie-cutter houses). The developer market has grown a need for skilled trades people (coders) and trades courses have developed to train them. I have a lot of respect for the trades, coding included, and I don't think that a trades course has less value than a full CS university degree complete with abstract math. Just be sure to know which your prospective employees have.
Once you show me your idea (or the embodiment of it), there is no way you can keep me from also having the idea. As soon as you show me whatever it is, I have the idea.
You misunderstand my argument; perhaps I phrased some of it poorly. I don't think that a right to profit exists. Certainly I think that a person has a right to do what they wish with an idea, including attempting to earn a profit with it. My argument is that the idea is divorced from the thing and the the inventor has a right to the idea (the "right to profit from it" was, perhaps, a poor choice of words). You nicely summed up what I object to:
Anybody who sees your product now also has your idea.
I think that the idea behind the product has it's own value. The patent codifies that value by allowing the sale of a product to be divorced from the sale of the idea.
From the constitution:
"...to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"
I do, in fact, think that it is the "Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" that is the core value that should be upheld. The promotion of progress follows from honouring that right.
Based entirely on presentation and not content, yes. I am more comfortable with paragraphs of text rather than banners that say BROADBAND SCANDAL, "See what the experts are saying" and CLICK FOR FREE DOWNLOAD.
In most cases, the "lines" (optical etc) are paid for with tax payer dollars.
I see this stated frequently but I've never seen a source quoted for it. I researched it in the case of Bell Canada a while ago (not terribly applicable to the present discussion) because the same claim was frequently made about them. I found nothing suggesting that a subsidy was ever given. I don't know what the situation is in the US but I suspect it may be similar. Government-backed monopolies sure! But publicly funded infrastructure? Perhaps someone could provide a source.
I'm really curious what proponents have to say, because slashdot does tend to get one sided on issues.
Allow me to offer my opinion on the subject as I am a proponent of the patent system (in principle, not the present implementation). The primary purpose of patents is to acknowledge that ideas have value. Manufactured things, of course, have value and those who build them earn a wage for the manual labor that goes into making them. Without the inventor, however, we would have only raw materials and muscle but no manufactured goods. The patent acknowledges that a person has a right to earn money from their ideas as well as from their physical labor. That is a right that I wholeheartedly support because I make a living off my mind not my muscles, as do many on Slashdot.
I happen to think that patents are necessary for the promotion of ideas and technology but that isn't the basis on which I think patents are a good thing. The argument hinges on the fact that people have a right to profit from their ideas because they thought of them. The notion that ideas are public is simply absurd. If I have an idea nothing can compel me to tell it to you; it's in my head, it's my idea. If I wish to build something using my idea and sell it, that is my right. The patent codifies the system that allows me to license others to build something from my idea if I don't have the means to build it myself, thereby distributing the fruits of my mental labor to the public. It is the patent that distinguishes the value of the idea from the value of the resources to build the thing. I disagree with the notion that physical labor can be done for the benefit of the individual but mental labor must be done for public good.
I also think that absurd "methods" patents and broad software patents like the ones that show up on Slashdot undermine the patent system. Those patents should be done away with. In most software cases I would agree that the copyright system is the better venue for protecting intellectual rights since I have yet to see a software patent that I think should exist. The existing implementation of the patent system needs to be dramatically reformed to avoid the obvious patents that get through on the virtue of the legal departments of large companies.
I have been very consistently against piracy on all fronts. I think the argument applies to all intellectual works. It needs to be rephrased to cover artistic works, but absolutely still applies. You're right though, other/.ers often only agree with me on the Apple stories (perhaps software more generally).
Political/moral positions are usually self-serving. Developers often feel that software piracy is bad but love pirating music, musicians often despise music piracy but have illegal copies of studio software. People with no talent whatsoever think all piracy is great. (Ooooo...raise your -1 troll if you're a pirate)
Slashdot Mirror
For completeness, I should point out that 11796 A is, I think, the current required to capture a 7 TeV beam.
The damage in the breakdown was all caused by the energy stored in the magnets...
Which is an incredible amount of energy! From what I gather, the LHC has 1232 main bending magnets in the ring. Each has an inductance of 0.11 H and a current of 11796 A. Those who have an electrodynamics course or two in their background can do the math! (For those who don't, it's 7.7 MJ per magnet, close to 10 GJ for the entire accelerator.) For those who prefer DC (Discovery Channel) units to SI units, that's just over 2 tonnes of TNT worth of energy.
I wonder what happens to the graphite beam dumps and surrounding material after multiple exposures to the beam. There must be a lot of imperfections generated in the carbon lattice as well as a whole mess of exotic, radioactive by-products (of course, the truly exotic ones would be short-lived). I believe I read that the entire LHC tunnel becomes fairly radioactive as the occasional proton smashes into the walls of the tube and sprays a particle shower around the area of the impact.
Another fascinating example of the huge energies involved is the energy stored in the magnetic field that contains the particle ring. In an emergency it rakes about 10 minutes to dissipate the field energy, which is accomplished by attaching that magnets to enormous banks of resistors. There are all sorts of components of the accelerator that each store enough energy while running to do some serious damage; the safety systems alone are an amazing engineering accomplishment.
I don't know much about selective absorption in acoustic waves but this process relies on a waveguide. While waveguides occur in acoustics, I don't think you can get as much energy into the evanescent wave, which is critical to the large group velocity reduction. But, acoustics isn't my field so perhaps you could correct me if I'm wrong.
It was a very simple experiment to perform. It doesn't make any measurement of the group velocity or demonstration of trapped light (which would typically involve releasing it controllably and detecting it). The original proposal involved meta-materials to achieve a region with a negative index of refraction to use as the waveguide. They could then (hopefully) manipulate the meta-material to controllably store and retrieve light.
It seems this experiment used a simple meta-material the consisted of the glass surfaces, the 30-nm gold coating and the air gap in a Newton's rings setup. They may even have had the gold coated lens lying around and did the experiment over lunch (which just involved taking a picture). I don't think it's all that interesting until they get storage and retrieval.
Looks like it's only if you're doing some virtualization. It probably wouldn't affect games.
Ha ha, a poster called "maxwell demon" replying to a comment about thermodynamics :-) Excellent.
It's usually not the industry/scientists' fault. It's the science journalists. They're the ones who take good research that's making cautiously optimistic projections for the possibilities of new technologies and turn it into "Scientists say they invented new technology that will abrogate our responsibilities!"
on anything that is driven by user content. Unmoderated content is simply useless and the more inter-connected that user accounts become, the better. A cross-site karma system would be excellent, eventually anyone who doesn't want to have to read shit from every moron with a keyboard won't have to. If karma could be propagated across news-sites, IMDB, /., etc. and linked into everyone's Facebook, we'd be better off. I just don't read unmoderated, anonymous content; it's worthless. There will always be fuckwads (sorry, reference to the Penny-Arcade comic another commenter posted) on the Internet, but it doesn't mean we can't flag them as not worth listening to.
Tags.
was to punish the bullies (appropriately scaled to the age of the guilty parties)! The case against Google seems absurd in any case. It hinges on the fact that Google didn't remove the video after it was requested to. The reason was that the request was sent to the wrong address. Google may seem to be omniscient but if they didn't get the notice there is no rational case against them. In any case I doubt they're answerable to Italian law unless the prosecutors could prove to an American court that extradition is warranted.
Thanks for that :) I very much enjoyed considering how well some of your archetypes describe many of my colleagues. One in particular is a perfect example of your D type. These people are characterized by dogmatic pursuit of what they think is the best way to do something even if it blinds them to the fact there are better ways.
Queue could also work in that context.
The emphasis needs to be to educate the parents firstly. They can then educate their children about the dangers online and then teach their kids to simply walk away from the computer when they need to. Parents must understand that leaving your child unsupervised on an unrestricted internet connection is like leaving them alone in a rough neighborhood (with an unmarked, windowless, candy-offering van called 4chan). The trouble is that the least well-informed people in the loop are the legislators.
The world is what it is and the Australian government seems to think that it can make a decree saying "no more drugs, no more prostitution, no more violence, no more liberals" and it will be so. (OK, that last one was a cheap shot ;-) ). Parents need to understand that they have to be there; that their children's safety is their responsibility. Nothing the government does will ever change that.
What they could do is support (preferably open-source) software to help parents lock-down or restrict an internet connection when they're not around. They could work with many existing companies to offer a free website white-list. They're bent on imposing legislation on ISPs to save the children. Why not instead work with ISPs to develop opt-in white-listing for concerned parents. They must work with the parents.
Let me put it this way, you're joining the adults
"Adult" might be an overly charitable term to apply to many of us on /.; even if the average age is probably upwards of 30.
It's an attempt to turn a difficult creative process into a trade school education.
There is a need and a place for CS trade schools to train coders. These are the poor saps that get shit hours and work conditions at EA but there is a need for those talents. Houses need to be built by framers just as much they need to be designed by architects (or architectural technologists as the case is for most cookie-cutter houses). The developer market has grown a need for skilled trades people (coders) and trades courses have developed to train them. I have a lot of respect for the trades, coding included, and I don't think that a trades course has less value than a full CS university degree complete with abstract math. Just be sure to know which your prospective employees have.
Once you show me your idea (or the embodiment of it), there is no way you can keep me from also having the idea. As soon as you show me whatever it is, I have the idea.
Hence the need for a law to control usage.
I have nothing more to add.
You misunderstand my argument; perhaps I phrased some of it poorly. I don't think that a right to profit exists. Certainly I think that a person has a right to do what they wish with an idea, including attempting to earn a profit with it. My argument is that the idea is divorced from the thing and the the inventor has a right to the idea (the "right to profit from it" was, perhaps, a poor choice of words). You nicely summed up what I object to:
Anybody who sees your product now also has your idea.
I think that the idea behind the product has it's own value. The patent codifies that value by allowing the sale of a product to be divorced from the sale of the idea.
From the constitution:
"...to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"
I do, in fact, think that it is the "Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" that is the core value that should be upheld. The promotion of progress follows from honouring that right.
Based entirely on presentation and not content, yes. I am more comfortable with paragraphs of text rather than banners that say BROADBAND SCANDAL, "See what the experts are saying" and CLICK FOR FREE DOWNLOAD.
In most cases, the "lines" (optical etc) are paid for with tax payer dollars.
I see this stated frequently but I've never seen a source quoted for it. I researched it in the case of Bell Canada a while ago (not terribly applicable to the present discussion) because the same claim was frequently made about them. I found nothing suggesting that a subsidy was ever given. I don't know what the situation is in the US but I suspect it may be similar. Government-backed monopolies sure! But publicly funded infrastructure? Perhaps someone could provide a source.
Yeah that link looks really unbiased. Investigative journalism in the finest tradition of timecube.com
I'm really curious what proponents have to say, because slashdot does tend to get one sided on issues.
Allow me to offer my opinion on the subject as I am a proponent of the patent system (in principle, not the present implementation). The primary purpose of patents is to acknowledge that ideas have value. Manufactured things, of course, have value and those who build them earn a wage for the manual labor that goes into making them. Without the inventor, however, we would have only raw materials and muscle but no manufactured goods. The patent acknowledges that a person has a right to earn money from their ideas as well as from their physical labor. That is a right that I wholeheartedly support because I make a living off my mind not my muscles, as do many on Slashdot.
I happen to think that patents are necessary for the promotion of ideas and technology but that isn't the basis on which I think patents are a good thing. The argument hinges on the fact that people have a right to profit from their ideas because they thought of them. The notion that ideas are public is simply absurd. If I have an idea nothing can compel me to tell it to you; it's in my head, it's my idea. If I wish to build something using my idea and sell it, that is my right. The patent codifies the system that allows me to license others to build something from my idea if I don't have the means to build it myself, thereby distributing the fruits of my mental labor to the public. It is the patent that distinguishes the value of the idea from the value of the resources to build the thing. I disagree with the notion that physical labor can be done for the benefit of the individual but mental labor must be done for public good.
I also think that absurd "methods" patents and broad software patents like the ones that show up on Slashdot undermine the patent system. Those patents should be done away with. In most software cases I would agree that the copyright system is the better venue for protecting intellectual rights since I have yet to see a software patent that I think should exist. The existing implementation of the patent system needs to be dramatically reformed to avoid the obvious patents that get through on the virtue of the legal departments of large companies.
I vote that /. excludes Bing from it's robots.txt. We don't want their kind here.
I have been very consistently against piracy on all fronts. I think the argument applies to all intellectual works. It needs to be rephrased to cover artistic works, but absolutely still applies. You're right though, other /.ers often only agree with me on the Apple stories (perhaps software more generally).
Political/moral positions are usually self-serving. Developers often feel that software piracy is bad but love pirating music, musicians often despise music piracy but have illegal copies of studio software. People with no talent whatsoever think all piracy is great. (Ooooo...raise your -1 troll if you're a pirate)