I think Star Trek varies a lot in terms of the quality of the science. Some episodes were written by people who knew more about science, and others weren't. To address your example of the warp drive: no, sorry, it's totally bogus. The basic structure of relativity guarantees that any mechanism for faster-than-light travel is also automatically a mechanism for time travel. (If you travel from event A to event B faster than the speed of light, then there's another frame of reference in which event B happens before event A.) So any science fiction that has FTL without time travel is scientifically wrong. AFAIK Charles Stross is the only SF writer who has ever done much writing in a milieu where FTL is equivalent to time travel, and I don't think he's even done it consistently in all his work. (I'm currently reading his book Glasshouse, which seems to have FTL without time travel.)
I teach physics at a community college, and I actually like to use Coyote and Roadrunner as an illustration of people's Aristotelian preconceptions. When the coyote steps off a cliff, he has to stop moving forward before he can look down and go, "oh, time to fall." This is exactly what Aristotle said had to happen: an object could be doing forced motion or natural motion, but it couldn't do both at the same time. One reason Aristotelianism was accepted for thousands of years was that it does a good job of codifying the incorrect expectations that people tend to have intuitively. If it wasn't for Coyote and Roadrunner, it would be harder for me to teach this!
My sister works at Pixar, and a lot of her work is physics simulations. (She's working on hair and cloth these days.) She says that a lot of the time, they try simulating the right physics first, but then that comes out not looking the way they want, e.g., water splashes realistically, but they want a cartoon splash, not a realistic splash. So they intentionally mung the equations to get the artistic effect they want. Well, why not? Picasso painted people with two eyes on the same side of their face.
The reason people in the US are ignorant about physics isn't because they see movies with incorrect physics in them, it's because K-12 science education in the US is a disaster.
For many people, both computer hardware and computer software are cheap compared to the time they spend using their computer, dealing with computer hassles, etc. For someone who's a professional graphic designer, for example, the price of a nice mac with a big screen, and copies of all the Adobe stuff, are just tax-deductible fixed costs of running their business. For people like this, the most important consideration is maximizing their productivity. If they're already used to Photoshop, then switching to GIMP isn't likely to make them any more productive. Ditto for switching from Windows to Linux.
Since it's all about time for professional users, any time spent screwing around and getting the dang thing to work is a disaster.
I'm not sure whether Linux is significantly less usable than Windows or MacOS X at this point; the question probably can't be answered
because it involves a lot of value judgments, lifestyle choices, and personal issues like technical and educational background.
But what I'm absolutely certain of is that any computer is a lot of hassle to set up and maintain. Slashdot users may consider
that hassle to be a kind of fun, but that's not the case for most people. So let's say, for the sake of argument, that Windows, MacOS X, and
Linux are all about equally full of hassles. Well, the person who is already running Windows has already worked out the hassles
with Windows. It's going to take them a huge amount of time to work out all the new and different hassles of a different OS.
Now that was all about professional users. The article's points about cracked software are mostly relevant to students and casual users.
To a student, it may really make financial sense to spend a weekend obtaining and installing a cracked version of Photoshop, because he
simply doesn't have the money to buy a legal copy. The thing is, it's very common in the retail world for businesses to offer different
pricing to people who have different personal priorities about money versus hassle. Airlines sell first-class tickets, but they also sell
economy tickets. Supermarkets give their best prices to people who have membership cards and who are willing to clip coupons from the Sunday
paper. The existence of cracked copies of Windows is another example of the same thing. Microsoft is very happy that a broke college student
pirates Windows, because the student doesn't have the money to pay for a legal copy, and if he wasn't using bootlegged Windows, he might get
in the habit of using some other OS.
Re cracked software, I think there's another phenomenon that the author of TFA isn't cluing in on. Commercial software tends to exploit users.
For example, I've bought Mac software (Mathematica) that wouldn't work on my new Mac because it had a later version of MacOS; their response was that I needed to buy a new version of the software to work on the new OS. In the same era, I bought some Mac music software with a copy protection scheme that involved inserting a special floppy every time you wanted to run it; I bought a new mac, which didn't have a floppy drive, and the software company told me I needed to buy an external floppy drive in order to keep running the software. A very common experience is that you buy software, find out that certain functionality is broken, and are forced to pay for an upgrade in hopes that it will fix the bug. The whole
computer hardware and software industry runs on principle of the upgrade treadmill: software companies arm-twist you into buying
new versions of software, which then won't run or don't perform acceptably on your hardware, so you have to buy new hardware. One response to this
(my response) was to switch to Linux. But a completely different, and not so unreasonable, response is to fight back by pirating your software.
Well, I have the usual Californian's reaction to that. Why the heck do people live in places like Alberta, or Texas? They just aren't habitable. My wife is from Buffalo, and now we're living in Southern California. The only way she's going back is in a coffin.
Even so, having lived up and down the California coast, I can tell you that it is by no means paradise, if by paradise you mean a place where the average person is willing to live without using heat and AC. My mother lives on the Monterey Peninsula. You get days in July where it's foggy, and the high is 65 F. I grew up in that house wearing a sweater 12 months per year. Where I live now, in Orange County, we're currently bracing for a heat wave that's expected to go above 100 F.
The real problems are (a) too many people, and (b) too many government subsidies for energy. The Iraq war is nothing but a way of paying for the unnaturally cheap energy we get in the U.S. The interstate highway system is one big subsidy for fossil fuels. Global warming is going to be the ultimate subsidy for the 20th century's fossil fuel addiction, and it's a subsidy that's going to be paid for by my grandkids. When cities discuss zoning and density, the big issue is always traffic and parking; again, it amounts to a subsidy for the automobile. If you ask any economist what the price of gas should be in the US, without subsidies, they'll offer a figure in the $4-6/gallon range. The trouble is that people are selfish, stupid, and shortsighted, and democracy is a great system for giving selfish, stupid, shortsighted people what they want. We won't vote for, e.g., Al Gore, who has advocated a carbon tax to make people pay the true, unsubsidized cost of fossil fuels, rather than forcing our grandkids to subsidize us by suffering from climate change.
Interesting. By coincidence, I did a bunch of work yesterday on the WP article for my congressman, Ed Royce. I'd noticed that a long section was cut and pasted directly from his own web page. Seeing your comment, I went back and checked who did that section, and it's a user named Marie-Therese. That happens to be the name of Royce's wife, and the Marie-Therese account has never done any edits except to the Royce article.
There's an FOSS text-to-speech system called festival, which sounds robotic, but intelligible. There's a debian package.
For better free-as-in-beer text-to-speech, try scribd.com. If you upload some text there, they'll automatically make an audio version, and I thought the quality was amazingly good. (If the text is copyrighted, you can set it to be available only to yourself.)
To me, the wording of the slashdot summary ("films") implied that the story was about scanning in video. Actually it's about scanning in still photographs. The link from the parent post has downloads of some videos ("Apollo Multimedia," and see, e.g., "Armstrong steps onto the Moon's surface").
I've bought four or five $180-200 desktops from Fry's without any rebate (not including monitors). They're Great Quality brand, and come with Linux preinstalled. All of them are still running, including the one I bought ca. 2002.
Rich Muller originated the idea of such a periodicity, about 25 years ago. It was always statistically controversial whether the periodicity actually existed; many people thought it was a selection effect. He came up with the Nemesis hypothesis to explain it.
I discussed this with my kids just now, and they agree 100% with the award. After all, this is the man who made barbie.com possible, as well as trollz.com, clubpenguin, and neopets.
I was curious to hear some samples, so I naively pointed my ubuntu box at hearmusic.com, and, surprisingly enough, everything Just Worked. It's 100% flash, but it worked fine for me.[1] It's a very slick looking interface, and reasonably responsive (more responsive than iTunes on my wife's mac, although that may be a bit of an unfair comparison, since my linux box is newer than her mac). You can listen to snippets from the songs, just like on iTunes. It's too bad that the popular audio and video codecs are patent-entangled, and that ogg vorbis has zero mainstream adoption, but at least flash works. No, I don't like installing a binary blob from Adobe on my machine, but for the average person, at least it takes care of the ability to, e.g., watch videos on youtube, which they take for granted.
[1] BTW, what is everybody complaining about with x64 and flash? My system is an x64, ubuntu fiesty. Flash 9 was trivial to install, worked great.
Clusty.com seems to have better privacy policies than google, and seems to give results of about the same quality. I use it as a matter of habit these days, except for some fancier searches, for which I need google.
Personally, I would like to be able to control dynamic range compression with a knob. If it's late at night, and I'm listening to a symphony on headphones in a quiet house, I want the full dynamic range. If I'm listening in the car, or on a portable mp3 player, I want dynamic range compression, because otherwise I have to keep fiddling with the volume to find a comfortable listening level.
The simplest way to implement this would be to take a running time-average of the power for, say, 5 seconds, and compensate for the changes in volume if the user has the compression turned up.
A nicer way to do it would be to have a separate, low-bandwidth track created by a human engineer using musical judgment. This track would be similar to the running time-average, but it would be more carefully tweaked to avoid goofy-sounding artifacts. Could, e.g., Ogg Vorbis store such an optional, low-bandwidth track in such a way that it would be ignored by player that didn't implement it?
But, I'd like to be realistic about this, setting up a printer was still very bad for me in Ubuntu, although that was probably HP to take the blame, the worst thing is that there is no way to make my scanner work on Ubuntu.
I agree with you that setting up a printer is currently one of the biggest problems. However, it does seem to be improving rapidly.
I just installed Fiesty on some machines, and a bunch of the problems I'd had before with setting up the printer had disappeared.
The review is a little nuts, however, because this guy has been a linux user since 1995, and he seems to think that his knowledge and experience are typical. He goes on and on about how much easier it is to install Linux than it is to install Windows -- but it would never occur to the typical user to install an OS in the first place. The typical user doesn't even understand what an OS is. The typical user also has a ton of files locked up in MS formats, and isn't interested in translating them into open formats, and correcting the errors that will inevitably occur in translation. The typical user is afraid to change from IE6 to IE7, or from Word 2003 to Word 2007. Any change freaks them out.
If virtual particles don't decay... good luck explaining hawking radiation.
Hawking radiation occurs because there's an external source of mass-energy (the black hole). That has nothing to do with your nutty idea that the Higgs field can lead to the creation of hydrogen atoms in empty space.
You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.
Because if this particle exists, and behaves as described, that would mean that you'd find enough energy for a "big bang" in, say, a cubic meter of empty space.
No, the existence or nonexistence of the Higgs doesn't imply any particular value for the zero-point energy of the vacuum or the cosmological constant. Actually, nobody has the faintest idea how to calculate the cosmological constant from first principles. When they try, they get answers that are something like 10^100 times bigger than what's actually observed. In any case, the cosmological constant is already known, with fairly small error bars (as things like these go in cosmology). The Higgs is part of the standard model, and the standard model fails miserably to explain the observed value of the cosmological constant. One of the attractive features of supersymmetry (which may or may not be true, independently of the existence of the Higgs) is that it helps to explain how a lot of the vacuum energy could cancel out neatly.
Also it decays, meaning that (minute quantities of...) matter are constantly being created, due to the off chance that a higgs boson would decay into a top and bottom quark and one of the top quarks decays into an electron and a few other things that will combine into a proton and voila... a hydrogen atom... out of nowhere. Literally out of nowhere.
No, if the Higgs exists, then it exists in nature only as a virtual particle. In this respect, it's no different from the W and the Z. The W and Z exist as virtual particles in any vacuum, and they have certain decay modes, but those decay modes aren't observed in a vacuum, because they're virtual particles.
So basically this will reduce "God"'s role in the creation of the universe further back before the big bang
No. The (standard) big bang model says that the big bang was a singularity where time began. According to the standard big bang model, there was no "before."
The rest of your list (points 1-3) show a complete failure to understand basic ideas about the big bang model, such as the fact that the big bang was not an explosion that took place within a preexisting spacetime.
AbiWord works like a charm and does not use X11
Apparently you didn't read the article very carefully. "Then they told me that there are two versions, AbiWord and AbiWord-X11. I had installed the former, which was the native Mac app (that I had already determined was too slow and buggy to use). I went back to the drawing board."
What functionality does this author 'need' that exists in Word for Mac but not AbiWord or NeoOffice?
Again, you apparently didn't read the article very carefully. "AbiWord turned out to be a bit of a disappointment, running far too slowly and too baggily on both the Mac Mini and the MacBook to be useful." "Using NeoOffice, I found one major flaw right off the bat. For some reason, I couldn't get italicized text to work properly."
within a few months of LHC startup, we should see SUSY.
I'm not a particle physicist. Can you explain more about why you're so confident? AFAICT, supersymmetry could be false, and even if it's true, it's clearly a broken symmetry. If it's broken, and the symmetry breaking leads to masses for the supersymmetric particles that are much higher than those of their standard model counterparts, is there some reason to think that the masses are within a certain range, accessible to the LHC?
Looking at this blog linked to from the Slate article, one thing that seems inconsistent with the Slate article's interpretation is that they're saying that the observations aren't consistent with a standard-model Higgs; it would have to be something outside the standard model, like, e.g., a supersymmetric Higgs. (Actually, I'm not really clear on what a "supersymmetric Higgs" means; is it two particles, a Higgs plus its supersymmetric partner?) The Slate article, however, raises the idea that the observations might simply confirm the standard model, and that would be it. Am I misunderstanding something?
Is the Tevatron still running? If so, could it be the sort of thing where the collaboration might just be trying to collect more data, so as to make it an 8-sigma observation instead of a 4-sigma one?
The MacMini only has 512Mb ram (because I configured it wrong)
He said the machine was too slow to be usable, and he made the argument that Apple shouldn't sell machines with hardware configurations that are too slow to be usable. 512 Mb is actually a lot of ram. My kid has a linux box in her room with 128 Mb of ram, and it's perfectly fine and snappy. If the whole selling point of a mac is that it Just Works, then you shouldn't have to be enough of a computer expert to suspect that the memory Apple is selling you with the machine is not enough to make the machine run well.
I think part of what may be going on here is that people's expectations of speed vary widely. Personally, I find my wife's (old but high-end) mac to be excruciatingly slow. Every time I have to use it, I end up asking her (while the little beachball icon spins), "Doesn't this drive you crazy?" However, she doesn't perceive it as slow.
Also, just b/c something is/mentioned/ does NOT mean that it was given a chance, nor was it properly researched, nor..
Why don't you just admit that you didn't read the article? He specifically discusses Macports, and goes into excruciating detail about his attempts to use Fink, which he concluded was just too hard to use (matching my own experience exactly). He also goes into great detail about the shortcomings of X11 applications run on OS X.
Well, if all you want is onboard, 2-d graphics support, then pretty much anything on the market will work just fine with Linux, so that's not a strong technical/practical reason to buy Intel. OTOH, if you want 3-d video for gaming, then Intel isn't an option. Of course, you might want to buy an Intel mobo just because you want to support OSS-friendly hardware on moral/political grounds.
There's a convenient OSS library called wvWare that can convert.doc to various other formats, including xml, html, and plain text. You can run it from the command line, or from scripts. Is there any similar OSS software that runs on Linux, and can, e.g., convert.docx to html or plain text? Please don't tell me I just have to write some XSLT transformations in Java or something:-), and no, I'm not suggesting that something like wvWare would be sufficient for most scientific journals.
Slashdot Mirror
I think Star Trek varies a lot in terms of the quality of the science. Some episodes were written by people who knew more about science, and others weren't. To address your example of the warp drive: no, sorry, it's totally bogus. The basic structure of relativity guarantees that any mechanism for faster-than-light travel is also automatically a mechanism for time travel. (If you travel from event A to event B faster than the speed of light, then there's another frame of reference in which event B happens before event A.) So any science fiction that has FTL without time travel is scientifically wrong. AFAIK Charles Stross is the only SF writer who has ever done much writing in a milieu where FTL is equivalent to time travel, and I don't think he's even done it consistently in all his work. (I'm currently reading his book Glasshouse, which seems to have FTL without time travel.)
I teach physics at a community college, and I actually like to use Coyote and Roadrunner as an illustration of people's Aristotelian preconceptions. When the coyote steps off a cliff, he has to stop moving forward before he can look down and go, "oh, time to fall." This is exactly what Aristotle said had to happen: an object could be doing forced motion or natural motion, but it couldn't do both at the same time. One reason Aristotelianism was accepted for thousands of years was that it does a good job of codifying the incorrect expectations that people tend to have intuitively. If it wasn't for Coyote and Roadrunner, it would be harder for me to teach this!
My sister works at Pixar, and a lot of her work is physics simulations. (She's working on hair and cloth these days.) She says that a lot of the time, they try simulating the right physics first, but then that comes out not looking the way they want, e.g., water splashes realistically, but they want a cartoon splash, not a realistic splash. So they intentionally mung the equations to get the artistic effect they want. Well, why not? Picasso painted people with two eyes on the same side of their face.
The reason people in the US are ignorant about physics isn't because they see movies with incorrect physics in them, it's because K-12 science education in the US is a disaster.
For many people, both computer hardware and computer software are cheap compared to the time they spend using their computer, dealing with computer hassles, etc. For someone who's a professional graphic designer, for example, the price of a nice mac with a big screen, and copies of all the Adobe stuff, are just tax-deductible fixed costs of running their business. For people like this, the most important consideration is maximizing their productivity. If they're already used to Photoshop, then switching to GIMP isn't likely to make them any more productive. Ditto for switching from Windows to Linux.
Since it's all about time for professional users, any time spent screwing around and getting the dang thing to work is a disaster. I'm not sure whether Linux is significantly less usable than Windows or MacOS X at this point; the question probably can't be answered because it involves a lot of value judgments, lifestyle choices, and personal issues like technical and educational background. But what I'm absolutely certain of is that any computer is a lot of hassle to set up and maintain. Slashdot users may consider that hassle to be a kind of fun, but that's not the case for most people. So let's say, for the sake of argument, that Windows, MacOS X, and Linux are all about equally full of hassles. Well, the person who is already running Windows has already worked out the hassles with Windows. It's going to take them a huge amount of time to work out all the new and different hassles of a different OS.
Now that was all about professional users. The article's points about cracked software are mostly relevant to students and casual users. To a student, it may really make financial sense to spend a weekend obtaining and installing a cracked version of Photoshop, because he simply doesn't have the money to buy a legal copy. The thing is, it's very common in the retail world for businesses to offer different pricing to people who have different personal priorities about money versus hassle. Airlines sell first-class tickets, but they also sell economy tickets. Supermarkets give their best prices to people who have membership cards and who are willing to clip coupons from the Sunday paper. The existence of cracked copies of Windows is another example of the same thing. Microsoft is very happy that a broke college student pirates Windows, because the student doesn't have the money to pay for a legal copy, and if he wasn't using bootlegged Windows, he might get in the habit of using some other OS.
Re cracked software, I think there's another phenomenon that the author of TFA isn't cluing in on. Commercial software tends to exploit users. For example, I've bought Mac software (Mathematica) that wouldn't work on my new Mac because it had a later version of MacOS; their response was that I needed to buy a new version of the software to work on the new OS. In the same era, I bought some Mac music software with a copy protection scheme that involved inserting a special floppy every time you wanted to run it; I bought a new mac, which didn't have a floppy drive, and the software company told me I needed to buy an external floppy drive in order to keep running the software. A very common experience is that you buy software, find out that certain functionality is broken, and are forced to pay for an upgrade in hopes that it will fix the bug. The whole computer hardware and software industry runs on principle of the upgrade treadmill: software companies arm-twist you into buying new versions of software, which then won't run or don't perform acceptably on your hardware, so you have to buy new hardware. One response to this (my response) was to switch to Linux. But a completely different, and not so unreasonable, response is to fight back by pirating your software.
Well, I have the usual Californian's reaction to that. Why the heck do people live in places like Alberta, or Texas? They just aren't habitable. My wife is from Buffalo, and now we're living in Southern California. The only way she's going back is in a coffin.
Even so, having lived up and down the California coast, I can tell you that it is by no means paradise, if by paradise you mean a place where the average person is willing to live without using heat and AC. My mother lives on the Monterey Peninsula. You get days in July where it's foggy, and the high is 65 F. I grew up in that house wearing a sweater 12 months per year. Where I live now, in Orange County, we're currently bracing for a heat wave that's expected to go above 100 F.
The real problems are (a) too many people, and (b) too many government subsidies for energy. The Iraq war is nothing but a way of paying for the unnaturally cheap energy we get in the U.S. The interstate highway system is one big subsidy for fossil fuels. Global warming is going to be the ultimate subsidy for the 20th century's fossil fuel addiction, and it's a subsidy that's going to be paid for by my grandkids. When cities discuss zoning and density, the big issue is always traffic and parking; again, it amounts to a subsidy for the automobile. If you ask any economist what the price of gas should be in the US, without subsidies, they'll offer a figure in the $4-6/gallon range. The trouble is that people are selfish, stupid, and shortsighted, and democracy is a great system for giving selfish, stupid, shortsighted people what they want. We won't vote for, e.g., Al Gore, who has advocated a carbon tax to make people pay the true, unsubsidized cost of fossil fuels, rather than forcing our grandkids to subsidize us by suffering from climate change.
Interesting. By coincidence, I did a bunch of work yesterday on the WP article for my congressman, Ed Royce. I'd noticed that a long section was cut and pasted directly from his own web page. Seeing your comment, I went back and checked who did that section, and it's a user named Marie-Therese. That happens to be the name of Royce's wife, and the Marie-Therese account has never done any edits except to the Royce article.
For better free-as-in-beer text-to-speech, try scribd.com. If you upload some text there, they'll automatically make an audio version, and I thought the quality was amazingly good. (If the text is copyrighted, you can set it to be available only to yourself.)
To me, the wording of the slashdot summary ("films") implied that the story was about scanning in video. Actually it's about scanning in still photographs. The link from the parent post has downloads of some videos ("Apollo Multimedia," and see, e.g., "Armstrong steps onto the Moon's surface").
I've bought four or five $180-200 desktops from Fry's without any rebate (not including monitors). They're Great Quality brand, and come with Linux preinstalled. All of them are still running, including the one I bought ca. 2002.
Rich Muller originated the idea of such a periodicity, about 25 years ago. It was always statistically controversial whether the periodicity actually existed; many people thought it was a selection effect. He came up with the Nemesis hypothesis to explain it.
Mod parent up.
I discussed this with my kids just now, and they agree 100% with the award. After all, this is the man who made barbie.com possible, as well as trollz.com, clubpenguin, and neopets.
I was curious to hear some samples, so I naively pointed my ubuntu box at hearmusic.com, and, surprisingly enough, everything Just Worked. It's 100% flash, but it worked fine for me.[1] It's a very slick looking interface, and reasonably responsive (more responsive than iTunes on my wife's mac, although that may be a bit of an unfair comparison, since my linux box is newer than her mac). You can listen to snippets from the songs, just like on iTunes. It's too bad that the popular audio and video codecs are patent-entangled, and that ogg vorbis has zero mainstream adoption, but at least flash works. No, I don't like installing a binary blob from Adobe on my machine, but for the average person, at least it takes care of the ability to, e.g., watch videos on youtube, which they take for granted.
[1] BTW, what is everybody complaining about with x64 and flash? My system is an x64, ubuntu fiesty. Flash 9 was trivial to install, worked great.
Clusty.com seems to have better privacy policies than google, and seems to give results of about the same quality. I use it as a matter of habit these days, except for some fancier searches, for which I need google.
Personally, I would like to be able to control dynamic range compression with a knob. If it's late at night, and I'm listening to a symphony on headphones in a quiet house, I want the full dynamic range. If I'm listening in the car, or on a portable mp3 player, I want dynamic range compression, because otherwise I have to keep fiddling with the volume to find a comfortable listening level.
The simplest way to implement this would be to take a running time-average of the power for, say, 5 seconds, and compensate for the changes in volume if the user has the compression turned up.
A nicer way to do it would be to have a separate, low-bandwidth track created by a human engineer using musical judgment. This track would be similar to the running time-average, but it would be more carefully tweaked to avoid goofy-sounding artifacts. Could, e.g., Ogg Vorbis store such an optional, low-bandwidth track in such a way that it would be ignored by player that didn't implement it?
But, I'd like to be realistic about this, setting up a printer was still very bad for me in Ubuntu, although that was probably HP to take the blame, the worst thing is that there is no way to make my scanner work on Ubuntu.
I agree with you that setting up a printer is currently one of the biggest problems. However, it does seem to be improving rapidly. I just installed Fiesty on some machines, and a bunch of the problems I'd had before with setting up the printer had disappeared.
The review is a little nuts, however, because this guy has been a linux user since 1995, and he seems to think that his knowledge and experience are typical. He goes on and on about how much easier it is to install Linux than it is to install Windows -- but it would never occur to the typical user to install an OS in the first place. The typical user doesn't even understand what an OS is. The typical user also has a ton of files locked up in MS formats, and isn't interested in translating them into open formats, and correcting the errors that will inevitably occur in translation. The typical user is afraid to change from IE6 to IE7, or from Word 2003 to Word 2007. Any change freaks them out.
If virtual particles don't decay ... good luck explaining hawking radiation.
Hawking radiation occurs because there's an external source of mass-energy (the black hole). That has nothing to do with your nutty idea that the Higgs field can lead to the creation of hydrogen atoms in empty space.
You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.
Because if this particle exists, and behaves as described, that would mean that you'd find enough energy for a "big bang" in, say, a cubic meter of empty space.
No, the existence or nonexistence of the Higgs doesn't imply any particular value for the zero-point energy of the vacuum or the cosmological constant. Actually, nobody has the faintest idea how to calculate the cosmological constant from first principles. When they try, they get answers that are something like 10^100 times bigger than what's actually observed. In any case, the cosmological constant is already known, with fairly small error bars (as things like these go in cosmology). The Higgs is part of the standard model, and the standard model fails miserably to explain the observed value of the cosmological constant. One of the attractive features of supersymmetry (which may or may not be true, independently of the existence of the Higgs) is that it helps to explain how a lot of the vacuum energy could cancel out neatly.
Also it decays, meaning that (minute quantities of ...) matter are constantly being created, due to the off chance that a higgs boson would decay into a top and bottom quark and one of the top quarks decays into an electron and a few other things that will combine into a proton and voila ... a hydrogen atom ... out of nowhere. Literally out of nowhere.
No, if the Higgs exists, then it exists in nature only as a virtual particle. In this respect, it's no different from the W and the Z. The W and Z exist as virtual particles in any vacuum, and they have certain decay modes, but those decay modes aren't observed in a vacuum, because they're virtual particles.
So basically this will reduce "God"'s role in the creation of the universe further back before the big bang
No. The (standard) big bang model says that the big bang was a singularity where time began. According to the standard big bang model, there was no "before." The rest of your list (points 1-3) show a complete failure to understand basic ideas about the big bang model, such as the fact that the big bang was not an explosion that took place within a preexisting spacetime.
AbiWord works like a charm and does not use X11
Apparently you didn't read the article very carefully. "Then they told me that there are two versions, AbiWord and AbiWord-X11. I had installed the former, which was the native Mac app (that I had already determined was too slow and buggy to use). I went back to the drawing board."
What functionality does this author 'need' that exists in Word for Mac but not AbiWord or NeoOffice?
Again, you apparently didn't read the article very carefully. "AbiWord turned out to be a bit of a disappointment, running far too slowly and too baggily on both the Mac Mini and the MacBook to be useful." "Using NeoOffice, I found one major flaw right off the bat. For some reason, I couldn't get italicized text to work properly."
within a few months of LHC startup, we should see SUSY.
I'm not a particle physicist. Can you explain more about why you're so confident? AFAICT, supersymmetry could be false, and even if it's true, it's clearly a broken symmetry. If it's broken, and the symmetry breaking leads to masses for the supersymmetric particles that are much higher than those of their standard model counterparts, is there some reason to think that the masses are within a certain range, accessible to the LHC?
Looking at this blog linked to from the Slate article, one thing that seems inconsistent with the Slate article's interpretation is that they're saying that the observations aren't consistent with a standard-model Higgs; it would have to be something outside the standard model, like, e.g., a supersymmetric Higgs. (Actually, I'm not really clear on what a "supersymmetric Higgs" means; is it two particles, a Higgs plus its supersymmetric partner?) The Slate article, however, raises the idea that the observations might simply confirm the standard model, and that would be it. Am I misunderstanding something?
Is the Tevatron still running? If so, could it be the sort of thing where the collaboration might just be trying to collect more data, so as to make it an 8-sigma observation instead of a 4-sigma one?
The MacMini only has 512Mb ram (because I configured it wrong)
He said the machine was too slow to be usable, and he made the argument that Apple shouldn't sell machines with hardware configurations that are too slow to be usable. 512 Mb is actually a lot of ram. My kid has a linux box in her room with 128 Mb of ram, and it's perfectly fine and snappy. If the whole selling point of a mac is that it Just Works, then you shouldn't have to be enough of a computer expert to suspect that the memory Apple is selling you with the machine is not enough to make the machine run well.
I think part of what may be going on here is that people's expectations of speed vary widely. Personally, I find my wife's (old but high-end) mac to be excruciatingly slow. Every time I have to use it, I end up asking her (while the little beachball icon spins), "Doesn't this drive you crazy?" However, she doesn't perceive it as slow.
Also, just b/c something is /mentioned/ does NOT mean that it was given a chance, nor was it properly researched, nor..
Why don't you just admit that you didn't read the article? He specifically discusses Macports, and goes into excruciating detail about his attempts to use Fink, which he concluded was just too hard to use (matching my own experience exactly). He also goes into great detail about the shortcomings of X11 applications run on OS X.
Well, if all you want is onboard, 2-d graphics support, then pretty much anything on the market will work just fine with Linux, so that's not a strong technical/practical reason to buy Intel. OTOH, if you want 3-d video for gaming, then Intel isn't an option. Of course, you might want to buy an Intel mobo just because you want to support OSS-friendly hardware on moral/political grounds.
The space fountain concept works a lot better in terms of the fundamental physics.
There's a convenient OSS library called wvWare that can convert .doc to various other formats, including xml, html, and plain text. You can run it from the command line, or from scripts. Is there any similar OSS software that runs on Linux, and can, e.g., convert .docx to html or plain text? Please don't tell me I just have to write some XSLT transformations in Java or something :-), and no, I'm not suggesting that something like wvWare would be sufficient for most scientific journals.