I seriously doubt that George Bush -has- a desktop.
I wonder if this is true. The photos of the Oval Office certainly never show a computer sitting on the President's desk. I wonder whether somewhere else in the White House (the living quarters?) there is a PC that the President uses. Or at least you would think he would have one back at his ranch in Texas.
I wonder if the guys who haven't been in government very long are more likely to use a PC regularly. (For instance, Cheney has very recently been in the private sector, where even a CEO has a laptop.)
Another thought: Certainly Al Gore must have used a PC on a regular basis. He, after all, was famous for being a champion of the Internet.
The US has already started to build one collider to compete with the LHC at CERN and abandoned it after spending a billion or so on it. This is a wish list, not a final decision.
Quite why anyone thinks the linac is worth building is beyond me, by the time the machine is finished the LHC will have done all the interesting work at this energy scale. Also note the comment about the world wide web being created by the high energy physics world, but without mentioning it was actually their competitor at cern who did that one.
This is a really unimformed set of statements on high-energy particle physics which have appeared in several forms throughout this discussion. Let me clarify a couple things.
The Next Linear Collider (NLC) is not competition for the LHC. The Superconducting Supercollider (SSC) which was cancelled here about 10 years ago was competition to the LHC.
I'm really too young to know much about the SSC's cancellation, but I have heard older folks say that their big mistake was not putting enough money into R&D before beginning construction. (Hence expensive mistakes in design like another poster here mentioned.) Hopefully lessons have been learned from the failure of the SSC.
Back to the SSC vs LHC vs NLC. There are two fundamentally different types of collider. Hadron machines (SSC,LHC, TeVatron @ Fermilab) collide protons against (anti)protons. Lepton machines (LEP @ CERN closed in 2000, NLC, various machines at SLAC over the years) collide electrons and positrons (aka anti-electrons).
The hadron approach is good because a proton is 2000 times heavier than an electron. So it's much easier to get to very high energies. On the down side, protons are not point particles, but rather "bags" of 3 quarks each. So it's hard to get precision information because you don't know exactly what the initial 4-vectors of the interacting quarks were.
Lepton collisions are clean because the electrons are point particles. But as I said, they are a lot lighter than protons. This motivates building the NLC as a linear collider as opposed to a storage ring ala SSC, TeVatron, LEP, LHC, or PEP-II (@SLAC). The energy loss from syncrotron radiation goes as the relativistic gamma to the sixth (!!) power. For a given energy, a lepton machine will have a gamma 2000 times bigger than a proton machine. And so putting really high energy electrons into a ring is very difficult because they lose so much energy.
The general concensus among high-energy physicists is that for the field to progress both machines are necessary (LHC and Linear Collider). The LHC will (probably) find the Higgs boson and measure its mass. It may also find physics beyond the Standard Model. A lepton machine will then be necessary to do precision studies and really untangle what the LHC will (hopefully) discover.
Having the LHC allows us to have an idea what goals the NLC should be designed for. For example, if the LHC discovers some amazing new physics at (say) 800 GeV, then this gives us information about buildng the NLC--it had better not be a 500 GeV machine.
The big question is not whether to build the NLC--it is whether it will be here or in Europe, and how long will we have to wait.
It appears that zephyr, the instant messaging system used internally at MIT (and CMU, etc), dates at least to 1990. (Or perhaps the documentation dates to 1990. In which case zephyr might be almost as old as Project Athena which started in 1983 or 1984.)
A cloud of dark matter could be a simple cloud of ordinary dust and gas which is not being illuminated in such a way that it is detectable to us
This is true, in particular it was thought that MACHOs ("Jupiter-like objects") could make up the dark matter portion of the energy budget. But that has already been virtually eliminated as a possibility by experiments that looked for micro-lensing of light.
The leading dark matter candidate now are WIMPs, which could be detected either directly through the recoil of nuclei (I think this is how CDMS works) or indirectly by observing ultra-high energy neutrinos from WIMP annihilation in a gravitational trap such as the center of the sun.
Seems strange that the article was so sketchy on why the damage was done. They sort of implied that the tank got overfilled, but then again they really avoided saying anything.
To concur with the fellow who already replied, it doesn't seem strange to me. It's likely that there is a combination of a) the cause is not really known and b) the NYT reporter didn't really know how to report it.
I don't think the comment about it having to do with "pressure" implies that the tank was overfull. It was simply a scientist confirming that the pressure of the water, and not some other factor, was the immediate cause of the failure. That doesn't imply that the pressure was greater than was designed for.
I don't think they're hiding anything, and if you give them a little time, I'm sure there will be a lot of discussion in the scientific community aimed at getting to the root of the problem.
I don't really have any information, but what crappy news! One of the professors at my lab (Kate Scholberg) has done extensive work at Super K, and one of my undergrad friends spent her summer there.
I knew that they were filling the tanks for more data collection. I guess it's good my friend already has the data she needs to write her senior thesis.
Found in a column by Lars-Erik Nelson in the Daily News of New York published on May 5. (Sorry there's no link, but I the only place I know to find it is Lexis-Nexis.)
Gore did not claim to have invented the Internet. In an interview with Wolf Blitzer in March 1999, Gore said: "During my
service in the U.S. Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet."
This claim is perfectly true. In March 1986, when computers were still something found mostly in laboratories, Gore sponsored
the Supercomputer Network Study Act to link the nation's supercomputers into a single system.
This was his vision: "Libraries, rural schools, minority institutions and vocational education programs will have access to the same
national resources - databases, supercomputers, accelerators - as more affluent and better-known institutions."
Three years later, after noticing that France was making strides with its Minitel home-computer network, Gore introduced the
National High Performance Computer Technology Act. One of its aims was to "establish a high-capacity national research and
education computer network."
His bill directed that the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which had created the forerunner of the Internet,
"shall ensure that unclassified computer technology research is readily available to American industry."
In testimony to a House committee, Gore said: "I genuinely believe that the creation of this nationwide network . . . will create an
environment where work stations are common in homes and even small businesses."
...
One of Gore's Republican colleagues, Sen. Slade Gorton of Washington, credited him at the time for introducing a bill that would "create [note that word] a high-capacity national research and education network to link up supercomputers and databases around the country."
In 1991, Gore reintroduced his bill to provide funding for development of a national computer network. He said: "Today, most
students using computer networks are studying science and engineering, but there are more and more applications in other fields, too.
Economists, historians and literature majors are all discovering the power of networking. In the future, I think we will see computers
and networks used to teach every subject from kindergarten through grade school."
...
By the way, when he signed Gore's Internet bill, President Bush took credit for it himself. He said he had proposed it in his 1992
budget.
Enough of that gripe, though, and onto a simple solution for this entire mess:
Ban "career politicians". If the TOTAL lifetime duration in public office was restricted to prevent people from turning "professional", you'd find much less self-serving, and much more people-serving going on.
Term limits: There are a number of problems with term limits, enough that some localities which embraced them in the past ten years are reconsidering (I read this in the NYTimes a while ago). These communities are having problems finding enough people to serve.
That might not be a problem on a national level (although it might!), but your proposal here is unrealistic. For instance, this would make it likely that the President would be elected from groups of people with very little political service. This sounds great perhaps, but there are problems with it. How do we know what the candidate's positions really are, as opposed to what they say on TV? Most candidates come with either voting records or records of their leadership in their home state. Plus, would you ever hire someone with no business experience to sit on the board of your corporation? Of course not--you look for an experienced person with an MBA. So why shouldn't voters want an experience politician to be their Senator?
Ban professional lobbying. If a voice is worth hearing, it's worth hearing for free. If it's not worth hearing, bribery should not be encouraged. "Do Not Feed The Animals!"
I agree that lobbyists are one of the most revolting figures of modern politics. I don't like them either. But how do you accomplish this goal? Don't corporations and foundations (for instance, the EFF) have a right to tell politicians what they think about issues? Perhaps you could ban firms solely set up to lobby politicians, but then wouldn't corporations just set up in-house operations to do the same thing? Can you really tell the corporation that it's illegal for them to have people communicating with Congress on company time? What about the 1st Amendment?
Ban campaign funds. Have a fixed sum, divided equally between all parties, and increased by the rate of inflation. If a political body has money, it should use it to aid those it speaks for, not look good on the television.
Again, this is an issue that tears me personally. I hate the influence of Big Money on politics, and yet I refuse to accept limitations on 1st Amendment rights. In any case, is it really fair to divide funds so equally? Who decides what "all parties" means? The FEC has to do things like that already, and the GOP, Democratic, and Reform parties currently get slices of the pie. Should the Green, Libertarian, and other (Socialist, etc.) parties get equal slices too? We are talking about tremendous sums of money, and equal slices would imply that tremendous amounts would be going to parties most people do not agree with. And if you really mean to get rid of all campaign contributions, then the gov't would have to provide this increasing "fixed sum" out of taxpayer dollars. Do you propose that individuals who decide not to donate money to political organizations suddenly be forced to contribute to all of them? And I don't understand the last point. Political bodies are funded by those it speaks for (or at least the richest of those it speaks for) in order to win elections and advance its agenda. How would the body "aid" those individuals other than by using the funds to win elections?
Either scrap the House of Representitives and replace it, or introduce a Third House. This new House would be filled as per Jury Duty, by lottery. It would have power to veto anything put forward by the other two houses, and would have the power to introduce bills of it's own. Each "jury member" would have a term of 3 months, which would count against their lifetime total.
This is the most radical of your ideas, and the most impractical. What you are advocating is essentially a form of direct democracy. The objections raised in the last post are valid, and don't even begin to scratch the surface. Among other things, think of the logistics! Every 3 months a new panel of people, with no experience, comes in. They would have to become familiar with "the way things work," let alone the actual pieces of legislation being considered. In addition, have you ever looked at actual legislation? It's a necessary evil that it be technically written in the language of law. Certainly any smart person could come up to speed on it, but not in 3 months. Also, any bills it might introduce would, in 3 months, most likely never see the light of day. It requires time to make a law. This is not a bad thing. Congress needs time to review ideas and the public needs time to be made aware of them.
Finally, you suggest that the third house would provide "checks and balances" because the other two "aren't doing that." Where do you find evidence of this? In general, all passable legislation is somewhere between the idealogical extremes of the elected representatives, specifically because of how the House, Senate, and President interact.
I agree that "Carnivore" is just a horrible sounding name. But as I read (in this story, I think) earlier, it's actually an indication of the system having better privacy protections. The earlier system was "Omnivore." This improvement was dubbed "Carnivore" because it gets to the "meat" of the data, better selecting the pertinent messages and ignoring those from innocents.
it seems that perhaps with time things will change. more communication can only encourage freedom, even if it temporarily makes it easier for the gov't to spy on people. if the dissidents can get their hands on, say, pgp, then it will make it much easier for them to avoid the spying, at least within email communications.
perhaps more important, the chinese gov't can't lay their hands on web sites located overseas. although they very carefully prevent access to foreign sites, greater access to the internet for more chinese people can only lead to a higher rate at which people are able to view dissident sites hosted in, say, taiwan or the u.s.
Haley Barbour, a partner in the Washington, D.C. law and lobbying firm of Barbour Griffith & Rogers, said "The Clinton/Gore administration wants the information superhighway to be a government toll road. That's why they're going after Microsoft."
Barbour formerly chaired the Republican National Committee and is credited with spearheading the Republican Congressional landslide of 1994.
in addition, remember that the gop controlled congress tried to cut the doj's antitrust budget right in the middle of the case. i think the republicans are much more pro-ms than against.
It's not that America's nuclear arsenal is so dangerous--it isn't.
I can't agree with that. By my standards, 1 nuclear blast in the world is too many. I believe we have, what, on the order of 10^5 warheads? That's dangerous. But you're right about the spread of knowledge to rogue states/terrorists being the biggest threat.
Near the top of the list would be the arsenals (nuclear, chemical, AND biological) of a range of countries.
Fortunately, it turns out to be pretty hard to build successful versions of those things (especially to put them on warheads). Terrorist groups scare me most. Most of them have people willing to die to fulfill their mission.
Or perhaps even worse, the possability of the emergence (either through random mutation or careful manipulation) of an air-borne retrovirus (what happens if you take a disease that is as hard to cure as AIDS, kills as fast as Ebola, and spreads like the common cold?).
That sounds like a modern black plague. A lot of people would die in that scenario. Perhaps even most people. But fortunately, the more virulent a disease, the harder it is to survive in the long term if it can't find more hosts. If the cold suddenly started killing people overnight, a lot of people would die. But eventually there would be few living people with the cold, and those few left could pick up the pieces.
Of course, one of those worries (and a very serious one) is infringements on free speach and privacy, such as this latest assault by the DoE.
It may be disturbing that they are so ominously threatening people, but one must realize that one of the goals of this warning (really, the only goal), is to deter people "from even thinking about it." I have confidence that in this situation, DoE could probably do all the screening it wants and not be on shaky legal ground (as lots of posts have said). At least in this case they're not doing it in secret.
One more thing--someone mentioned workers protesting security measures at Los Alamos. They were very correct--the most effective solution here when dealing with the gov't or a corporation is to organize and protest. Organized Labor--it's worked before.
The statistics are frightening: something like 95% of all addicts return to disfunctional patterns on partaking of the substance just once.
Why isn't it 100%? Wouldn't every return to addiction begin with a single partaking?
i believe the author intended to say that 95% of all "recovered" alcoholics who partake in one drink proceed to return to alcoholism. whether this is true i don't know.
to add my own comments to this debate: i have to admit that i have no studies to quote nor do i have personal experience. but i think that although there may be "two schools of thought" on moderation vs. abstinence, the abstinence school is much preferred. i know that is the scripture of alcoholics anonymous, and they seem to be highly successful.
it's a shame pk never made it to (or perhaps didn't stick to) aa. it's amazing--until today i didn't even know "pk" stood for something. i certainly spent years starting dos command lines with "pkzip..." though. a sad story.
Is this really a wormhole as described here? Or is it just, as it says, a way of transmiting a signal faster than light speed?
it is really relevant whether this is a "wormhole" or not? isn't the more important part the fact that it (supposedly) sends a signal faster than light, which is impossible?
it seems strange to me that, contrary to the intro on/., the page seems to indicate that this actually received a patent. Can someone who better understands this summarize what exactly it's supposed to do and if it could possibly work. And why the patent was issued? (if i'm correct in that conclusion.)
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if this is true. The photos of the Oval Office certainly never show a computer sitting on the President's desk. I wonder whether somewhere else in the White House (the living quarters?) there is a PC that the President uses. Or at least you would think he would have one back at his ranch in Texas.
I wonder if the guys who haven't been in government very long are more likely to use a PC regularly. (For instance, Cheney has very recently been in the private sector, where even a CEO has a laptop.)
Another thought: Certainly Al Gore must have used a PC on a regular basis. He, after all, was famous for being a champion of the Internet.
This is a really unimformed set of statements on high-energy particle physics which have appeared in several forms throughout this discussion. Let me clarify a couple things.
The Next Linear Collider (NLC) is not competition for the LHC. The Superconducting Supercollider (SSC) which was cancelled here about 10 years ago was competition to the LHC.
I'm really too young to know much about the SSC's cancellation, but I have heard older folks say that their big mistake was not putting enough money into R&D before beginning construction. (Hence expensive mistakes in design like another poster here mentioned.) Hopefully lessons have been learned from the failure of the SSC.
Back to the SSC vs LHC vs NLC. There are two fundamentally different types of collider. Hadron machines (SSC,LHC, TeVatron @ Fermilab) collide protons against (anti)protons. Lepton machines (LEP @ CERN closed in 2000, NLC, various machines at SLAC over the years) collide electrons and positrons (aka anti-electrons).
The hadron approach is good because a proton is 2000 times heavier than an electron. So it's much easier to get to very high energies. On the down side, protons are not point particles, but rather "bags" of 3 quarks each. So it's hard to get precision information because you don't know exactly what the initial 4-vectors of the interacting quarks were.
Lepton collisions are clean because the electrons are point particles. But as I said, they are a lot lighter than protons. This motivates building the NLC as a linear collider as opposed to a storage ring ala SSC, TeVatron, LEP, LHC, or PEP-II (@SLAC). The energy loss from syncrotron radiation goes as the relativistic gamma to the sixth (!!) power. For a given energy, a lepton machine will have a gamma 2000 times bigger than a proton machine. And so putting really high energy electrons into a ring is very difficult because they lose so much energy.
The general concensus among high-energy physicists is that for the field to progress both machines are necessary (LHC and Linear Collider). The LHC will (probably) find the Higgs boson and measure its mass. It may also find physics beyond the Standard Model. A lepton machine will then be necessary to do precision studies and really untangle what the LHC will (hopefully) discover.
Having the LHC allows us to have an idea what goals the NLC should be designed for. For example, if the LHC discovers some amazing new physics at (say) 800 GeV, then this gives us information about buildng the NLC--it had better not be a 500 GeV machine.
The big question is not whether to build the NLC--it is whether it will be here or in Europe, and how long will we have to wait.
See this document: Zephyr Revisions
This is true, in particular it was thought that MACHOs ("Jupiter-like objects") could make up the dark matter portion of the energy budget. But that has already been virtually eliminated as a possibility by experiments that looked for micro-lensing of light.
The leading dark matter candidate now are WIMPs, which could be detected either directly through the recoil of nuclei (I think this is how CDMS works) or indirectly by observing ultra-high energy neutrinos from WIMP annihilation in a gravitational trap such as the center of the sun.
To concur with the fellow who already replied, it doesn't seem strange to me. It's likely that there is a combination of a) the cause is not really known and b) the NYT reporter didn't really know how to report it.
I don't think the comment about it having to do with "pressure" implies that the tank was overfull. It was simply a scientist confirming that the pressure of the water, and not some other factor, was the immediate cause of the failure. That doesn't imply that the pressure was greater than was designed for.
I don't think they're hiding anything, and if you give them a little time, I'm sure there will be a lot of discussion in the scientific community aimed at getting to the root of the problem.
I knew that they were filling the tanks for more data collection. I guess it's good my friend already has the data she needs to write her senior thesis.
Term limits: There are a number of problems with term limits, enough that some localities which embraced them in the past ten years are reconsidering (I read this in the NYTimes a while ago). These communities are having problems finding enough people to serve.
That might not be a problem on a national level (although it might!), but your proposal here is unrealistic. For instance, this would make it likely that the President would be elected from groups of people with very little political service. This sounds great perhaps, but there are problems with it. How do we know what the candidate's positions really are, as opposed to what they say on TV? Most candidates come with either voting records or records of their leadership in their home state. Plus, would you ever hire someone with no business experience to sit on the board of your corporation? Of course not--you look for an experienced person with an MBA. So why shouldn't voters want an experience politician to be their Senator?
I agree that lobbyists are one of the most revolting figures of modern politics. I don't like them either. But how do you accomplish this goal? Don't corporations and foundations (for instance, the EFF) have a right to tell politicians what they think about issues? Perhaps you could ban firms solely set up to lobby politicians, but then wouldn't corporations just set up in-house operations to do the same thing? Can you really tell the corporation that it's illegal for them to have people communicating with Congress on company time? What about the 1st Amendment?
Again, this is an issue that tears me personally. I hate the influence of Big Money on politics, and yet I refuse to accept limitations on 1st Amendment rights. In any case, is it really fair to divide funds so equally? Who decides what "all parties" means? The FEC has to do things like that already, and the GOP, Democratic, and Reform parties currently get slices of the pie. Should the Green, Libertarian, and other (Socialist, etc.) parties get equal slices too? We are talking about tremendous sums of money, and equal slices would imply that tremendous amounts would be going to parties most people do not agree with. And if you really mean to get rid of all campaign contributions, then the gov't would have to provide this increasing "fixed sum" out of taxpayer dollars. Do you propose that individuals who decide not to donate money to political organizations suddenly be forced to contribute to all of them? And I don't understand the last point. Political bodies are funded by those it speaks for (or at least the richest of those it speaks for) in order to win elections and advance its agenda. How would the body "aid" those individuals other than by using the funds to win elections?
This is the most radical of your ideas, and the most impractical. What you are advocating is essentially a form of direct democracy. The objections raised in the last post are valid, and don't even begin to scratch the surface. Among other things, think of the logistics! Every 3 months a new panel of people, with no experience, comes in. They would have to become familiar with "the way things work," let alone the actual pieces of legislation being considered. In addition, have you ever looked at actual legislation? It's a necessary evil that it be technically written in the language of law. Certainly any smart person could come up to speed on it, but not in 3 months. Also, any bills it might introduce would, in 3 months, most likely never see the light of day. It requires time to make a law. This is not a bad thing. Congress needs time to review ideas and the public needs time to be made aware of them.
Finally, you suggest that the third house would provide "checks and balances" because the other two "aren't doing that." Where do you find evidence of this? In general, all passable legislation is somewhere between the idealogical extremes of the elected representatives, specifically because of how the House, Senate, and President interact.
I agree that "Carnivore" is just a horrible sounding name. But as I read (in this story, I think) earlier, it's actually an indication of the system having better privacy protections. The earlier system was "Omnivore." This improvement was dubbed "Carnivore" because it gets to the "meat" of the data, better selecting the pertinent messages and ignoring those from innocents.
perhaps more important, the chinese gov't can't lay their hands on web sites located overseas. although they very carefully prevent access to foreign sites, greater access to the internet for more chinese people can only lead to a higher rate at which people are able to view dissident sites hosted in, say, taiwan or the u.s.
in addition, remember that the gop controlled congress tried to cut the doj's antitrust budget right in the middle of the case. i think the republicans are much more pro-ms than against.
One more thing--someone mentioned workers protesting security measures at Los Alamos. They were very correct--the most effective solution here when dealing with the gov't or a corporation is to organize and protest. Organized Labor--it's worked before.
i believe the author intended to say that 95% of all "recovered" alcoholics who partake in one drink proceed to return to alcoholism.
whether this is true i don't know.
to add my own comments to this debate: i have to admit that i have no studies to quote nor do i have personal experience. but i think that although there may be "two schools of thought" on moderation vs. abstinence, the abstinence school is much preferred. i know that is the scripture of alcoholics anonymous, and they seem to be highly successful.
it's a shame pk never made it to (or perhaps didn't stick to) aa. it's amazing--until today i didn't even know "pk" stood for something. i certainly spent years starting dos command lines with "pkzip ..." though. a sad story.
it is really relevant whether this is a "wormhole" or not? isn't the more important part the fact that it (supposedly) sends a signal faster than light, which is impossible?
it seems strange to me that, contrary to the intro on /., the page seems to indicate that this actually received a patent. Can someone who better understands this summarize what exactly it's supposed to do and if it could possibly work. And why the patent was issued? (if i'm correct in that conclusion.)
josh