My concern isn't cost, but the knock-on effects. What else happens when you spray a crapton of water into the atmosphere? Where will rain increase, and where decrease? Is there a risk of disastrous flooding? Will the reduction in visible light throw off animal behavior? Or plant growth cycles?
If all we had to worry about was a few degrees of warming, climate change wouldn't be that big a deal. It's the fact that it has so many other effects, different ones in different parts of the planet. It worries me to think of a "simple" solution to a complex problem. I'm sure that the engineers have it worked out better than you've just described, but I want to know how deeply they've considered it, and that they've got reason to think that they're not flapping the wings of the world's largest butterfly, if you take my meaning.
I'm skeptical about the ability of geoengineering to solve the problems created by climate change. The climate is chaotic: obviously in its form as weather, but longer-term as well. Is it going to be possible at all to un-stir that pot?
Climate effects of CO2 go well beyond the change in temperature. It also acidifies the ocean, to the detriment of the life there. It also shifts weather patterns: even if we manage the temperature of the globe on average, it won't fix the alternations made to rainfall patterns and local temperatures, which will affect plant and animal life and require changes (perhaps drastic) to the way farming is done. I worry that geoengineering would fight global warming but cause even more climate change.
I guess we won't know if we don't do the research, but it concerns me that it could be seen as "Don't worry, we'll just put everything back, so go ahead and dig up that last ounce of fossil fuel." Even if the geoengineering approach can do more good than harm, it doesn't let us off the hook to produce less carbon, which will mitigate the damage. And we're having a hard enough time getting anything done on that score without adding a new phase to climate change denialism: "We can fix it."
I imagine they swap trolling stories and then go off to see if they can tag-team somebody.
One characteristic of a troll, I've found, is that they generally have the thick skins they claim that other people should have. They're often relatively privileged people who aren't threatened by much. There's little point in one troll trolling another, though I've seen it happen.
The scale they're trying to capture is far smaller than that: they want to capture molecules moving in a chemical reaction. They're moving much, much less than a millimeter.
The speed of light isn't the problem there. The entire frame comes in to them at the speed of light, just as in an ordinary camera. The trick is being able to capture this frame and move on to the next one, which they do with a very clever beam-splitting setup. (I haven't gotten all the details yet, but I gather that it's like sending the light beams to multiple cameras at once, each of which takes a very, very short image at a very, very precisely calibrated time. And it doesn't actually have a trillion cameras; it takes frames at that rate, but only a few of them, one per camera.)
And ya know, it may come to that. Not the sack of oranges, per se, but the fact that they have a physical body may one day be a part of social media. I could see a form of authentication arising where you have to present your physical body to an authority to get an account.
That has obvious applications in financial matters, where you can say "Yes, this is indeed the person who has the authority to withdraw money or take loans". But it may also be part of social media: if I can limit access to accounts that I could conceptually beat with a sack of oranges, then I can dismiss somebody intent on trolling and limit their opportunities to try again. I can even use reputation to bar them before they've said even a single word to me.
Facebook already wants to be the world's single-sign-on. I could see them, or somebody else, making that much more serious.
This is true: trolls don't go away. But it's also not effective to engage them directly, either. It merely gives them another opportunity to attack. It never ends well for you; you cannot win.
You can't beat a bully, but you can simply resign yourself to their existence, and seek out media where you can limit their access to you. The balance of power there is tense, because the war of arms escalates, and in the end they will always find a way to be heard. You can only hope they'll move on to a more rewarding target; for celebrities (even involuntary ones), that may not be possible. That does inflict emotional injury, but the obvious response will not cure the injury. You simply have to take it as fact and try to deal with it.
Posts unless extremely well explained will get modded down to troll
And there, I think, is the rub. If you have a point to make that runs substantially counter to conventional wisdom, you'd better be prepared to have it very well worked out.
A lot of non-down-modded posts aren't particularly well-written, either, and it's entirely possible for basic pap drivel to be upvoted simply for pandering. But it's relatively easy to ignore such things while looking for something that actually is insightful. For me, at least, it's a different experience from things designed to upset me: they DO upset me, and that's not as easily dismissed. That's my weakness, perhaps, but it's real, and common.
It's my belief that an unorthodox but valid idea will eventually find a voice that can express it well, and that when that happens, it will be considered. Until then, I'm willing to take the risk that if an idea is widely disbelieved AND badly expressed, it's probably because it's wrong. Given my limited time to spend looking at web sites, it seems the best strategy.
If it means I'm not the first one to hear about some brilliant idea or nugget of news, that's actually OK with me. I know that there are others who have more time and patience, and so I have no time or patience for people who insist that the sole reason they're being modded down is because they're unpopular. They need to seriously consider the possibility that they're wrong, and one strong clue to that is an inability to phrase the argument cogently, in a way that resists easy dismissal.
Archimedes' Sand Reckoner is considerably bigger. He's calculating the number of possible grains of sand in the world and comes up with a number equivalent to 10^63. He also talks abstractly about numbers far, far bigger than that, up to (10^8)^(10^8).
His goal wasn't really to calculate anything, just to show that numbers keep going up without becoming infinite.
Both the wall and the road (and the entrance) were buried as well.
They did know that something was there: it was obvious that this was a man-made hill. They didn't know how significant it was, and so it wasn't until now that they put together the funding and manpower to go look.
It is pretty damn remarkable. A lot of it is just a matter of time and money. A dig like this is expensive, because you need to do it with some delicacy. We could rip the top off that mound in an afternoon with bulldozers, losing huge amounts of information in the process. Instead it takes an army of grad students and many months.
Greece (and in fact the entire area through the Middle East) is just covered with such sites, where the locals know that something is buried under some hill or other, waiting for their Schliemann to decide to put forth the effort to dig it up and catalog it.
We're really fortunate about these sites, where something important happened and was then largely abandoned, or at least never progressed to becoming big population centers. Sadly, many sites continued to be used and are now modern, thriving cities, and the artifacts were either ripped out or buried in a way that we'll never be able to reach.
I wonder how much they save by making the battery inaccessible. In terms of design it means they get to cram it in around everything else. I wonder if it means they also save on connectors and mountings.
A really simple minimal spanning tree solves NP-complete problems in linear time. The solutions are inexact, but are usually pretty good. That's how Google Maps manages to get you pretty much anywhere faster than you can type the address.
I don't know if anybody has compared that to people's ability to guess the right path; we can do some things pretty well. But the computers can burn through approximations pretty darn well.
Seems to me that there's a whole new market there. Court stenography is less and less important, but there's a lot of new opportunities for transcription. Much of that video should be captioned or transcribed. There's a considerable market in having your video/audio transcribed so that it's searchable, or pasteable into your document, or whatnot.
I don't know how long that market will be open, since it's at least conceptually automatable, but for the moment the automated tools leave a lot to be desired. (I suspect that combining automated first drafts with manual corrections could be more profitable than transcribing, even with steno tools, but I don't really know.) For the moment, though, there may be some money to be made outside of courtrooms, and a tool that doubled your speed would double your income. (Not everybody will be able to achieve that, of course, but even a 10% raise would be a benefit many people would not turn up their nose at.)
It's also possible that they're price-sorting. That is, people staying at expensive hotels have more money (duh). They're willing to pay more for luxuries, many of them hard to observe (more staff, more frequent replacement of linens [and more in the rotation], more expensive furnishings, etc.) The people who pay for such things have more money and you can use that to try to up-sell them.
If they're paying $200 a night for four-star deluxe room, they've got $10 to kick in for wi-fi and not even really notice it. And you know that they didn't pick the $69 EconoLodge down the street. They'll assume that they're getting more bits, and that the service is better maintained; they're likely not to check. They do know that they're perceiving an overall experience that they like better, and they're willing to pay a substantial premium for it. That's not right or wrong, if they're getting what they want, but it does expose their pricing preference. That tips their hand and makes them pay more than they might otherwise.
I think it's similar to Starbucks. Even if you like it better, is it really "four times better" than the 7-11? It doesn't matter. They know that you're willing to pay 300% more for the coffee and will price everything else to match, because you're there, regardless of what it costs them.
Many places include utilities, so it would be in their interest to lower costs.
Even for those who don't, lower utility prices are potentially a selling point. If a renter has to chose between two identical apartments, one of which gets its electricity for $.10 and the other for $.23, it's an easy decision.
That's not going to mean instant conversion of every single apartment; friction is high even when the cost-benefit tradeoff is obvious, and it often isn't. But I don't think that having a distinction between occupant and owner is necessarily a bar to upgrades. It introduces delays, but the costs are being paid by somebody, and they'll seek to minimize them.
I suspect that a better argument against getting solar electric into apartments is the ratio of roof to occupants. It's not a renter-owner distinction, since not all apartments are big buildings and not all big buildings are rented, but it does mean that there's a chunk of the population whose abodes don't have enough access to the sun to support the economics of solar panels. The solar panels will get put on anyway since that is now rooftop space that's being wasted in a populated area, but the economics of who pays to own/lease that space, and who is willing to make the up-front investment, is less clear.
You can currently go out right now and find a company in your town that will provide, install and maintain PV panels on your roof for a guaranteed electricity price that is LOWER than what you currently pay
And I don't think it's a coincidence that Elon Musk is a big player in that domain as well.
That is stuff Tolkien actually talked about at more length in the LotR appendices and in material published after his death. It seems reasonable to include it, since this is really intended as an LotR prequel rather than just The Hobbit on its own. I'm not entirely crazy about the way they wrote it, but it's not something they invented out of whole cloth.
I'd have liked to have seen more of Saruman, in fact, but that was limited by Christopher Lee's health. It ties in to the continuation of the Gandalf plot line from the second film.
There's no good reason to do it that way now that the era of cheap labor in China is over.
I really don't know much about that; can you amplify a bit? I mean, economics said that it should happen some day, as all that money washing into China should eventually translate into demands for higher pay, but there were plenty of places to squirrel that money away rather than pay workers. And there were a LOT of potential workers.
So what finally caused the labor rate to rise enough? I gather that the goal was to establish dominance in some kinds of manufacturing so that we'd have to re-establish the industry from scratch, raising the threshold for bringing manufacturing projects back here. Did the achieve that, or what?
One pathway for electron/positron collision can produce a neutral Z and a Higgs. In fact, they already tried that at the Large Electron Positron collider, the predecessor to the LHC. It came very close, at 115 GeV. There were hints of the Higgs, and so it came as no real surprise to find it just 10% higher.
This is actually a more efficient way of producing Higgs particles, at lower energies. The LHC produces the Higgs with two quarks, but there are six quarks involved in the proton/proton collision, so a lot of the energy you put in doesn't produce Higgs bosons. (In very rare instances you'll get two Higgs bosons, but most of the time the other quarks just produce other stuff.)
This is almost certainly about eliminating the risk of contingent workforce being classified as employees.
Sorry, I think this is the point I'm not getting. Is that a tax thing or benefits thing or some other law? Does it incur some sort of penalty, like making them pay some kind of retroactive tax?
Yeah, as usual, the summary is terrible. ALL collisions at the LHC are proton-proton collisions, not just the W-W ones.
What they're measuring is one of the higher-order corrections implied by the Higgs mechanism. Without the Higgs field, W bosons wouldn't have mass. Measuring how the Ws interact with each helps verify that the Higgs mechanism for explaining W boson mass is correct. Unfortunately, it's kinda hard to produce a W boson, much less two at once, much less getting them to interact with each other. You have to produce a lot of high-energy collisions to see it happen.
They did, and they got the answer they expected from the Higgs mechanism. Yay, Peter Higgs gets to keep his Nobel prize.
It was sponsored by over 200 people on both sides. It passed by a "voice vote" which means they didn't track exactly who voted for it or against it, but it was overwhelmingly positive. I gather that a few Democrats voted against it, mostly on the grounds that some states tax it and need it as a revenue source (it's a Republican thing to believe that collecting less taxes somehow magically decreases deficits rather than increasing them), but mostly, it's hard to vote against a tax cut in an election year.
Because of that there's a good chance that it will flounder and die in the Senate. The House is 100% up in November, but the Senators are a bit more responsible about forbidding states from raising revenues, and the Senators from Texas (which lose their exemption under the current moratorium) may ask Reid to spike it.
So arguably, this is more about ending the moratorium than extending it: by voting up a permanent ban they've diminished the chances of extending the temporary one. I don't know all of the inside-baseball on this one and there's more that I'm not seeing, so I can't give a confident prediction.
If so, perhaps they their script from when I quit Comcast. I quit because they couldn't or wouldn't fix a very unreliable connection; don't get me wrong, the service sucked. But canceling it took a few minutes; they asked me why, and I told them, and that was it. They didn't try really hard to retain me.
Perhaps the frequent complaints I'd made popped up a box saying "Customer is a pain in the butt, let them go" or "Customer is at the end of a long last mile with outdated equipment, and it would cost more to fix their problem than we'd make in payments, so give it up." Or maybe it was just my very definite answer about why I was canceling. But it didn't take me very long and I got no real pushback on it.
I find that in effect my password-keeper for sites with onerous restrictions, but used only rarely, is my email. I end up using the password-recovery feature which usually ends up as "we'll email you a link; if you have access to the original email address you signed in with, we'll treat that as proof that you are who you say you are."
Losing access to my email account would be pretty disastrous. That can happen not just by forgetting the password, but with any kind of administrative failure, or even simply being out of range (though fortunately, trying to access a web site usually implies access to my email.)
It's very much an eggs-in-one-basket situation, though fortunately those rarely-used web sites are usually of limited importance to me.
What I find particularly perplexing is that if there was a real significant movement, and the request were possible, the White House would already be doing it. It's hard for me to imagine a President saying, "Gosh, 134,000+ people, you're right. This is a really important issue and I had no idea that people cared about it. Thanks, I'll get right on it."
So I'm confused as to what they hope to accomplish with the site. Maybe, maybe they'd end up going to Congress and saying, "Look, we've got ten million virtual signatures here, and that means I've got a campaign issue next time around. So go do something." But shy of that I don't see it giving anybody anything except a place to vent, followed by a quick civics lesson on the separation of powers.
Slashdot Mirror
My concern isn't cost, but the knock-on effects. What else happens when you spray a crapton of water into the atmosphere? Where will rain increase, and where decrease? Is there a risk of disastrous flooding? Will the reduction in visible light throw off animal behavior? Or plant growth cycles?
If all we had to worry about was a few degrees of warming, climate change wouldn't be that big a deal. It's the fact that it has so many other effects, different ones in different parts of the planet. It worries me to think of a "simple" solution to a complex problem. I'm sure that the engineers have it worked out better than you've just described, but I want to know how deeply they've considered it, and that they've got reason to think that they're not flapping the wings of the world's largest butterfly, if you take my meaning.
I'm skeptical about the ability of geoengineering to solve the problems created by climate change. The climate is chaotic: obviously in its form as weather, but longer-term as well. Is it going to be possible at all to un-stir that pot?
Climate effects of CO2 go well beyond the change in temperature. It also acidifies the ocean, to the detriment of the life there. It also shifts weather patterns: even if we manage the temperature of the globe on average, it won't fix the alternations made to rainfall patterns and local temperatures, which will affect plant and animal life and require changes (perhaps drastic) to the way farming is done. I worry that geoengineering would fight global warming but cause even more climate change.
I guess we won't know if we don't do the research, but it concerns me that it could be seen as "Don't worry, we'll just put everything back, so go ahead and dig up that last ounce of fossil fuel." Even if the geoengineering approach can do more good than harm, it doesn't let us off the hook to produce less carbon, which will mitigate the damage. And we're having a hard enough time getting anything done on that score without adding a new phase to climate change denialism: "We can fix it."
I imagine they swap trolling stories and then go off to see if they can tag-team somebody.
One characteristic of a troll, I've found, is that they generally have the thick skins they claim that other people should have. They're often relatively privileged people who aren't threatened by much. There's little point in one troll trolling another, though I've seen it happen.
The scale they're trying to capture is far smaller than that: they want to capture molecules moving in a chemical reaction. They're moving much, much less than a millimeter.
The speed of light isn't the problem there. The entire frame comes in to them at the speed of light, just as in an ordinary camera. The trick is being able to capture this frame and move on to the next one, which they do with a very clever beam-splitting setup. (I haven't gotten all the details yet, but I gather that it's like sending the light beams to multiple cameras at once, each of which takes a very, very short image at a very, very precisely calibrated time. And it doesn't actually have a trillion cameras; it takes frames at that rate, but only a few of them, one per camera.)
And ya know, it may come to that. Not the sack of oranges, per se, but the fact that they have a physical body may one day be a part of social media. I could see a form of authentication arising where you have to present your physical body to an authority to get an account.
That has obvious applications in financial matters, where you can say "Yes, this is indeed the person who has the authority to withdraw money or take loans". But it may also be part of social media: if I can limit access to accounts that I could conceptually beat with a sack of oranges, then I can dismiss somebody intent on trolling and limit their opportunities to try again. I can even use reputation to bar them before they've said even a single word to me.
Facebook already wants to be the world's single-sign-on. I could see them, or somebody else, making that much more serious.
This is true: trolls don't go away. But it's also not effective to engage them directly, either. It merely gives them another opportunity to attack. It never ends well for you; you cannot win.
You can't beat a bully, but you can simply resign yourself to their existence, and seek out media where you can limit their access to you. The balance of power there is tense, because the war of arms escalates, and in the end they will always find a way to be heard. You can only hope they'll move on to a more rewarding target; for celebrities (even involuntary ones), that may not be possible. That does inflict emotional injury, but the obvious response will not cure the injury. You simply have to take it as fact and try to deal with it.
Posts unless extremely well explained will get modded down to troll
And there, I think, is the rub. If you have a point to make that runs substantially counter to conventional wisdom, you'd better be prepared to have it very well worked out.
A lot of non-down-modded posts aren't particularly well-written, either, and it's entirely possible for basic pap drivel to be upvoted simply for pandering. But it's relatively easy to ignore such things while looking for something that actually is insightful. For me, at least, it's a different experience from things designed to upset me: they DO upset me, and that's not as easily dismissed. That's my weakness, perhaps, but it's real, and common.
It's my belief that an unorthodox but valid idea will eventually find a voice that can express it well, and that when that happens, it will be considered. Until then, I'm willing to take the risk that if an idea is widely disbelieved AND badly expressed, it's probably because it's wrong. Given my limited time to spend looking at web sites, it seems the best strategy.
If it means I'm not the first one to hear about some brilliant idea or nugget of news, that's actually OK with me. I know that there are others who have more time and patience, and so I have no time or patience for people who insist that the sole reason they're being modded down is because they're unpopular. They need to seriously consider the possibility that they're wrong, and one strong clue to that is an inability to phrase the argument cogently, in a way that resists easy dismissal.
Archimedes' Sand Reckoner is considerably bigger. He's calculating the number of possible grains of sand in the world and comes up with a number equivalent to 10^63. He also talks abstractly about numbers far, far bigger than that, up to (10^8)^(10^8).
His goal wasn't really to calculate anything, just to show that numbers keep going up without becoming infinite.
Both the wall and the road (and the entrance) were buried as well.
They did know that something was there: it was obvious that this was a man-made hill. They didn't know how significant it was, and so it wasn't until now that they put together the funding and manpower to go look.
It is pretty damn remarkable. A lot of it is just a matter of time and money. A dig like this is expensive, because you need to do it with some delicacy. We could rip the top off that mound in an afternoon with bulldozers, losing huge amounts of information in the process. Instead it takes an army of grad students and many months.
Greece (and in fact the entire area through the Middle East) is just covered with such sites, where the locals know that something is buried under some hill or other, waiting for their Schliemann to decide to put forth the effort to dig it up and catalog it.
We're really fortunate about these sites, where something important happened and was then largely abandoned, or at least never progressed to becoming big population centers. Sadly, many sites continued to be used and are now modern, thriving cities, and the artifacts were either ripped out or buried in a way that we'll never be able to reach.
I wonder how much they save by making the battery inaccessible. In terms of design it means they get to cram it in around everything else. I wonder if it means they also save on connectors and mountings.
A really simple minimal spanning tree solves NP-complete problems in linear time. The solutions are inexact, but are usually pretty good. That's how Google Maps manages to get you pretty much anywhere faster than you can type the address.
I don't know if anybody has compared that to people's ability to guess the right path; we can do some things pretty well. But the computers can burn through approximations pretty darn well.
Seems to me that there's a whole new market there. Court stenography is less and less important, but there's a lot of new opportunities for transcription. Much of that video should be captioned or transcribed. There's a considerable market in having your video/audio transcribed so that it's searchable, or pasteable into your document, or whatnot.
I don't know how long that market will be open, since it's at least conceptually automatable, but for the moment the automated tools leave a lot to be desired. (I suspect that combining automated first drafts with manual corrections could be more profitable than transcribing, even with steno tools, but I don't really know.) For the moment, though, there may be some money to be made outside of courtrooms, and a tool that doubled your speed would double your income. (Not everybody will be able to achieve that, of course, but even a 10% raise would be a benefit many people would not turn up their nose at.)
It's also possible that they're price-sorting. That is, people staying at expensive hotels have more money (duh). They're willing to pay more for luxuries, many of them hard to observe (more staff, more frequent replacement of linens [and more in the rotation], more expensive furnishings, etc.) The people who pay for such things have more money and you can use that to try to up-sell them.
If they're paying $200 a night for four-star deluxe room, they've got $10 to kick in for wi-fi and not even really notice it. And you know that they didn't pick the $69 EconoLodge down the street. They'll assume that they're getting more bits, and that the service is better maintained; they're likely not to check. They do know that they're perceiving an overall experience that they like better, and they're willing to pay a substantial premium for it. That's not right or wrong, if they're getting what they want, but it does expose their pricing preference. That tips their hand and makes them pay more than they might otherwise.
I think it's similar to Starbucks. Even if you like it better, is it really "four times better" than the 7-11? It doesn't matter. They know that you're willing to pay 300% more for the coffee and will price everything else to match, because you're there, regardless of what it costs them.
Many places include utilities, so it would be in their interest to lower costs.
Even for those who don't, lower utility prices are potentially a selling point. If a renter has to chose between two identical apartments, one of which gets its electricity for $.10 and the other for $.23, it's an easy decision.
That's not going to mean instant conversion of every single apartment; friction is high even when the cost-benefit tradeoff is obvious, and it often isn't. But I don't think that having a distinction between occupant and owner is necessarily a bar to upgrades. It introduces delays, but the costs are being paid by somebody, and they'll seek to minimize them.
I suspect that a better argument against getting solar electric into apartments is the ratio of roof to occupants. It's not a renter-owner distinction, since not all apartments are big buildings and not all big buildings are rented, but it does mean that there's a chunk of the population whose abodes don't have enough access to the sun to support the economics of solar panels. The solar panels will get put on anyway since that is now rooftop space that's being wasted in a populated area, but the economics of who pays to own/lease that space, and who is willing to make the up-front investment, is less clear.
You can currently go out right now and find a company in your town that will provide, install and maintain PV panels on your roof for a guaranteed electricity price that is LOWER than what you currently pay
And I don't think it's a coincidence that Elon Musk is a big player in that domain as well.
That is stuff Tolkien actually talked about at more length in the LotR appendices and in material published after his death. It seems reasonable to include it, since this is really intended as an LotR prequel rather than just The Hobbit on its own. I'm not entirely crazy about the way they wrote it, but it's not something they invented out of whole cloth.
I'd have liked to have seen more of Saruman, in fact, but that was limited by Christopher Lee's health. It ties in to the continuation of the Gandalf plot line from the second film.
There's no good reason to do it that way now that the era of cheap labor in China is over.
I really don't know much about that; can you amplify a bit? I mean, economics said that it should happen some day, as all that money washing into China should eventually translate into demands for higher pay, but there were plenty of places to squirrel that money away rather than pay workers. And there were a LOT of potential workers.
So what finally caused the labor rate to rise enough? I gather that the goal was to establish dominance in some kinds of manufacturing so that we'd have to re-establish the industry from scratch, raising the threshold for bringing manufacturing projects back here. Did the achieve that, or what?
One pathway for electron/positron collision can produce a neutral Z and a Higgs. In fact, they already tried that at the Large Electron Positron collider, the predecessor to the LHC. It came very close, at 115 GeV. There were hints of the Higgs, and so it came as no real surprise to find it just 10% higher.
This is actually a more efficient way of producing Higgs particles, at lower energies. The LHC produces the Higgs with two quarks, but there are six quarks involved in the proton/proton collision, so a lot of the energy you put in doesn't produce Higgs bosons. (In very rare instances you'll get two Higgs bosons, but most of the time the other quarks just produce other stuff.)
This is almost certainly about eliminating the risk of contingent workforce being classified as employees.
Sorry, I think this is the point I'm not getting. Is that a tax thing or benefits thing or some other law? Does it incur some sort of penalty, like making them pay some kind of retroactive tax?
Yeah, as usual, the summary is terrible. ALL collisions at the LHC are proton-proton collisions, not just the W-W ones.
What they're measuring is one of the higher-order corrections implied by the Higgs mechanism. Without the Higgs field, W bosons wouldn't have mass. Measuring how the Ws interact with each helps verify that the Higgs mechanism for explaining W boson mass is correct. Unfortunately, it's kinda hard to produce a W boson, much less two at once, much less getting them to interact with each other. You have to produce a lot of high-energy collisions to see it happen.
They did, and they got the answer they expected from the Higgs mechanism. Yay, Peter Higgs gets to keep his Nobel prize.
It was sponsored by over 200 people on both sides. It passed by a "voice vote" which means they didn't track exactly who voted for it or against it, but it was overwhelmingly positive. I gather that a few Democrats voted against it, mostly on the grounds that some states tax it and need it as a revenue source (it's a Republican thing to believe that collecting less taxes somehow magically decreases deficits rather than increasing them), but mostly, it's hard to vote against a tax cut in an election year.
Because of that there's a good chance that it will flounder and die in the Senate. The House is 100% up in November, but the Senators are a bit more responsible about forbidding states from raising revenues, and the Senators from Texas (which lose their exemption under the current moratorium) may ask Reid to spike it.
So arguably, this is more about ending the moratorium than extending it: by voting up a permanent ban they've diminished the chances of extending the temporary one. I don't know all of the inside-baseball on this one and there's more that I'm not seeing, so I can't give a confident prediction.
If so, perhaps they their script from when I quit Comcast. I quit because they couldn't or wouldn't fix a very unreliable connection; don't get me wrong, the service sucked. But canceling it took a few minutes; they asked me why, and I told them, and that was it. They didn't try really hard to retain me.
Perhaps the frequent complaints I'd made popped up a box saying "Customer is a pain in the butt, let them go" or "Customer is at the end of a long last mile with outdated equipment, and it would cost more to fix their problem than we'd make in payments, so give it up." Or maybe it was just my very definite answer about why I was canceling. But it didn't take me very long and I got no real pushback on it.
I find that in effect my password-keeper for sites with onerous restrictions, but used only rarely, is my email. I end up using the password-recovery feature which usually ends up as "we'll email you a link; if you have access to the original email address you signed in with, we'll treat that as proof that you are who you say you are."
Losing access to my email account would be pretty disastrous. That can happen not just by forgetting the password, but with any kind of administrative failure, or even simply being out of range (though fortunately, trying to access a web site usually implies access to my email.)
It's very much an eggs-in-one-basket situation, though fortunately those rarely-used web sites are usually of limited importance to me.
What I find particularly perplexing is that if there was a real significant movement, and the request were possible, the White House would already be doing it. It's hard for me to imagine a President saying, "Gosh, 134,000+ people, you're right. This is a really important issue and I had no idea that people cared about it. Thanks, I'll get right on it."
So I'm confused as to what they hope to accomplish with the site. Maybe, maybe they'd end up going to Congress and saying, "Look, we've got ten million virtual signatures here, and that means I've got a campaign issue next time around. So go do something." But shy of that I don't see it giving anybody anything except a place to vent, followed by a quick civics lesson on the separation of powers.