Even stepping down a few orders of magnitude, it's not like the Gel-Mann model of quarks and the unified Standard Model from the 60s have any real-world impact.
You are missing the entire point. The Standard Model and quarks have not had practical applications YET. 100 years ago you could have made the exact same argument about quantum mechanics being purely curiosity for its own sake. Our understanding of that has lead to silicon transistors, NMR imaging (MRI), nuclear power etc. Of course it took 50+ years for those applications to appear. Already particle physics has medical applications: use of hadronic showers to kill brain tumours. Who knows what we applications we may find in 100 years for the physics we will discover at the LHC. The only thing for certain is that if we never go out and find that physics we'll never have any applications for it.
It's worse than little - its negative progress. Five years ago if I was rich enough I could purchase a ticket on a craft, Concorde, capable of cruising at twice the speed of sound. Today there is no supersonic passenger aircraft in service. Since I understand that a vastly more efficient supersonic aircraft could be constructed today the problem seems to be one of being willing to take an economic risk rather than a lack of technical expertise.
such security fixes could dry up overnight on a OSS project...start thinking like you've got 100 million dollar projects relying on this stuff.
This situation is PRECISELY when open source shows its strength. Take the massive annual license fee that you would need to pay MS to provide such support and hire your own, competent IT staff to maintain the code you want. First this means that you are creating jobs in the UK rather than paying some foreign company which should be a very important consideration for the UK government especially in the current climate. Secondly you now have your own local experts to provide support, implement the features that you want, provide support etc. etc. This puts you in a far better position than having to ring up MS. You own guys will be familiar with your usage and can give advice based on what they know the code does rather than on black-box trial and error experience. Finally you are contributing any changes and code back to the community helping those people that pay the taxes in the first place. Since this may also encourage other firms to invest in local expertise rather than ship money abroad this can help the local economy.
Too specific? I'd say no where near specific enough. I'm an experimental physicist, an experimental particle physicist and we use almost nothing but Open Source software. Mind you that is mainly because things like MatLab, LabView etc. cannot cope with what we need them to do. Hence most of the time we write our own software using Open Source tools and use the Linux OS both for massive clusters as well as embedded processors using in the detector's electronic frontends.
There is one tool, root, that we use for I/O and analysis. It is by far the worst designed and written piece of C++ I have ever had the misfortune to encounter but its I/O is extremely fast and powerful...once you get it to work. I'm not sure I'd recommend it but if you do it is best used via the Python interface which offers a layer of insulation from the full horror of the interpreted pseudo-C++ environment.
The only real exceptions to Open Source I can think of are the CAD software used to design detectors and electronics. Some of the embedded CPUs also used to use propriety OS's but I don't think that this is very common now - at least not on the projects I've had experience with. So perhaps if he explained what sort of experiment physics he was interested in it would help to be able to give advice.
FermiLinux was what they used before switching to Scientific Linux. The original FermiLinux was about 1-2 years out of date because they took about a year to certify the corresponding version of RedHat (pre-Fedora). We never used it on the Desktop Linux cluster I designed and used to manage because of that although now they use Scientific Linux things are a lot better.
If it turns out that you can create something indistinguishable from a magnetic monopole, then we have to start some very serious research into the implications.
This is "indistinguishable" from a monopole in the same way that an image in a mirror is "indistinguishable" from the real object. While extremely interesting there will be bound to be edge effects given the finite size of the mirror and there must physically be a second pole somewhere because the material cannot spontaneously acquire a net magnetic charge...unless there is some significant new physics occuring. Hence I would take "indistinguishable" with a very large grain of salt. It is an extremely interesting result though.
This is only true for large-scale black holes. We are colliding protons at the LHC, not stars. Any holes produced will be so small that normal matter cannot "fall" into it in the ordinary sense because they will be far smaller than a nucleus.
The implication, then, is that the LHC estimates should be independently done by other teams.
But how can they be independent? They'll be basing their arguments on the same laws of physics which apparently only have a 1 in 10,000 chance of being right. The HUGE flaw in their assumption is that the probability of a paper being wrong is a flat 0.01%. It is not. Some papers use conservative, well established physics (such as the LHC safety report) others are pushing the boundaries. The LHC safety report uses the simple fact that we do not see planets and stars disappear into Black Holes to set a limit on any danger the LHC poses. Could there be a mistake in the calculation of the actual probability - yes there could. But it cannot be significantly different because we do not see stars and planets disappear!
It's both right and wrong. The conclusion that we can't trust the probability of disaster if we got it wrong is correct...bloody obvious, but correct. The part where they use the population of the Earth to determine whether the LHC "risk" is acceptable is frankly insane. This seems to suggest that if Bird flu wipes out half the population then the "risk" of running the LHC is suddenly now more acceptable?
This is just one of a number of scare tactics corporations use to worry parents into buying their crap. You are betting $1,000+ dollars that (a) they will develop a treatment that uses stem cells, (b) the stem cells that your body produces throughout life will somehow not be useable and (c) that your child develops the medical condition which they can treat with these cells.
Instead of relying on this extremely tortuous chain of random chance why not invest that $1,000 for their education? Chances are they will almost certainly need that when they group up.
If everyone says it sucks and "taints the world" of the original, then stay away from the theatre.
That still means that some poor bastard has had the original destroyed for them just to save you. Had the film never been made then nobody would have had to suffer.
I think we would have noticed by now if Jupiter or Saturn had collapsed into a black hole. For planets I mean local ones, for stars they stop shining and again we would notice that. Similarly pulsars (neutron stars) would also disappear and these are particularly important because their enormous density means that any black hole produced by a cosmic ray would grow far more rapidly than on Earth.
We have seen none of this happen so, even though we don't know precisely what physics we will find at the LHC nature has shown us that, whatever it turns out to be it is not dangerous to the planet. Note this also applies to other exotic doom scenarios like strange matter etc.
Actually you pay tuition for the opportunity to gain knowledge. Payment of tuition does not magically download knowledge into your brain: you still need to put considerable effort in!
That being said I find it rather sad that a professional educator should act in this fashion. If my students found my notes so useful that their friends not in my course wanted copies I'd frankly be extremely happy that I'd done my job so well! As for recording lectures I think that is a little different since you are taping the persons voice. Here in Canada that requires the persons consent as a matter of law (privacy laws). As a matter of courtesy though I would expect to be asked. I've never refused anyone (and I'm now starting to podcast them myself on iTunesU anyway) but so may and should be allowed to do so.
The evidence that the LHC is safe comes from experimental observation: no planet or star has disappeared due to cosmic ray bombardment. The possibility that BHs can last for minutes is a theoretical possibility. If the theory is correct it must agree with the experimental data. Hence either the assumptions upon which the theory is based are wrong or having a black hole lifetime of several minutes is still not enough time for it to grow.
There are plenty of people with questionable or no morals. There are far fewer people willing to commit suicide. Hiroshima and Nagasaki showed that nuclear war is suicide: even if you survive the initial blast the radiation will still get you.
On the other hand Hitler's genocide seems to have done nothing to discourage others, possibly the reverse in fact. I'm not arguing that (so far) preventing nuclear war was an intended benefit but it seems to be an effective one. Even mushroom clouds can have silver linings...in limited circumstances.
You forget the countless lives, possibly even the planet itself, that may have been saved by dropping those two bombs. They showed nuclear weapons to be such terrible devices that since then nobody has ever dared to set one off in anger. Showing empty houses being blasted to smithereens does not have anywhere near the same impact as seeing pictures of the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We were fortunate that the weapons were used before two countries had large stockpiles at their disposal.
War is horrible but once there is a war the MOST unethical thing anyone can do is to prolong the war. It should be ended as quickly as possible and this is usually accomplished by using the most overwhelming force possible.
Wrong. The fastest way to end a war is to unconditionally surrender. This does not necessarily lead to the lowest number of casualties though as I imagine (and thankfully only imagine) would have been the case if the UK had ever surrendered to Nazi Germany.
Slashdot Mirror
Even stepping down a few orders of magnitude, it's not like the Gel-Mann model of quarks and the unified Standard Model from the 60s have any real-world impact.
You are missing the entire point. The Standard Model and quarks have not had practical applications YET. 100 years ago you could have made the exact same argument about quantum mechanics being purely curiosity for its own sake. Our understanding of that has lead to silicon transistors, NMR imaging (MRI), nuclear power etc. Of course it took 50+ years for those applications to appear. Already particle physics has medical applications: use of hadronic showers to kill brain tumours. Who knows what we applications we may find in 100 years for the physics we will discover at the LHC. The only thing for certain is that if we never go out and find that physics we'll never have any applications for it.
Us secular people prefer CE.
Actually it is because you can only go at one second per second in your reference frame and it is only your future that is important to you.
It's worse than little - its negative progress. Five years ago if I was rich enough I could purchase a ticket on a craft, Concorde, capable of cruising at twice the speed of sound. Today there is no supersonic passenger aircraft in service. Since I understand that a vastly more efficient supersonic aircraft could be constructed today the problem seems to be one of being willing to take an economic risk rather than a lack of technical expertise.
Why give impressions? .... it would confuse the accuracy of advertising.
You have answered your own question. Why should I help some advertising company improve the accuracy of its ads?
such security fixes could dry up overnight on a OSS project...start thinking like you've got 100 million dollar projects relying on this stuff.
This situation is PRECISELY when open source shows its strength. Take the massive annual license fee that you would need to pay MS to provide such support and hire your own, competent IT staff to maintain the code you want. First this means that you are creating jobs in the UK rather than paying some foreign company which should be a very important consideration for the UK government especially in the current climate. Secondly you now have your own local experts to provide support, implement the features that you want, provide support etc. etc. This puts you in a far better position than having to ring up MS. You own guys will be familiar with your usage and can give advice based on what they know the code does rather than on black-box trial and error experience. Finally you are contributing any changes and code back to the community helping those people that pay the taxes in the first place. Since this may also encourage other firms to invest in local expertise rather than ship money abroad this can help the local economy.
Too specific? I'd say no where near specific enough. I'm an experimental physicist, an experimental particle physicist and we use almost nothing but Open Source software. Mind you that is mainly because things like MatLab, LabView etc. cannot cope with what we need them to do. Hence most of the time we write our own software using Open Source tools and use the Linux OS both for massive clusters as well as embedded processors using in the detector's electronic frontends.
There is one tool, root, that we use for I/O and analysis. It is by far the worst designed and written piece of C++ I have ever had the misfortune to encounter but its I/O is extremely fast and powerful...once you get it to work. I'm not sure I'd recommend it but if you do it is best used via the Python interface which offers a layer of insulation from the full horror of the interpreted pseudo-C++ environment.
The only real exceptions to Open Source I can think of are the CAD software used to design detectors and electronics. Some of the embedded CPUs also used to use propriety OS's but I don't think that this is very common now - at least not on the projects I've had experience with. So perhaps if he explained what sort of experiment physics he was interested in it would help to be able to give advice.
Fortunately Fermilab does not run the LHC, CERN does.
FermiLinux was what they used before switching to Scientific Linux. The original FermiLinux was about 1-2 years out of date because they took about a year to certify the corresponding version of RedHat (pre-Fedora). We never used it on the Desktop Linux cluster I designed and used to manage because of that although now they use Scientific Linux things are a lot better.
If it turns out that you can create something indistinguishable from a magnetic monopole, then we have to start some very serious research into the implications.
This is "indistinguishable" from a monopole in the same way that an image in a mirror is "indistinguishable" from the real object. While extremely interesting there will be bound to be edge effects given the finite size of the mirror and there must physically be a second pole somewhere because the material cannot spontaneously acquire a net magnetic charge...unless there is some significant new physics occuring. Hence I would take "indistinguishable" with a very large grain of salt. It is an extremely interesting result though.
I think you mean English 3.0, American is English 2.0.
These were Oxford statisticians, not physicists. The physics department is actually extremely good...but not as good as Cambridge's :-)
Significantly less that the past billions of years of cosmic ray bombardment.
This is only true for large-scale black holes. We are colliding protons at the LHC, not stars. Any holes produced will be so small that normal matter cannot "fall" into it in the ordinary sense because they will be far smaller than a nucleus.
The implication, then, is that the LHC estimates should be independently done by other teams.
But how can they be independent? They'll be basing their arguments on the same laws of physics which apparently only have a 1 in 10,000 chance of being right. The HUGE flaw in their assumption is that the probability of a paper being wrong is a flat 0.01%. It is not. Some papers use conservative, well established physics (such as the LHC safety report) others are pushing the boundaries. The LHC safety report uses the simple fact that we do not see planets and stars disappear into Black Holes to set a limit on any danger the LHC poses. Could there be a mistake in the calculation of the actual probability - yes there could. But it cannot be significantly different because we do not see stars and planets disappear!
It's both right and wrong. The conclusion that we can't trust the probability of disaster if we got it wrong is correct...bloody obvious, but correct. The part where they use the population of the Earth to determine whether the LHC "risk" is acceptable is frankly insane. This seems to suggest that if Bird flu wipes out half the population then the "risk" of running the LHC is suddenly now more acceptable?
This is just one of a number of scare tactics corporations use to worry parents into buying their crap. You are betting $1,000+ dollars that (a) they will develop a treatment that uses stem cells, (b) the stem cells that your body produces throughout life will somehow not be useable and (c) that your child develops the medical condition which they can treat with these cells.
Instead of relying on this extremely tortuous chain of random chance why not invest that $1,000 for their education? Chances are they will almost certainly need that when they group up.
If everyone says it sucks and "taints the world" of the original, then stay away from the theatre.
That still means that some poor bastard has had the original destroyed for them just to save you. Had the film never been made then nobody would have had to suffer.
Correction: we all wish there had only been one.
I think we would have noticed by now if Jupiter or Saturn had collapsed into a black hole. For planets I mean local ones, for stars they stop shining and again we would notice that. Similarly pulsars (neutron stars) would also disappear and these are particularly important because their enormous density means that any black hole produced by a cosmic ray would grow far more rapidly than on Earth.
We have seen none of this happen so, even though we don't know precisely what physics we will find at the LHC nature has shown us that, whatever it turns out to be it is not dangerous to the planet. Note this also applies to other exotic doom scenarios like strange matter etc.
Actually you pay tuition for the opportunity to gain knowledge. Payment of tuition does not magically download knowledge into your brain: you still need to put considerable effort in!
That being said I find it rather sad that a professional educator should act in this fashion. If my students found my notes so useful that their friends not in my course wanted copies I'd frankly be extremely happy that I'd done my job so well! As for recording lectures I think that is a little different since you are taping the persons voice. Here in Canada that requires the persons consent as a matter of law (privacy laws). As a matter of courtesy though I would expect to be asked. I've never refused anyone (and I'm now starting to podcast them myself on iTunesU anyway) but so may and should be allowed to do so.
The evidence that the LHC is safe comes from experimental observation: no planet or star has disappeared due to cosmic ray bombardment. The possibility that BHs can last for minutes is a theoretical possibility. If the theory is correct it must agree with the experimental data. Hence either the assumptions upon which the theory is based are wrong or having a black hole lifetime of several minutes is still not enough time for it to grow.
There are plenty of people with questionable or no morals. There are far fewer people willing to commit suicide. Hiroshima and Nagasaki showed that nuclear war is suicide: even if you survive the initial blast the radiation will still get you.
On the other hand Hitler's genocide seems to have done nothing to discourage others, possibly the reverse in fact. I'm not arguing that (so far) preventing nuclear war was an intended benefit but it seems to be an effective one. Even mushroom clouds can have silver linings...in limited circumstances.
You forget the countless lives, possibly even the planet itself, that may have been saved by dropping those two bombs. They showed nuclear weapons to be such terrible devices that since then nobody has ever dared to set one off in anger. Showing empty houses being blasted to smithereens does not have anywhere near the same impact as seeing pictures of the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We were fortunate that the weapons were used before two countries had large stockpiles at their disposal.
War is horrible but once there is a war the MOST unethical thing anyone can do is to prolong the war. It should be ended as quickly as possible and this is usually accomplished by using the most overwhelming force possible.
Wrong. The fastest way to end a war is to unconditionally surrender. This does not necessarily lead to the lowest number of casualties though as I imagine (and thankfully only imagine) would have been the case if the UK had ever surrendered to Nazi Germany.