1) such experiments don't fit in a budget of a single nation any more -- define who are "we" that you speak of?
America is conducting a political science experiment in Iraq which cost tens of billions of dollars already, and it fits the budget of a single (albeit very rich) state perfectly. Just make the occupation of Iraq one month shorter and you've got an accelerator and some spare change.
Circular colliders ain't that circular, either (for example HERA in DESY, where the new LC will be located). They are formed like polygons, with sharp turns for turning, and straight lines for acceleration.
Want to change international perception, than help encourage the US to build big science projects like this. The US needs to once more be the worlds top destination for scientists, and this is one of the ways of doing so.
Suppose the USA builds a great scientific project and invite scientist from all over the world, what will happen? Half of them won't be let into the USA for 'security reasons'.
Despite the incredible importance of this research - not to mention basic research in general - it was dismissed as a boondoggle and sandbox for particle physicists.
After reading the linked text I have this strange impression it's been written by somebody who just hated his high-school physics teacher. Probably also never graduated from it.
Absurd. You get no boost in light speed, you just force the light to become a standing wave and eliminate the (infinite) majority of available states of electromagnetic field by imposing specific boundary conditions on it. How can you force such nonsense in people's heads? Light speed in vacuum is equal to c which is constant, period.
A word of explanation: Casimir effect is when you hold two conducting plates in the vacuum parallel and near to each other. Since they are conducting and flat, electromagnetic field (check the Maxwell equations) has to be zero inside them. We thus impose a boundary condition on the Maxwell equations (since their solutions have to continuously drop to zero in magnitude when near the plates) and these boundary conditions carry on into quantum electrodynamics, limiting the possible states photons can have between the plates.
These experiments, the grandparent poster wrote about, slowed down the light impulses in the media, not in the vacuum. Think of it as of a sprinter running on the olympic track (photons in the vacuum, constant speed) or the same sprinter running among the bushes, getting caught by them and thus effectively being slowed down (photons in the media).
Someone raise my karma, or I won't be able to post on the topic I really like and happen to now something about.
For particles we have a good, precise definition of mass. It's the lowest possible energy of the particle in any of its quantum states. Unfortunately, this works only for the combination of Special Relativity and quantum mechanics, known as quantum field theory. It does not work for General Relativity, in fact it is very difficult to give a good definition of mass in General Relativity and there are various definitions of it. General Relativity does not work with pointlike objects like particles, it works with fields.
It is the same for the massive objects, with the difference that massive objects do not travel on 'null geodesics'. They are falling freely, and their 4-momentum (it is a space-time geometrical quanity composed of energy and momentum) is being dragged along itself through the curved space-time. There is no 'attractve force' acting on these bodies, since it would violate the main postulate of General Relativity, that all reference frames are equivalent.
To make it clear: imagine you live on a big sphere. You point your nose into one direction and follow Gandalf's Principle: "Always follow your nose". Since the sphere is curved, your trajectory is curved, too, but you won't notice it, since a sphere is 'locally flat': just as we usually see this small piece of Earth around as a more or less flat surface.
The difference between photons and massive objects is that for the phonons, integrating a quantity known as interval along their path gives zero, and for massive objects it it gives a nonzero (and either positive or negative, depending on the convention) number.
Wasn't there a study which showed similar thing w/r to human anatomy classes? It showed that doctors trained on plastic corpses were evidently worse prepared than those training on real corpses. Looks like nothing can replace the real experience with human body.
No, of course not. If they could, they would be computer scientists, or hackers. Instead they are physicists.
I'm doing my PhD in physics. I know many people in physics. Most of them are intelligent enough (yes, some are plain dumb, you get fools everywhere) to understand the need security when being told about it. It may come as a surprise to you, but these people crank problems equally difficult than the security of a certain protocol. They gather a lot of information from their own discipline, and simply don't have time nor the inclination to gather the security-related information. The usual setup is that students, or PhD students are expected to act as "experts on computers". Some of them may be quite smart when it comes to security, some not. Professors and other researchers step in only when they are personally interested (I know a solid state physicists who also does research on cryptography) or a situation arises which forces them to. Being an undergrad and silly, I got a Unix account in a theoretical physics lab. I run some stupid exploit and messed a bit with the account of some scientific asshole I personally didn't like (and had reasons to it). The professor who run the shop took a patient approach to the problem after they discovered the incident: went to the dean, selected the most probable suspects, got a plea of guilt and asked us (there was another stupid undegrad involved) what we did. I told him and also told him what should they do to not make it happen again. They did it (and also deleted my account on that system). The professor has been friendly to me all the time since then. He understood they were proved insecure, didn't take it personally and followed the good advice.
The point of my rambling is that despite the fact that physicists are not professionaly trained in computer security (they have to know computers, since many of them write their own programs for calculations, in C or Fortran; many also are strong Linux supporters), they're not a bunch of poets who'll never grasp the need for security. When given the advice they will follow if it sounds reasonable.
I would add to that that the hacker community got a lot of support from the academic community all over the world. What these guys from Romania (not "Roimania") did, is just plain stupid and ungrateful, in a way. IMHO most scientists opt for freedom, not control. Such attacks may well change it.
In my opinion, they'll never put such excellent software in Hotmail. The reason is simple. MS is doing it only to push Google out of business, because they're unable to make a search engine better than Google. That's why they give 2 GB, to make it look as a better offer than gmail.
Pursuing the analogy, leaving the keys in the car is like posting your root password on your website. Running an unpatched Windows PC is like trusting the manufacturer of the car that his locks are good, when they aren't.
You are missing the main point. They are not asking the Hosting ISP to shut down. They are having the British ISP's block that IP address. SO it does not matter WHAT jurisdiction it is in, they don't care about taking it down.
There is still one problem: people are paying their ISPs for the access to the Internet, not to the "Internet without these awful spammers' sites". I, personally, would object to my ISP blocking any websites from me.
You're referring to Tchernobyl, aren't you? There are no such reactors operating in Western Europe and those in post-communist countries are being upgraded to meet modern standards.
And at least 2 of the remainign reactors of Tchernobyl are still being operated, and the state of the encasing of the damanged reactor is not such that it will still be standing a century from now.
It's an individual case which can be dealt with by shelling enough money to Ukraine to make it close the reactors. It's just that Western countries want to deal with it cheap (which makes one think they don't see so much danger in it as they declare publicly).
Also, risk assesment does of course include the actual chance of somethign happening, which is small, and getting smaller and smaller as technology develops and old systems are being decommisioned.
The other side of it are the potential consequences, and those are enormous.
With every large-scale technology one can find an enormously fatal accident caused by its usage, and declare that, no matter how small the odds are, the danger is unacceptable. Taking such approach means one is ideologically opposed to the technology in question.
Fewer peopel are likely dying of the exhaust from the local gas driven powerplants then died from thcernobyl, which amkes for a much better comparison unless you are going to stick nuclear power into every car maybe.
Why are you picking gas plants? We have coal plants, which emmit sulphur (which is filtered out, but needs to be stored afterwards) and radioactive elements and provide the incentive for coal mining, which is heavily damaging the environment.
There are other, much cleaner alternatives without having to turn to nuclear power.
But none of them makes economical sense. And don't tell me you want to put windmills everywhere and call it 'clean'. I call it 'scary'.
The problem is, that European countries are too damn small for Americans to tell between them. I remember that in 1997 a US rocket aimed at Serbian troops fell somewhere in Bulgaria (another country). Or the fact that it turns out that it was actually Iran, not Iraq, that was under suspiction of the CIA... How can you tell if it's just one letter?
Some time ago I read that in the past, American elites (diplomats, politicians) had a deep sentiment for Europe, they knew Europe from their youth or from the II World War. It is no longer so, which makes me think that the division between America and Europe may continue to develop.
Catholic mass has been parodied, used and abused in lots of movies, songs and books. Muslims are more touchy here, but they have the right to feel offended, as long as they don't cut anybody's head off because of it.
Risky idea. As other posters have mentioned, you won't heat the water evenly, but locally. What's worse, the dynamics of ocean currents are not linear, so small action != small reaction. AFAIK this dynamics is instable, once you push it out of stability, it does a lot of weird things, and then settles down at some other stable point. So heating the Labrador current with the full power of the East Coast may be a little risky.
Slashdot Mirror
At least the trolls are well fed around here.
1) such experiments don't fit in a budget of a single nation any more -- define who are "we" that you speak of?
America is conducting a political science experiment in Iraq which cost tens of billions of dollars already, and it fits the budget of a single (albeit very rich) state perfectly. Just make the occupation of Iraq one month shorter and you've got an accelerator and some spare change.
Circular colliders ain't that circular, either (for example HERA in DESY, where the new LC will be located). They are formed like polygons, with sharp turns for turning, and straight lines for acceleration.
They're not dangerous. The article was a scam.
einstein's special theory of relativity was instigated by the simple idea that acceleration and gravity are equivalent.
Errr, no. It was General Relativity.
Want to change international perception, than help encourage the US to build big science projects like this. The US needs to once more be the worlds top destination for scientists, and this is one of the ways of doing so.
Suppose the USA builds a great scientific project and invite scientist from all over the world, what will happen? Half of them won't be let into the USA for 'security reasons'.
Despite the incredible importance of this research - not to mention basic research in general - it was dismissed as a boondoggle and sandbox for particle physicists.
After reading the linked text I have this strange impression it's been written by somebody who just hated his high-school physics teacher. Probably also never graduated from it.
Absurd. You get no boost in light speed, you just force the light to become a standing wave and eliminate the (infinite) majority of available states of electromagnetic field by imposing specific boundary conditions on it. How can you force such nonsense in people's heads? Light speed in vacuum is equal to c which is constant, period.
A word of explanation: Casimir effect is when you hold two conducting plates in the vacuum parallel and near to each other. Since they are conducting and flat, electromagnetic field (check the Maxwell equations) has to be zero inside them. We thus impose a boundary condition on the Maxwell equations (since their solutions have to continuously drop to zero in magnitude when near the plates) and these boundary conditions carry on into quantum electrodynamics, limiting the possible states photons can have between the plates.
These experiments, the grandparent poster wrote about, slowed down the light impulses in the media, not in the vacuum. Think of it as of a sprinter running on the olympic track (photons in the vacuum, constant speed) or the same sprinter running among the bushes, getting caught by them and thus effectively being slowed down (photons in the media).
Someone raise my karma, or I won't be able to post on the topic I really like and happen to now something about.
For particles we have a good, precise definition of mass. It's the lowest possible energy of the particle in any of its quantum states. Unfortunately, this works only for the combination of Special Relativity and quantum mechanics, known as quantum field theory. It does not work for General Relativity, in fact it is very difficult to give a good definition of mass in General Relativity and there are various definitions of it. General Relativity does not work with pointlike objects like particles, it works with fields.
It is the same for the massive objects, with the difference that massive objects do not travel on 'null geodesics'. They are falling freely, and their 4-momentum (it is a space-time geometrical quanity composed of energy and momentum) is being dragged along itself through the curved space-time. There is no 'attractve force' acting on these bodies, since it would violate the main postulate of General Relativity, that all reference frames are equivalent.
To make it clear: imagine you live on a big sphere. You point your nose into one direction and follow Gandalf's Principle: "Always follow your nose". Since the sphere is curved, your trajectory is curved, too, but you won't notice it, since a sphere is 'locally flat': just as we usually see this small piece of Earth around as a more or less flat surface.
The difference between photons and massive objects is that for the phonons, integrating a quantity known as interval along their path gives zero, and for massive objects it it gives a nonzero (and either positive or negative, depending on the convention) number.
Wasn't there a study which showed similar thing w/r to human anatomy classes? It showed that doctors trained on plastic corpses were evidently worse prepared than those training on real corpses. Looks like nothing can replace the real experience with human body.
No, of course not. If they could, they would be computer scientists, or hackers. Instead they are physicists.
I'm doing my PhD in physics. I know many people in physics. Most of them are intelligent enough (yes, some are plain dumb, you get fools everywhere) to understand the need security when being told about it. It may come as a surprise to you, but these people crank problems equally difficult than the security of a certain protocol. They gather a lot of information from their own discipline, and simply don't have time nor the inclination to gather the security-related information. The usual setup is that students, or PhD students are expected to act as "experts on computers". Some of them may be quite smart when it comes to security, some not. Professors and other researchers step in only when they are personally interested (I know a solid state physicists who also does research on cryptography) or a situation arises which forces them to. Being an undergrad and silly, I got a Unix account in a theoretical physics lab. I run some stupid exploit and messed a bit with the account of some scientific asshole I personally didn't like (and had reasons to it). The professor who run the shop took a patient approach to the problem after they discovered the incident: went to the dean, selected the most probable suspects, got a plea of guilt and asked us (there was another stupid undegrad involved) what we did. I told him and also told him what should they do to not make it happen again. They did it (and also deleted my account on that system). The professor has been friendly to me all the time since then. He understood they were proved insecure, didn't take it personally and followed the good advice.
The point of my rambling is that despite the fact that physicists are not professionaly trained in computer security (they have to know computers, since many of them write their own programs for calculations, in C or Fortran; many also are strong Linux supporters), they're not a bunch of poets who'll never grasp the need for security. When given the advice they will follow if it sounds reasonable.
I don't think real scientists would degrade themselves to pursuing revenge after these assholes.
I would add to that that the hacker community got a lot of support from the academic community all over the world. What these guys from Romania (not "Roimania") did, is just plain stupid and ungrateful, in a way. IMHO most scientists opt for freedom, not control. Such attacks may well change it.
Macro biology is concerned primarily with MS Word macro viruses.
In my opinion, they'll never put such excellent software in Hotmail. The reason is simple. MS is doing it only to push Google out of business, because they're unable to make a search engine better than Google. That's why they give 2 GB, to make it look as a better offer than gmail.
Pursuing the analogy, leaving the keys in the car is like posting your root password on your website. Running an unpatched Windows PC is like trusting the manufacturer of the car that his locks are good, when they aren't.
You are missing the main point. They are not asking the Hosting ISP to shut down. They are having the British ISP's block that IP address. SO it does not matter WHAT jurisdiction it is in, they don't care about taking it down.
There is still one problem: people are paying their ISPs for the access to the Internet, not to the "Internet without these awful spammers' sites". I, personally, would object to my ISP blocking any websites from me.
Sure. If someone steals my car and commits a crime with it, I lose my property. After all, it was my fault that I let my car to be stolen, wasn't it?
It's an individual case which can be dealt with by shelling enough money to Ukraine to make it close the reactors. It's just that Western countries want to deal with it cheap (which makes one think they don't see so much danger in it as they declare publicly).
Also, risk assesment does of course include the actual chance of somethign happening, which is small, and getting smaller and smaller as technology develops and old systems are being decommisioned.
The other side of it are the potential consequences, and those are enormous.
With every large-scale technology one can find an enormously fatal accident caused by its usage, and declare that, no matter how small the odds are, the danger is unacceptable. Taking such approach means one is ideologically opposed to the technology in question.
Fewer peopel are likely dying of the exhaust from the local gas driven powerplants then died from thcernobyl, which amkes for a much better comparison unless you are going to stick nuclear power into every car maybe.
Why are you picking gas plants? We have coal plants, which emmit sulphur (which is filtered out, but needs to be stored afterwards) and radioactive elements and provide the incentive for coal mining, which is heavily damaging the environment.
There are other, much cleaner alternatives without having to turn to nuclear power.
But none of them makes economical sense. And don't tell me you want to put windmills everywhere and call it 'clean'. I call it 'scary'.
You dont't pirate something which is free. I was talking about legitimate behaviour only.
The problem is, that European countries are too damn small for Americans to tell between them. I remember that in 1997 a US rocket aimed at Serbian troops fell somewhere in Bulgaria (another country). Or the fact that it turns out that it was actually Iran, not Iraq, that was under suspiction of the CIA... How can you tell if it's just one letter?
Some time ago I read that in the past, American elites (diplomats, politicians) had a deep sentiment for Europe, they knew Europe from their youth or from the II World War. It is no longer so, which makes me think that the division between America and Europe may continue to develop.
Catholic mass has been parodied, used and abused in lots of movies, songs and books. Muslims are more touchy here, but they have the right to feel offended, as long as they don't cut anybody's head off because of it.
Risky idea. As other posters have mentioned, you won't heat the water evenly, but locally. What's worse, the dynamics of ocean currents are not linear, so small action != small reaction. AFAIK this dynamics is instable, once you push it out of stability, it does a lot of weird things, and then settles down at some other stable point. So heating the Labrador current with the full power of the East Coast may be a little risky.
We've reached the point where average users don't need any more power
Nonsense. We heard that in the '80. "Who needs more than 640 kb of RAM?"