The SSC in Texas was 40 TeV, and the LHC at CERN will be 14 TeV when fully operational. They're about to turn on now, but will make their first run at the lower 10 TeV. Fermilab runs at 2 TeV.
Yes, we would have had the answers to all these questions and more 10 years ago, if the SSC hadn't been scrapped.
<soapbox>
The US is at a significant disadvantage when it comes to "big science". Every year, every project must come back to congress and beg for funding, justify their existence, rather than spend that time doing science. As a consequence, funding in the US is extremely volatile. Look at the budget crisis of DOE in December, the zeroing of the ITER budget, and the canceling of the SSC in 1993 for a few examples. Big science is worthwhile. We should figure out how to give scientists some measure of job security, so they can concentrate on science. This is a miniscule portion of the budget.
</soapbox>
GeV = giga electron volt = 10^9 eV. The electron volt (eV) is the amount of energy gained by an electron accelerated by a 1 volt potential.
Finally, E=m c^2 so we generally interchange mass and energy as convenient. Strictly, we should write masses in units of GeV/c^2. However we generally set c=1 so there is no difference between mass and energy. Obviously, in engineering units mass and energy are not the same. However, one can always take a mass, and multiply by the speed of light (in whatever units are appropriate) to get the unit of energy.
More generally, this is called "natural units". We set hbar=c=1 in quantum mechanics, leaving only one real unit, energy. At the end of any calculation, one can re-insert hbar and c in relevant units. General Relativists also set Newton's constant to 1, which removes units altogether. It's a neat trick. Try it.;)
length = hbar/energy; momentum = energy/c; mass = energy/c^2; time = length/c; etc.
So this guy is using DC solar panels, converting it to AC with an inverter, and then using it primarily to power...a computer lab, which just convert it back to DC. There must be at least 50% loss in this. AC was designed for transmission lines, which run for miles.
When the distance from source to sink is measured in meters instead, wouldn't it make sense to avoid the inversion step, and just use a voltage stepdown transformer, keeping everything DC? You'd have to install DC power supplies into your computers. Do those even exist? Of course power not going to computers could be run into an inverter to power other household AC things...
I think the switch to local power generation may require the (re)invention of DC infrastructure for within the house.
Why isn't anyone making systematic IP blacklists? I mean, after the usual kind of spam crap, you've just identified the attacker, or a piece of a botnet. Keep it all in a list and just deny those IP any access at all. (e.g. firewall rules) By sharing these rules, you nullify the effect of the botnets. Tough shit for the people with cracked computers. They should have been more dilligent in applying patches...
I do this with denyhosts which checks logs for ssh dictionary attacks and then blocks them. By sharing these lists, and cross referencing them between different hosts, you should have a very reliable list, and can remove the effect of IP spoofing which may be possible with some protocols/attacks.
Of course they aren't going for direct democracy. That is an organizational nightmare.
Someone should tell that to Switzerland. I live here (American expat) and it seems to work quite well. But it's difficult for me to make a really informed opinion since my French and German are crap. They vote all the time (many times a year), and from an outsider's perspective, it doesn't seem that different in its outcome than a representative democracy. I would also argue it prevents certain abuses -- particularly the kind that can be bought. It's much more difficult to railroad through a proposition that is harmful to most people in a direct democracy. In a representative democracy your targets are defined and you know who to pay off, bribe, blackmail, or otherwise influence to get your unpopular law. It's clear that this is happening routinely in the US, Brittan, and a few other places.
These are not the same at all. The "Black holes are the ultimate destructive force" is a strange public misunderstanding. Really, supernovae are the ultimate destructive force -- and create black holes. But we won't be creating supernovae in the lab. In fact there's an interesting theory that nearby supernovae have been responsible for major extinction events on Earth. Astrophysical black holes are cold, very cold. In fact they're colder than the Cosmic Microwave Background. As black holes get smaller, they get hotter, down to the threshold at which they can be created, at which point their temperature equals their mass (in natural units) which is 10^17 Kelvin for these theories. Hot things radiate particles lighter than their temperature. Everything stable is lighter than 10^17 Kelvin.
We're remotely surprised because it's a ridiculous set of assumptions that leads one to the conclusion that creating black holes in the lab are dangerous. Read TFA or the non-technical summary for the guts, but briefly,
If you can create a black hole by p+p->BH, then the p-p-BH interaction exists, and the BH can also decay into p+p, since they are lighter. Violation of this requires violation of Quantum Mechanics and/or the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
"Concern" isn't a word I would use, but the arguments do become weaker for the VLHC. So the worst possible imaginable scenario would only have the earth surviving for a few hundred million years after our experiment, instead of billions. Also the VLHC is far from "planned". It's been discussed, but there is no engineering work and no formal proposal for it.
Also note that astronomy is really advancing at a lightning pace these days. By the time any VLHC reaches serious consideration, astrophysical bounds on these scenarios will be much, much tighter. A VLHC could not be operational any sooner than 20 years from now, if serious planning started today.
The assumptions of the original lawsuit basically requires one to reject the 2nd law of thermodynamics (in order to prevent black hole decay). This is not a "normal" assumption. It might have been a curiosity in the theoretical literature, but should never have grabbed the public's attention. My comment about dragons is not really in jest. One can never know anything about things which have never happened, and I don't think are worthy of our time (scientifically). Of course humans love to debate about all kinds of unobservable things -- gods, ESP, angels, etc...
There's a big difference between people mouthing off in a "forum" and a carefully researched, scientific journal article. TFA is the latter (there are two actually) and weighs in at 88 pages! Further, they begin by rejecting the points in your post (which are assumptions that most reasonable people would begin with), to see what would happen, because the original claim by the folks in Hawaii did just that. Now hopefully some nutcase won't make us reject the assumption that dragons are not involved...
There is also the general feeling amongst most judges to grant more leeway to the executive branch during times of war. The last thing you want to have happen as a SC judge is to issue a ruling and then have the executive branch ignore it. Say, for example, in 2002 they would've said "No gitmo, put them in federal prisons, blah blah." It's highly possible, even probably, the bush administration would've simply ignored the ruling and probably had popular support for doing so, basically gutting the SC's power.
Interesting argument, I like it. You're saying the slowness of the courts prevents a power struggle between them and the rest of the government. The stability is highly dependent on each branch obeying the others.
However it's clear to me that one mode of a falling democracy is a large number of laws from which they can select. These laws then get used against political opponents or rivals, giving effectively absolute power. In this case, they may lose gitmo, but then there's always extraordinary rendition and other prisons outside the US. The rate of new laws is far, far higher than the rate of them getting reviewed.
Scroll wheel makes a crappy pgup/pgdn. Either it jumps too many pages or (if you lower sensitivity) makes scrolling in continuous mode (e.g. web browsers) way too slow.
You clearly don't hold a pencil in one hand while reading things. Not all of us have two free hands lying about.
Between the one mouse button, lack of pgup/pgdn keys, and numerous hardware problems, my macbook pro is really pissing me off. I wish everyone would stop manufacturing crap.
Ok, why the hell has every manufacturer in the business decided to eschew the pgup/pgdn buttons for the god-awful two-handed replacement? Does anyone actually like this crap or are the rest of you only reading 1 page things?
I was obviously talking about Pons-Fleischmann type devices, not muon catalyzed fusion. In muon catalyzed fusion my second sentence is false: "The electrons are irrelevant since their density is so low". You replace an electron with a muon and you make the "size" of the muonic atom much smaller. This allows the deuterium to come close enough to fuse. No one has managed to come close to break-even with it though. And, it still holds that Quantum Mechanics rules out the Pons & Fleischmann type devices (without muons).
Cold fusion isn't ruled out by any known laws of physics
No, cold fusion is ruled out by basic Quantum Mechanics.
The electrons are irrelevant since their density is so low, and nuclei must be within 10^-15 m to fuse. This only occurs at temperatures of hundreds of millions Celsius. If these experiments were generating temperatures this high, one could easily tell because they would also emit X- and gamma-rays.
Explanation of "cold fusion" phenomena (if these experiments are real and reproducible) would require a significant modification of Quantum Mechanics. This is exactly why physicists are so quick to dismiss the experiments. Few papers have been published "ruling it out" because it's so simple. However here is one: http://link.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v63/p191. The theoretical literature claiming to come up with exotic ways to allow the phenomena to happen are quite extreme, in my opinion.
A govenment/regulatory body doesn't have to deal with you on the moon, they just cut you off from supplies and arrest you the minute you step foot on earth.
Any offworld settlement had better be self-sufficient, or you have much bigger problems than local authorities at your supply depot. And if it's self sufficient, who cares about some local authority hundreds of thousands of miles (and billions of dollars) away?
"Property rights" won't amount to a hill of beans to the first person to get up there, stand on the spot and say "this is mine".
In other words, property rights are unenforcable, and none of the existing governments on earth have any real say. What government is going to spend 10 billion on space hardware to settle a legal property ownership/squatting claim?
In yet other words, possession is 9/10 of the law. Go ahead and argue about the other 1/10, because you don't matter.
Finally, the LDS Church does own the copyrights to these manuals. The law does offer them protection against violators, so I don't see anything wrong with them demanding that protection.
Copyright grants authors the ability to control distribution of their works as a compromise to enhance the public good, and allow profit for the author.
In this case, the church is not making a profit, nor is the public good served by giving anyone control over distribution of this text.
Most people seem to confuse copyright with control. Authors/creators are not given control out of some inherent right. And, control is not permanent or guaranteed. Authors only get control to generate profit, as an incentive to get the author to generate new works.
This particular work, as far as I can see, has nothing to do with the usual ideas of copyright. Neither do bibles.
Between spam, malware, and credit card fraud, the criminals are winning, big time.
The eventual consequence of this is a faltering of trust in our financial systems and economies, and the rise of new kinds of criminal mafias, with billion dollar portfolios. If you thought the mob was scary, wait until you see what rises out of the ashes of the current system.
The solution to this, I believe, is first to limit the information transferred in any transaction to that which is necessary for the transaction (no grocer, you don't need to know where I live); second to implement electronic cash (in the current credit card system you give authorization to perform transactions at any time in the future without verification); and third to establish and teach strong cryptography for communications, transactions, and identity.
But the biggest thing we can do now is get the world's police forces to get off their asses. As long as these things are not prosecuted, criminals will flourish, and they are.
It's time to make this an important issue in elections, before we all lose big.
Slashdot Mirror
The SSC in Texas was 40 TeV, and the LHC at CERN will be 14 TeV when fully operational. They're about to turn on now, but will make their first run at the lower 10 TeV. Fermilab runs at 2 TeV.
Yes, we would have had the answers to all these questions and more 10 years ago, if the SSC hadn't been scrapped.
<soapbox>
The US is at a significant disadvantage when it comes to "big science". Every year, every project must come back to congress and beg for funding, justify their existence, rather than spend that time doing science. As a consequence, funding in the US is extremely volatile. Look at the budget crisis of DOE in December, the zeroing of the ITER budget, and the canceling of the SSC in 1993 for a few examples. Big science is worthwhile. We should figure out how to give scientists some measure of job security, so they can concentrate on science. This is a miniscule portion of the budget.
</soapbox>
GeV = giga electron volt = 10^9 eV. The electron volt (eV) is the amount of energy gained by an electron accelerated by a 1 volt potential.
Finally, E=m c^2 so we generally interchange mass and energy as convenient. Strictly, we should write masses in units of GeV/c^2. However we generally set c=1 so there is no difference between mass and energy. Obviously, in engineering units mass and energy are not the same. However, one can always take a mass, and multiply by the speed of light (in whatever units are appropriate) to get the unit of energy.
More generally, this is called "natural units". We set hbar=c=1 in quantum mechanics, leaving only one real unit, energy. At the end of any calculation, one can re-insert hbar and c in relevant units. General Relativists also set Newton's constant to 1, which removes units altogether. It's a neat trick. Try it. ;)
length = hbar/energy; momentum = energy/c; mass = energy/c^2; time = length/c; etc.
So this guy is using DC solar panels, converting it to AC with an inverter, and then using it primarily to power...a computer lab, which just convert it back to DC. There must be at least 50% loss in this. AC was designed for transmission lines, which run for miles.
When the distance from source to sink is measured in meters instead, wouldn't it make sense to avoid the inversion step, and just use a voltage stepdown transformer, keeping everything DC? You'd have to install DC power supplies into your computers. Do those even exist? Of course power not going to computers could be run into an inverter to power other household AC things...
I think the switch to local power generation may require the (re)invention of DC infrastructure for within the house.
-- Bob
Why isn't anyone making systematic IP blacklists? I mean, after the usual kind of spam crap, you've just identified the attacker, or a piece of a botnet. Keep it all in a list and just deny those IP any access at all. (e.g. firewall rules) By sharing these rules, you nullify the effect of the botnets. Tough shit for the people with cracked computers. They should have been more dilligent in applying patches...
I do this with denyhosts which checks logs for ssh dictionary attacks and then blocks them. By sharing these lists, and cross referencing them between different hosts, you should have a very reliable list, and can remove the effect of IP spoofing which may be possible with some protocols/attacks.
Someone should tell that to Switzerland. I live here (American expat) and it seems to work quite well. But it's difficult for me to make a really informed opinion since my French and German are crap. They vote all the time (many times a year), and from an outsider's perspective, it doesn't seem that different in its outcome than a representative democracy. I would also argue it prevents certain abuses -- particularly the kind that can be bought. It's much more difficult to railroad through a proposition that is harmful to most people in a direct democracy. In a representative democracy your targets are defined and you know who to pay off, bribe, blackmail, or otherwise influence to get your unpopular law. It's clear that this is happening routinely in the US, Brittan, and a few other places.
Who cares about "societal norms" for private acts? By definition, "society" doesn't know about them.
This is simply some people imposing their will on others.
Yes. Now divide by two.
These are not the same at all. The "Black holes are the ultimate destructive force" is a strange public misunderstanding. Really, supernovae are the ultimate destructive force -- and create black holes. But we won't be creating supernovae in the lab. In fact there's an interesting theory that nearby supernovae have been responsible for major extinction events on Earth. Astrophysical black holes are cold, very cold. In fact they're colder than the Cosmic Microwave Background. As black holes get smaller, they get hotter, down to the threshold at which they can be created, at which point their temperature equals their mass (in natural units) which is 10^17 Kelvin for these theories. Hot things radiate particles lighter than their temperature. Everything stable is lighter than 10^17 Kelvin.
We're remotely surprised because it's a ridiculous set of assumptions that leads one to the conclusion that creating black holes in the lab are dangerous. Read TFA or the non-technical summary for the guts, but briefly, If you can create a black hole by p+p->BH, then the p-p-BH interaction exists, and the BH can also decay into p+p, since they are lighter. Violation of this requires violation of Quantum Mechanics and/or the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
"Concern" isn't a word I would use, but the arguments do become weaker for the VLHC. So the worst possible imaginable scenario would only have the earth surviving for a few hundred million years after our experiment, instead of billions. Also the VLHC is far from "planned". It's been discussed, but there is no engineering work and no formal proposal for it.
Also note that astronomy is really advancing at a lightning pace these days. By the time any VLHC reaches serious consideration, astrophysical bounds on these scenarios will be much, much tighter. A VLHC could not be operational any sooner than 20 years from now, if serious planning started today.
The assumptions of the original lawsuit basically requires one to reject the 2nd law of thermodynamics (in order to prevent black hole decay). This is not a "normal" assumption. It might have been a curiosity in the theoretical literature, but should never have grabbed the public's attention. My comment about dragons is not really in jest. One can never know anything about things which have never happened, and I don't think are worthy of our time (scientifically). Of course humans love to debate about all kinds of unobservable things -- gods, ESP, angels, etc...
See also the Review of the Safety of LHC Collisions which also appeared today, and is a more non-technical summary of the safety review.
There's a big difference between people mouthing off in a "forum" and a carefully researched, scientific journal article. TFA is the latter (there are two actually) and weighs in at 88 pages! Further, they begin by rejecting the points in your post (which are assumptions that most reasonable people would begin with), to see what would happen, because the original claim by the folks in Hawaii did just that. Now hopefully some nutcase won't make us reject the assumption that dragons are not involved...
Interesting argument, I like it. You're saying the slowness of the courts prevents a power struggle between them and the rest of the government. The stability is highly dependent on each branch obeying the others.
However it's clear to me that one mode of a falling democracy is a large number of laws from which they can select. These laws then get used against political opponents or rivals, giving effectively absolute power. In this case, they may lose gitmo, but then there's always extraordinary rendition and other prisons outside the US. The rate of new laws is far, far higher than the rate of them getting reviewed.
So it takes approximately 7 years between blatently unconstitutional actions by one branch to be reviewed and overturned by another branch.
Fortunately for Congress and the President, they can pass new laws and executive orders on time scales shorter than 7 years.
In between lies the downfall of democracy.
Scroll wheel makes a crappy pgup/pgdn. Either it jumps too many pages or (if you lower sensitivity) makes scrolling in continuous mode (e.g. web browsers) way too slow.
Between the one mouse button, lack of pgup/pgdn keys, and numerous hardware problems, my macbook pro is really pissing me off. I wish everyone would stop manufacturing crap.
Ok, why the hell has every manufacturer in the business decided to eschew the pgup/pgdn buttons for the god-awful two-handed replacement? Does anyone actually like this crap or are the rest of you only reading 1 page things?
I was obviously talking about Pons-Fleischmann type devices, not muon catalyzed fusion. In muon catalyzed fusion my second sentence is false: "The electrons are irrelevant since their density is so low". You replace an electron with a muon and you make the "size" of the muonic atom much smaller. This allows the deuterium to come close enough to fuse. No one has managed to come close to break-even with it though. And, it still holds that Quantum Mechanics rules out the Pons & Fleischmann type devices (without muons).
E = 1/2 m v^2 = 3/2 k T; v = sqrt(3 m k T)
No, cold fusion is ruled out by basic Quantum Mechanics.
The electrons are irrelevant since their density is so low, and nuclei must be within 10^-15 m to fuse. This only occurs at temperatures of hundreds of millions Celsius. If these experiments were generating temperatures this high, one could easily tell because they would also emit X- and gamma-rays.
Explanation of "cold fusion" phenomena (if these experiments are real and reproducible) would require a significant modification of Quantum Mechanics. This is exactly why physicists are so quick to dismiss the experiments. Few papers have been published "ruling it out" because it's so simple. However here is one: http://link.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v63/p191. The theoretical literature claiming to come up with exotic ways to allow the phenomena to happen are quite extreme, in my opinion.
Congratulations!
Too bad everyone else in this thread is stuck figuring out how to divide by 2...
Any offworld settlement had better be self-sufficient, or you have much bigger problems than local authorities at your supply depot. And if it's self sufficient, who cares about some local authority hundreds of thousands of miles (and billions of dollars) away?
In other words, property rights are unenforcable, and none of the existing governments on earth have any real say. What government is going to spend 10 billion on space hardware to settle a legal property ownership/squatting claim?
In yet other words, possession is 9/10 of the law. Go ahead and argue about the other 1/10, because you don't matter.
Copyright grants authors the ability to control distribution of their works as a compromise to enhance the public good, and allow profit for the author.
In this case, the church is not making a profit, nor is the public good served by giving anyone control over distribution of this text.
Most people seem to confuse copyright with control. Authors/creators are not given control out of some inherent right. And, control is not permanent or guaranteed. Authors only get control to generate profit, as an incentive to get the author to generate new works.
This particular work, as far as I can see, has nothing to do with the usual ideas of copyright. Neither do bibles.
Ummm...it's a newspaper. They have a staff. Pay a couple staff members to moderate. That isn't that hard, is it?
Between spam, malware, and credit card fraud, the criminals are winning, big time.
The eventual consequence of this is a faltering of trust in our financial systems and economies, and the rise of new kinds of criminal mafias, with billion dollar portfolios. If you thought the mob was scary, wait until you see what rises out of the ashes of the current system.
The solution to this, I believe, is first to limit the information transferred in any transaction to that which is necessary for the transaction (no grocer, you don't need to know where I live); second to implement electronic cash (in the current credit card system you give authorization to perform transactions at any time in the future without verification); and third to establish and teach strong cryptography for communications, transactions, and identity.
But the biggest thing we can do now is get the world's police forces to get off their asses. As long as these things are not prosecuted, criminals will flourish, and they are.
It's time to make this an important issue in elections, before we all lose big.