*sigh* Discoveries like these are all to often over sensationalized by the media.
The actual paper by Nimtz and Stahlhofen is available in the arXiv, a physics preprint server: http://arxiv.org/abs/0708.0681, I'm surprised it wasn't linked to in the article.
I live in pseudo-rural Illinois, I'm 3 miles from a town of 500, 10 miles from a city of 5,000, and 15 miles from a city of 50,000. However, we have no cable service. No wired broadband service. Our telephone lines are so bad that our 56k dialup modem can only connect at 26.4k.
There is 1 (as in singular, only, 0 competition) broadband company that might possibly provide me service, and even then they can't give me an answer till I'm willing to write them the check. And then they charge outrageous prices, $40 per month for a 256k link (no details on the up & down split, of course) and that's with all the discounts of a forced two year contract. However, their 1024k link does go for $60/month. But all that for terrestrial wireless and the lack of weather stability that wired internet would provide? I guess there's always satellite, but 1 second ping times and high prices are issues.
I guess I just live in a technological hole that somehow the internet has forgotten. Broadband may have reached the most rural of areas, but it has forgotten some of the places in between.
Since the moment you plug your computer into the university network you have agreed to have not only your computer searched at the universities discretion but also to have your files deleted at the universities discretion.
What? Is this Washington State University, as in funded by the government? As in not a private school? Isn't this a flagrant, blatant violation of the 4th amendment?
Amendment IV: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
I refuse to have one civil liberty grated to me, only to have another taken away.
At my school, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, MAC spoofing was rather common. The reason for this was that university housing gave us 10mbps links, but only allowed us to transfer (up+down) 750MB per floating 24hr window without our bandwidth becoming significantly reduced (That's 10 to 15 minutes of full pipe transfer, FYI). Details here. Of course, this limiting was tied to MAC Address, as each room only had one port to the router. So to circumvent the limiting, people would look up MAC addresses and IPs on the network and spoof their network card to them. This caused weird things to happen when two computers with the same IP and MAC are on the same network, but in essence you could steal someone else's bandwidth. With such a practice in use, how can they possibly say that one person or another was the person that IP+MAC combo belonged to? They have records of what room the MAC was in use in when, but how can they be sure that it wasn't your roommate spoofing your MAC address?
Maybe the Higgs boson test will, like other species that tried to make one, turn us into merely a dark stain on the space-time fabric.
Discovery != Production.
The thing is, there is a good probability that we've already created at least one Higgs boson at Fermilab. The problem with this kind of science isn't making one, it's that you have to make 3000 (or more). The problem then is that you lose 3000 of them because the decay chains of the Higgs boson turns into something you can't separate from background (along with other event selection requirements), this eliminates 99% of the potential Higgs events. In the next stage you then lose another 70% of the remaining events because the kinematics of the ideal decay look like a background (you can still extract some statistical significance from them, however). This leaves you with a handful of events that are 'signal like', seeing these events has to be statistically significant, so you have to know the errors on your models and on the data very well (the error isn't on the data itself, it's on our understanding of the data; i.e.. the calorimeters don't measure energy perfectly, so that error is here).
So if we discover it, it's not because of one Higgs being produced, it's because we've collected enough events that look like Higgs, separated them from the background and understood the errors on our measurements. It's a very difficult task.
I worked with the chair of the Higgs group at CDF last summer, it was rather enlightening. They have a lot of work to do though. What it comes down to is there are two competing experiments/detectors at Fermilab, CDF and D0. They do not cooperate very much to keep them from becoming biased and so they have confirmation of discoveries. Back when LHC was looking to turn on in 2007, the only way Fermilab could possibly have a Higgs discovery is if the two experiments collaborated and released a joint Fermilab Higgs result. Even then, Fermilab would quite possibly need to be (statistically) lucky for the result to be a discovery of the Higgs. Now however, with an extra half year of data, analysis and checking, Fermilab might just discover the Higgs before the LHC even turns on. Even after the LHC turns on, it'll take a while for Physicists working on LHC to analyze the data, so the Fermilab people have a bit of time there as well.
Apple is a computer... no...
Apple is a hardware... umm...
Apple is an iPod... err...
Apple is a music... wait...
Apple is a company.
Back when Bungie was bought out in June 2000, Apple was a computer hardware company, they were still using OS 9, the iPod and OS X were still a year away, and Apple simply wasn't in the position it is in today. An Apple/Bungie deal would have been interesting, but it would have been a drastic change of character for Apple back in 2000.
They are the only Fortune 100 company based anywhere near Austin, TX (they are actually based Round Rock, about 20 miles from Austin). Though, there are two other Fortune 500s in Austin; Whole Foods Market at #411 and Temple-Inland at #414.
The most restrictive CC license is either the Developing Nations 2.0 or possibly the Founders' Copyright, both of which would place the debates under normal copyright in the United States. Using either one of these would be a great disservice.
There is literally no specific freedom that all Creative Commons licenses grant. Therefore, to say that a work "uses a Creative Commons license" is to leave all important questions about the work's licensing unanswered. When you see such a statement, please suggest making it clearer. And if someone proposes to "use a Creative Commons license" for a certain work, it is vital to ask immediately "Which one?"
For example, the nc (no commercial use) and nd (aka NoDerivs, meaning no derivative works) Creative Commons "options" clearly make any license nonfree. Please don't use them.
From the Xiph page: Xiph QuickTime Components (XiphQT) is, in short, the solution for Mac and Windows users who want to use Xiph formats in any QuickTime-based application, e.g. playing Ogg Vorbis in iTunes or producing Ogg Theora with iMovie. It lets you do exactly what you want to do, play Ogg in iTunes.
It is refereed to possibly being both 6*7 and 6*9.
From The Restaurant at the End of the Universe:
"Alright," he said, "but where do we start? How should I know?
They say the Ultimate Answer or whatever is Forty-two, how am I
supposed to know what the question is? It could be anything. I
mean, what's six times seven?"
Zaphod looked at him hard for a moment. Then his eyes blazed with
excitement.
These theoretical astrophysicists are getting good at what they do.
The submitter of this article (and the populace of Slashdot as a whole) doesn't get the point of this article. Ignatiev isn't suggesting this experiment out of thin air, he's suggested a novel earth-based experiment to help explain the anomaly in galactic rotation (ie. Dark Matter). To explain this anomaly some theoretical astrophysicists modify Newtonian dynamics in a small way so that the galactic rotation calculations come out correct. Others introduce Dark Matter, or alter gravitation itself.
He basically wants to observe an object smaller than 7 cm x 40 cm x 40 cm at the precise moment and the precise location on the earth such that it would experience an acceleration that is much smaller than the extra acceleration it would experience as proposed by the modified Newtonian dynamics. So any extraneous acceleration observed at this moment had to have come from modified Newtonian dynamics.
The interesting thing about this article is that it isn't just a wild claim by a crackpot scientist, it's the proposition of an extremely accurate measurement using the most advanced technologies we have available. Of particular interest to me was that the proposed effect was two orders of magnitude larger than that observable by LIGO, a gravitational wave detector, suggesting that such an experiment is actually possible.
Based on 4GB compact flash prices at Pricewatch, I can get 32G for $107.60 or 64G for $215.20.
No, you can't. The $13.45 == ($107.60/(32GB/4GB)) == ($215.20/(64GB/4GB)) 4GB CF card your looking at is out of stock. (Possibly because you mentioned it here...)
The next cheapest (in terms of $/GB) is a 4GB Pen Drive for $32.95. That leads to prices of $263.60 for 32GB, and $527.20 for 64GB. Much closer to what I'd expect for flash memory.
The only reason I checked is because I wanted a $13.45 4GB CF card.
I have a method that can detect a running nuclear plant from miles away - it's called "look". If I "look" and steam is coming out of the cooling towers, then it's running!
I happen to live about 10 miles (~ 15 km) from a running nuclear plant, and I don't remember ever see steam coming from the cooling towers. There's been fog on the cooling lake from time to time, but not continuously. Now, this is one of the more modern plants (on line in 1987), so that may make a difference.
That said, 1.5M rpm for 1m diameter gives a tangential velocity of ~4,712 km/min = 282,74 km/s which is about 94.3% of c; that's a mass enhancement factor of about 3 for the fastest-moving part. Still, the total required energy even according to plain classical mechanics is of the order of 10^20 Joules. Good luck to whoever is trying for the working prototype;-)
Sorry, but that's not the right answer. You got the right tangential velocity in km/min, but you messed up the conversion to km/s. You divide by 60, not multiply by 60. The number should been 78539.8 m/s, which is 'only' 0.000261799 % the speed of light. But it is 230 times the speed of sound. Yeah, it's not going to happen.
The record speed for a 1.6kg projectile is 3300 m/s, so we are no where close to the velocity needed for this sort of thing.
Slashdot Mirror
*sigh* Discoveries like these are all to often over sensationalized by the media.
The actual paper by Nimtz and Stahlhofen is available in the arXiv, a physics preprint server: http://arxiv.org/abs/0708.0681, I'm surprised it wasn't linked to in the article.
I call bullshit on your bullshit.
I live in pseudo-rural Illinois, I'm 3 miles from a town of 500, 10 miles from a city of 5,000, and 15 miles from a city of 50,000. However, we have no cable service. No wired broadband service. Our telephone lines are so bad that our 56k dialup modem can only connect at 26.4k.
There is 1 (as in singular, only, 0 competition) broadband company that might possibly provide me service, and even then they can't give me an answer till I'm willing to write them the check. And then they charge outrageous prices, $40 per month for a 256k link (no details on the up & down split, of course) and that's with all the discounts of a forced two year contract. However, their 1024k link does go for $60/month. But all that for terrestrial wireless and the lack of weather stability that wired internet would provide? I guess there's always satellite, but 1 second ping times and high prices are issues.
I guess I just live in a technological hole that somehow the internet has forgotten. Broadband may have reached the most rural of areas, but it has forgotten some of the places in between.
At my school, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, MAC spoofing was rather common. The reason for this was that university housing gave us 10mbps links, but only allowed us to transfer (up+down) 750MB per floating 24hr window without our bandwidth becoming significantly reduced (That's 10 to 15 minutes of full pipe transfer, FYI). Details here. Of course, this limiting was tied to MAC Address, as each room only had one port to the router. So to circumvent the limiting, people would look up MAC addresses and IPs on the network and spoof their network card to them. This caused weird things to happen when two computers with the same IP and MAC are on the same network, but in essence you could steal someone else's bandwidth. With such a practice in use, how can they possibly say that one person or another was the person that IP+MAC combo belonged to? They have records of what room the MAC was in use in when, but how can they be sure that it wasn't your roommate spoofing your MAC address?
Whoops, 99% of 3000 is 2970, not 3000.
The thing is, there is a good probability that we've already created at least one Higgs boson at Fermilab. The problem with this kind of science isn't making one, it's that you have to make 3000 (or more). The problem then is that you lose 3000 of them because the decay chains of the Higgs boson turns into something you can't separate from background (along with other event selection requirements), this eliminates 99% of the potential Higgs events. In the next stage you then lose another 70% of the remaining events because the kinematics of the ideal decay look like a background (you can still extract some statistical significance from them, however). This leaves you with a handful of events that are 'signal like', seeing these events has to be statistically significant, so you have to know the errors on your models and on the data very well (the error isn't on the data itself, it's on our understanding of the data; i.e.. the calorimeters don't measure energy perfectly, so that error is here).
So if we discover it, it's not because of one Higgs being produced, it's because we've collected enough events that look like Higgs, separated them from the background and understood the errors on our measurements. It's a very difficult task.
I worked with the chair of the Higgs group at CDF last summer, it was rather enlightening. They have a lot of work to do though. What it comes down to is there are two competing experiments/detectors at Fermilab, CDF and D0. They do not cooperate very much to keep them from becoming biased and so they have confirmation of discoveries. Back when LHC was looking to turn on in 2007, the only way Fermilab could possibly have a Higgs discovery is if the two experiments collaborated and released a joint Fermilab Higgs result. Even then, Fermilab would quite possibly need to be (statistically) lucky for the result to be a discovery of the Higgs. Now however, with an extra half year of data, analysis and checking, Fermilab might just discover the Higgs before the LHC even turns on. Even after the LHC turns on, it'll take a while for Physicists working on LHC to analyze the data, so the Fermilab people have a bit of time there as well. Agreed, or at least a "-1 Uninformed".
Apple is a computer... no...
Apple is a hardware... umm...
Apple is an iPod... err...
Apple is a music... wait...
Apple is a company.
Back when Bungie was bought out in June 2000, Apple was a computer hardware company, they were still using OS 9, the iPod and OS X were still a year away, and Apple simply wasn't in the position it is in today. An Apple/Bungie deal would have been interesting, but it would have been a drastic change of character for Apple back in 2000.
You just did. It's Dell.
They are the only Fortune 100 company based anywhere near Austin, TX (they are actually based Round Rock, about 20 miles from Austin). Though, there are two other Fortune 500s in Austin; Whole Foods Market at #411 and Temple-Inland at #414.
Sorry, your post wasn't modded funny yet, so how was I to know?
The Free Software Foundation warns about CC licences:
Xiph QuickTime Components (XiphQT) is, in short, the solution for Mac and Windows users who want to use Xiph formats in any QuickTime-based application, e.g. playing Ogg Vorbis in iTunes or producing Ogg Theora with iMovie. It lets you do exactly what you want to do, play Ogg in iTunes.
From The Restaurant at the End of the Universe:
"I may be a pretty sad case, but I don't write jokes in base 13!" - Douglas Adams
See Wikipedia and Wikiquote. This quote is also in video form on the DVD release of the Hitchhiker's TV series.
These theoretical astrophysicists are getting good at what they do.
The submitter of this article (and the populace of Slashdot as a whole) doesn't get the point of this article. Ignatiev isn't suggesting this experiment out of thin air, he's suggested a novel earth-based experiment to help explain the anomaly in galactic rotation (ie. Dark Matter). To explain this anomaly some theoretical astrophysicists modify Newtonian dynamics in a small way so that the galactic rotation calculations come out correct. Others introduce Dark Matter, or alter gravitation itself.
He basically wants to observe an object smaller than 7 cm x 40 cm x 40 cm at the precise moment and the precise location on the earth such that it would experience an acceleration that is much smaller than the extra acceleration it would experience as proposed by the modified Newtonian dynamics. So any extraneous acceleration observed at this moment had to have come from modified Newtonian dynamics.
The interesting thing about this article is that it isn't just a wild claim by a crackpot scientist, it's the proposition of an extremely accurate measurement using the most advanced technologies we have available. Of particular interest to me was that the proposed effect was two orders of magnitude larger than that observable by LIGO, a gravitational wave detector, suggesting that such an experiment is actually possible.
They did use polarizers to make Zaphod's Peril sensitive sunglasses in the TV series.
No, you can't. The $13.45 == ($107.60/(32GB/4GB)) == ($215.20/(64GB/4GB)) 4GB CF card your looking at is out of stock. (Possibly because you mentioned it here...)
The next cheapest (in terms of $/GB) is a 4GB Pen Drive for $32.95. That leads to prices of $263.60 for 32GB, and $527.20 for 64GB. Much closer to what I'd expect for flash memory.
The only reason I checked is because I wanted a $13.45 4GB CF card.
To paraphrase Robot Chicken: "In other news, the NFL got totally served."
And risk getting whiped out by one particularly virulent strain of bacteria contracted from a dirty telephone? No thanks.
Ever thought of going in to advertising?
I happen to live about 10 miles (~ 15 km) from a running nuclear plant, and I don't remember ever see steam coming from the cooling towers. There's been fog on the cooling lake from time to time, but not continuously. Now, this is one of the more modern plants (on line in 1987), so that may make a difference.
Correct link: Library of Congress.
The record speed for a 1.6kg projectile is 3300 m/s, so we are no where close to the velocity needed for this sort of thing.
To bad 10.4.5 came out today, otherwise they would actually be ahead.