Now, since they can read your plate and determine if you're an IPASS user, and there is no penalty for not having an IPASS unit in your car if you're a registered user...why have IPASS units at all?
They charge tolls by license plates in Canada. It may be a more effective way to do things. However, that would mean sharing everybody's vehicle registration information with the typically-private toll collection company, and that might not go so well with many people.
Put it on the top of a hill, give it a light tap, and I assure you it'll run like a charm. You'd never know the boiler was on backwards. Why, I bet your friends will be clamoring for one too once they see how cool having one is, except well, there's one and only one in the world. Who wouldn't want that kind of prestige?
Think about it. But not too long because I have three other guys who were here earlier who said they're interested. In fact, I'm expecting a call this very afternoon from one of them. But since you're here already, what the heck, I'll give it to you now and send him to voicemail. Plus, just because you look like such a great guy, I'll throw in some floor mats for free. But not the Toyota ones, because we all know the Japanese have nothing on the French when it comes to floormats.
I'm sorry you're getting old, but things change whether you want them to or not.
Things change, but nobody says it's always for the better.
And then, there's the paperless office. Remember that? Thirty-five years later, and I don't know a single office (outside of some "home office" or what might pass as one) that doesn't have a printer, copier, or both. Even that this rate of technological progression, I'm doubtful I'll see it in my lifetime (even assuming a life expectancy of 100 years).
Anyway, I digress. Today, it might be a great idea to put everything into the cloud. Who knows if that'll hold true for tomorrow? But then again, who says your JS engine of today is limited to displaying information streamed to you from a central server? It can also be used to write a GUI for a local OS-agnostic application.
IP addresses change. If you move your non-existent torrent server from say, Ukraine to Russia, the IP will be different and nobody will be able to find it.
This is why people went with DNS in the first place.
Considering the tiny difference, I would hazard a guess that you are correct. It isn't so much that c can be exceeded, as that there's a problem with how we've measured c these past 100 years. Maybe our approximation isn't as good as we thought it to be.
If this is indeed true, now the exciting stuff begins. What is causing our measurements to be off by this tiny amount? The difference is probably negligable within the solar system. But it may have profound implications on a cosmic level. And why doesn't this difference scale to a cosmic level?
It could be due to effects from a black hole, or even dark matter drawn in by our planet's gravity well. Light is a little slower, but neutrinos are unaffected. If only the voyager probes had neutrino emitters or detectors.
It's not so much deserves as gets empathy. One doesn't have much of a choice with empathy. You either can or can't be empathetic, and it depends on both the person and the situation to be empathetic about.
Some people can be more empathetic in that they can better understand anothers' feelings over a wide range of situations, while others are less empathetic because they're only able to do so where they themselves have been in the same situation.
And empathy has nothing to do with how one acts towards another. One can be empathetic, but still act negatively towards that person, sometimes because of the empathy.
Farther down, there's a good comment on the back story of this affair. Having read that (I'm not active in the photography community myself), in my opinion, this person does not deserve anything but antipathy and even contempt. But then again, the same could be said of myself if you ask the right person.
I think a lot of people may have written off QT for dead. With Nokia becoming a glorified Microsoft lacky, most of the excitement that a Nokia product would have once generated has been replaced by resignation. For many QT fans and developers, the question is not a matter of if Nokia will shutter QT, but of when.
The problem with SSL has always been that there's a single point of failure. If you compromise the CA, you ultimately compromise SSL itself until trust for that particular CA gets revoked.
In the short term, browsers should remember the last CA of each site. If it changes, throw up a warning page. That's a good stop-gap measure for MITM (instead of the stupid warning page for self-signed certs). In the long term, there needs to be some combination of distributed (P2P) certificate validation, and multiply signed certificates. There's no 100% guarantee, but this way, the pool can't be poisoned, nor would compromising one particular CA compromise the certificates signed by that CA.
In fact, it's pretty difficult to compromise a multiply-signed certificate where one of the signatures is the entity itself. At that point, there'd be no difference between compromising that kind of certificate and compromising the company servers or intranet outright.
If somebody else patents those operational techniques, well, it's not like you could build a viable nuclear reactor after that either.
Granted, you could just have intended to sit on your patent, in which case, you'd rake in the big bucks licensing it out to others. Then again, your patent expires after twenty years, and that's usually how long it takes to come up with all the supporting technology.
Look at touch screens. They haven't become viable on pocket-sized devices until very recently (not too long before the patents expired), when chips small enough can handle that kind of UI (the unresponsiveness that killed the previous generation's touch screen devices were not only due to the resistive nature of the touch sensitive hardware).
...is competence in programming, much less actual computational science, better serverd by possessing a computer as opposed to promoting a strong foundation in fundamental mathematics?
(Yes, this is a loaded question, because there's a general concensus that possessing and using technology does not result in better education, much less an education in something as complex as the technology itself.)
It is you who doesn't get the point: Walmart and McDonalds are not having any trouble hiring; people are still vying for a job there despite knowing full well they'll be exploited.
Vote? Where does that come into economic models? Do you mean where people vote with their money and stop using a company's products? Or perhaps where people vote with their feet and stop going to work?
Capitalism makes the same assumption, that workers are a natural resource to be fully exploited. Not only that, but capitalism tends to emphasize the immediate, short-term profit as being more important than the long-term health.
Government's economic role is to balance the needs of capitalism with the needs of the people. The U.S. government among many others supposedly "for the people" has utterly failed this.
Both communism and capitalism exhibit the same problems during implementation not because they're both defective in the same way, but because the problem exists at a level different from what economic models address. Greed is a social ill, not a monetary one. Greed requires a social solution to address rather than a different economic model.
I don't give a solution myself because any and all solutions begin with what I've already stated in my signature (attributed to Jefferson BTW, but there are not enough characters in the field to put his name down).
There are two major industries fighting against patent reform: agriculture, and pharmaceuticals. Both make a killing on patenting what's essentially software. The largest tech companies that produce real products are for patent reform. The ones against it mainly do not sell actual software, but sells the services their software is able to perform.
Actually, funny thing is, patent reform will also result in health care reform, as well as help fight obesity. Both Barack and Michelle's goals would be fulfilled almost overnight by fixing one system. But the interests are too entrenched.
Not e-mail addresses built into printers--fax machines built into printers.
Faxes get sent to a phone number. Nothing can ever replace the phone number. Thus, nothing will replace a fax machine, except for a better fax machine. It's like replacing voice calls with text messages or even e-mails. It's not going to happen.
FYI, the current all-in-ones don't actually have a fax machine built into the printer. Instead, most have a fax machine tacked alongside a printer. When I can say, send the printer a job and have it automatically be faxed, and likewise when the printer is able to send me the faxes it receives to me in a PDF, PS, or other document format, that's when the fax machine is built into the printer. It'd be a nice bonus if I could fax and print out the same document in one go, or if I could scan (to the computer) and fax the same document in one go, but I'd be satisfied even without these additional perks.
I'm actually wondering if some newer models of footprints have this capability (I know many models already have the ability to e-mail scanned documents to a computer, and receive and print e-mailed documents). But until the functionality makes it to the small business/home office machines, the fax machine is not going away anytime soon.
The problem is that since then, too many conspiracies have popped up. There've been too many government cover ups, too many covert operations, too many things that the government does that goes against the will of the people.
People no longer believe in what the government says. People can no longer trust the government to be of the people, for the people, and by the people. Why do you think radical movements like the tea party have gained popularity recently? Why do you think that every presidential election for the past twenty years involves candidates trying to dig up dirt on the other guy, and when that fails to appear, make up the dirt?
And the worst part is, the media is so enamored of politicans' dirt that they blow a smudge out of proportion into a BP oil spill. So anyone who isn't 100% clean (which is impossible) has to spend wads and wads of money defending themselves, and the one with the most money instead of the one with the best policies win. And the one with the most money got that way because of special interest groups' donations, which in turn fuels the covert operations and secrecy.
The cycle is vicious and has existed since the very beginning of the nation. It's only now with the easy access to information that people have come to realize what a corrupt group of people are sitting at the top. And so love turns to hatred, trust turns to distrust.
And the smart and ambitious are trying to ride this tidal wave to the top. They don't actually care what happens when it comes crashing down in a few generations, as they'll be 6 feet under by then. But they'll make it sound like they do.
Your rolls of e-ink "paper" will have defects. The larger the "cut", the higher chance of a defective portion in one cut, the more you'll have to throw away.
Granted, you could technically make the cut such that you can salvage smaller pieces from a defective larger one (ledger-letter-statement). But that additional process might be too costly to be effective.
And then, there are market forces. I'm not sure anyone would want to carry around a 8.5x11 (plus bezel) e-reader. Now, if you could roll it up like a scroll or roller shade, you'd be golden, but that comes with other interface issues. I'm sure it's in the works though.
Restore the binaries directly from an earlier backup or some known-clean version. Transfer the existing and the restored binaries to a clean server via write-once media and do hash compares using multiple algorithms. Obtain several more copies of the clean versions and do the same with them.
Recompile the source with the compromised server. Again, do the hash comparisons using a clean, unconnected, read-only machine.
If there was some malicious binary inserted into the server or some kind of malicious hook still running off an EPROM, this kind of clean-room before-and-after check would find it. However, it's only possible if the breach was detected early. Otherwise, if there's no "clean" binary on a "clean" server, it'd be impossible to detect.
Feel free to report it, triage it, patch it, etc., but realize that most bug reports are never implemented.
I don't think that's going to do any good either. If all the work's been done, and all that's left is integration and QA, then it should be immediately assigned, reviewed (including the fix), and put into the nightly.
Nobody wants to see all the hard work they put into something disregarded. All your message would do is discourage people from reporting bugs, and probably make them switch to a different browser when a viable alternative comes alone.
And in general, confirmed bugs need to be handled. They need to be assigned to a developer or a team, and if it isn't the correct person or team, subsequently reassigned appropriately, and then prioritized. And if it sits at priority 6 for eternity because there's not enough manpower to work on it, well, that's where it's going to be. But once there's a solution, it needs to be bumped to priority 1.
IMHO, the developers should solely work on building a solid foundation, a solid core, and leave the fancy UI stuff to the extensions. The interface changes, the bleeding-edge new features, leave that to extension developers. Let them experiment and play with the different aspects of the UI. When an extension gets stable and popular enough, put it into the release as a part of the "recommended extensions" installation option.
Yes, this shifts the burden of the bug to the extension developer. But at the same time, it leaves the developers free to work on the real problems, the underlying issues that are probably more time-consuming but less numerous. To enable this, extension developers need access to the bug system, bug reports need to be filed with the extensions installed, and the developers of any of the extensions listed should be able to change the status of the bug to indicate whether it's been fixed or not (and with it, bad actors need to be dealt with). It's a lot of work, but it's probably worthwhile work even for Firefox development as it exists right now.
The people running the Firefox project should learn from iOS and the Android teams how to build a software ecosystem. And the funny thing is, there's already one that exists for Firefox. There isn't a need to start from scratch. It's a matter of leveraging what's already there, and making better use of their best developers' time.
Unless all the developers are all shitty and the real truth is, nobody actually knows what's going on. But I doubt that's the case. I hope.
Not to understand when you're breaking the law, but when you're not breaking the law. And more importantly, it requires a lawyer to get out from any repercussions. Because while we laymen may not be breaking the law and know it, they can still harass us and make our lives difficult. And the only ones who are even remotely capable of defending themselves from that kind of behavior are lawyers. And even then, it still takes an ungodly amount of time, effort, and expenses.
It's one thing to fail because of religious, cultural, or whatever dogma hindering knowledge acquisition. It's a completely different thing when most professional, career scientists at the top of their field, pursuing the unknown while trying to remain as unbiased as possible, are calling it quits. the latter means that while there might be value in more experiments, that value is not enough to justify the cost, i.e. they'll revisit the idea if new evidence shows up in other experiments to warrant it.
To put it another way, the most important test have been conducted, and the results are not favorable. If the theory still ends up being useful, it would only be useful for a few edge cases. And as such, it may not actually describe anything previously unknown.
That having been said, it's not quite time to write off the Higgs quite yet. There's still a ways to go before the range of energy the Higgs is supposed to show up in is exhausted. You are talking about the Higgs when you say particle, right?
You weren't around for the blackout of '03 then I guess. It's no big deal unless you absolutely need refrigeration. But then that prompts all of the restaurants to cook and practically give away all of their food. It's better than letting it go to waste.
Almost every large building has and will be running on backup generators. After the numerous generator critical failures during '03, it shouldn't be an issue anymore for anyone. Last time was bad because a lot of generators had been sitting around rusting for years without any use. For many such places, there were enough generators that failed to make it a pretty close call. This time, you won't have electricity to run your computer or AC, but your building's hallways, and any other bit of critical infrastructure, will.
The biggest issue is water, which will only have enough pressure to reach around the 4th and 5th floors of most buildings. That's why people buy cases of bottled water and fill their tubs in advance. It's probably the most crucial thing. Though if you ask, people will help you fill up your buckets from their faucet on the first or second floor.
The other major problem is powering back on. Last time, it had to be done in zones over several days. That was a pain. But most outer boroughs experience enough power loss enough times a year for it to be nothing more than a minor inconvenience. At least it's not the middle of a 100+ heat wave. That's when places usually suffer power loss.
All in all, it can be a fairly pleasant experience.
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Now, since they can read your plate and determine if you're an IPASS user, and there is no penalty for not having an IPASS unit in your car if you're a registered user...why have IPASS units at all?
They charge tolls by license plates in Canada. It may be a more effective way to do things. However, that would mean sharing everybody's vehicle registration information with the typically-private toll collection company, and that might not go so well with many people.
Running car my hiney.
Put it on the top of a hill, give it a light tap, and I assure you it'll run like a charm. You'd never know the boiler was on backwards. Why, I bet your friends will be clamoring for one too once they see how cool having one is, except well, there's one and only one in the world. Who wouldn't want that kind of prestige?
Think about it. But not too long because I have three other guys who were here earlier who said they're interested. In fact, I'm expecting a call this very afternoon from one of them. But since you're here already, what the heck, I'll give it to you now and send him to voicemail. Plus, just because you look like such a great guy, I'll throw in some floor mats for free. But not the Toyota ones, because we all know the Japanese have nothing on the French when it comes to floormats.
I'm sorry you're getting old, but things change whether you want them to or not.
Things change, but nobody says it's always for the better.
And then, there's the paperless office. Remember that? Thirty-five years later, and I don't know a single office (outside of some "home office" or what might pass as one) that doesn't have a printer, copier, or both. Even that this rate of technological progression, I'm doubtful I'll see it in my lifetime (even assuming a life expectancy of 100 years).
Anyway, I digress. Today, it might be a great idea to put everything into the cloud. Who knows if that'll hold true for tomorrow? But then again, who says your JS engine of today is limited to displaying information streamed to you from a central server? It can also be used to write a GUI for a local OS-agnostic application.
IP addresses change. If you move your non-existent torrent server from say, Ukraine to Russia, the IP will be different and nobody will be able to find it.
This is why people went with DNS in the first place.
Considering the tiny difference, I would hazard a guess that you are correct. It isn't so much that c can be exceeded, as that there's a problem with how we've measured c these past 100 years. Maybe our approximation isn't as good as we thought it to be.
If this is indeed true, now the exciting stuff begins. What is causing our measurements to be off by this tiny amount? The difference is probably negligable within the solar system. But it may have profound implications on a cosmic level. And why doesn't this difference scale to a cosmic level?
It could be due to effects from a black hole, or even dark matter drawn in by our planet's gravity well. Light is a little slower, but neutrinos are unaffected. If only the voyager probes had neutrino emitters or detectors.
It's not so much deserves as gets empathy. One doesn't have much of a choice with empathy. You either can or can't be empathetic, and it depends on both the person and the situation to be empathetic about.
Some people can be more empathetic in that they can better understand anothers' feelings over a wide range of situations, while others are less empathetic because they're only able to do so where they themselves have been in the same situation.
And empathy has nothing to do with how one acts towards another. One can be empathetic, but still act negatively towards that person, sometimes because of the empathy.
Farther down, there's a good comment on the back story of this affair. Having read that (I'm not active in the photography community myself), in my opinion, this person does not deserve anything but antipathy and even contempt. But then again, the same could be said of myself if you ask the right person.
I think a lot of people may have written off QT for dead. With Nokia becoming a glorified Microsoft lacky, most of the excitement that a Nokia product would have once generated has been replaced by resignation. For many QT fans and developers, the question is not a matter of if Nokia will shutter QT, but of when.
Maybe this will set a precedent, where all research funded by an external agent has patent clauses attached to them.
Of course, this could swing both ways. Oracle could insist that all patents to research results it funded be assigned to Oracle.
The problem with SSL has always been that there's a single point of failure. If you compromise the CA, you ultimately compromise SSL itself until trust for that particular CA gets revoked.
In the short term, browsers should remember the last CA of each site. If it changes, throw up a warning page. That's a good stop-gap measure for MITM (instead of the stupid warning page for self-signed certs). In the long term, there needs to be some combination of distributed (P2P) certificate validation, and multiply signed certificates. There's no 100% guarantee, but this way, the pool can't be poisoned, nor would compromising one particular CA compromise the certificates signed by that CA.
In fact, it's pretty difficult to compromise a multiply-signed certificate where one of the signatures is the entity itself. At that point, there'd be no difference between compromising that kind of certificate and compromising the company servers or intranet outright.
If somebody else patents those operational techniques, well, it's not like you could build a viable nuclear reactor after that either.
Granted, you could just have intended to sit on your patent, in which case, you'd rake in the big bucks licensing it out to others. Then again, your patent expires after twenty years, and that's usually how long it takes to come up with all the supporting technology.
Look at touch screens. They haven't become viable on pocket-sized devices until very recently (not too long before the patents expired), when chips small enough can handle that kind of UI (the unresponsiveness that killed the previous generation's touch screen devices were not only due to the resistive nature of the touch sensitive hardware).
...is competence in programming, much less actual computational science, better serverd by possessing a computer as opposed to promoting a strong foundation in fundamental mathematics?
(Yes, this is a loaded question, because there's a general concensus that possessing and using technology does not result in better education, much less an education in something as complex as the technology itself.)
It is you who doesn't get the point: Walmart and McDonalds are not having any trouble hiring; people are still vying for a job there despite knowing full well they'll be exploited.
Vote? Where does that come into economic models? Do you mean where people vote with their money and stop using a company's products? Or perhaps where people vote with their feet and stop going to work?
Capitalism makes the same assumption, that workers are a natural resource to be fully exploited. Not only that, but capitalism tends to emphasize the immediate, short-term profit as being more important than the long-term health.
Government's economic role is to balance the needs of capitalism with the needs of the people. The U.S. government among many others supposedly "for the people" has utterly failed this.
Both communism and capitalism exhibit the same problems during implementation not because they're both defective in the same way, but because the problem exists at a level different from what economic models address. Greed is a social ill, not a monetary one. Greed requires a social solution to address rather than a different economic model.
I don't give a solution myself because any and all solutions begin with what I've already stated in my signature (attributed to Jefferson BTW, but there are not enough characters in the field to put his name down).
There are two major industries fighting against patent reform: agriculture, and pharmaceuticals. Both make a killing on patenting what's essentially software. The largest tech companies that produce real products are for patent reform. The ones against it mainly do not sell actual software, but sells the services their software is able to perform.
Actually, funny thing is, patent reform will also result in health care reform, as well as help fight obesity. Both Barack and Michelle's goals would be fulfilled almost overnight by fixing one system. But the interests are too entrenched.
Not e-mail addresses built into printers--fax machines built into printers.
Faxes get sent to a phone number. Nothing can ever replace the phone number. Thus, nothing will replace a fax machine, except for a better fax machine. It's like replacing voice calls with text messages or even e-mails. It's not going to happen.
FYI, the current all-in-ones don't actually have a fax machine built into the printer. Instead, most have a fax machine tacked alongside a printer. When I can say, send the printer a job and have it automatically be faxed, and likewise when the printer is able to send me the faxes it receives to me in a PDF, PS, or other document format, that's when the fax machine is built into the printer. It'd be a nice bonus if I could fax and print out the same document in one go, or if I could scan (to the computer) and fax the same document in one go, but I'd be satisfied even without these additional perks.
I'm actually wondering if some newer models of footprints have this capability (I know many models already have the ability to e-mail scanned documents to a computer, and receive and print e-mailed documents). But until the functionality makes it to the small business/home office machines, the fax machine is not going away anytime soon.
The problem is that since then, too many conspiracies have popped up. There've been too many government cover ups, too many covert operations, too many things that the government does that goes against the will of the people.
People no longer believe in what the government says. People can no longer trust the government to be of the people, for the people, and by the people. Why do you think radical movements like the tea party have gained popularity recently? Why do you think that every presidential election for the past twenty years involves candidates trying to dig up dirt on the other guy, and when that fails to appear, make up the dirt?
And the worst part is, the media is so enamored of politicans' dirt that they blow a smudge out of proportion into a BP oil spill. So anyone who isn't 100% clean (which is impossible) has to spend wads and wads of money defending themselves, and the one with the most money instead of the one with the best policies win. And the one with the most money got that way because of special interest groups' donations, which in turn fuels the covert operations and secrecy.
The cycle is vicious and has existed since the very beginning of the nation. It's only now with the easy access to information that people have come to realize what a corrupt group of people are sitting at the top. And so love turns to hatred, trust turns to distrust.
And the smart and ambitious are trying to ride this tidal wave to the top. They don't actually care what happens when it comes crashing down in a few generations, as they'll be 6 feet under by then. But they'll make it sound like they do.
Sorry for the rant.
In a word: QA.
Your rolls of e-ink "paper" will have defects. The larger the "cut", the higher chance of a defective portion in one cut, the more you'll have to throw away.
Granted, you could technically make the cut such that you can salvage smaller pieces from a defective larger one (ledger-letter-statement). But that additional process might be too costly to be effective.
And then, there are market forces. I'm not sure anyone would want to carry around a 8.5x11 (plus bezel) e-reader. Now, if you could roll it up like a scroll or roller shade, you'd be golden, but that comes with other interface issues. I'm sure it's in the works though.
for a fundamental understanding of Minkowski space-time, Hilbert Spaces, etc, just having a web-connected machine in front of you
The computer's just a tool. What matters is how it's used. More relevantly, what matters is how the teachers teach their students to use it.
For those relying on the use of technology to do the actual teaching, I sense a catch-22 in the making.
Restore the binaries directly from an earlier backup or some known-clean version. Transfer the existing and the restored binaries to a clean server via write-once media and do hash compares using multiple algorithms. Obtain several more copies of the clean versions and do the same with them.
Recompile the source with the compromised server. Again, do the hash comparisons using a clean, unconnected, read-only machine.
If there was some malicious binary inserted into the server or some kind of malicious hook still running off an EPROM, this kind of clean-room before-and-after check would find it. However, it's only possible if the breach was detected early. Otherwise, if there's no "clean" binary on a "clean" server, it'd be impossible to detect.
Feel free to report it, triage it, patch it, etc., but realize that most bug reports are never implemented.
I don't think that's going to do any good either. If all the work's been done, and all that's left is integration and QA, then it should be immediately assigned, reviewed (including the fix), and put into the nightly.
Nobody wants to see all the hard work they put into something disregarded. All your message would do is discourage people from reporting bugs, and probably make them switch to a different browser when a viable alternative comes alone.
And in general, confirmed bugs need to be handled. They need to be assigned to a developer or a team, and if it isn't the correct person or team, subsequently reassigned appropriately, and then prioritized. And if it sits at priority 6 for eternity because there's not enough manpower to work on it, well, that's where it's going to be. But once there's a solution, it needs to be bumped to priority 1.
IMHO, the developers should solely work on building a solid foundation, a solid core, and leave the fancy UI stuff to the extensions. The interface changes, the bleeding-edge new features, leave that to extension developers. Let them experiment and play with the different aspects of the UI. When an extension gets stable and popular enough, put it into the release as a part of the "recommended extensions" installation option.
Yes, this shifts the burden of the bug to the extension developer. But at the same time, it leaves the developers free to work on the real problems, the underlying issues that are probably more time-consuming but less numerous. To enable this, extension developers need access to the bug system, bug reports need to be filed with the extensions installed, and the developers of any of the extensions listed should be able to change the status of the bug to indicate whether it's been fixed or not (and with it, bad actors need to be dealt with). It's a lot of work, but it's probably worthwhile work even for Firefox development as it exists right now.
The people running the Firefox project should learn from iOS and the Android teams how to build a software ecosystem. And the funny thing is, there's already one that exists for Firefox. There isn't a need to start from scratch. It's a matter of leveraging what's already there, and making better use of their best developers' time.
Unless all the developers are all shitty and the real truth is, nobody actually knows what's going on. But I doubt that's the case. I hope.
It would have overflowed and become recursive.
Not to understand when you're breaking the law, but when you're not breaking the law. And more importantly, it requires a lawyer to get out from any repercussions. Because while we laymen may not be breaking the law and know it, they can still harass us and make our lives difficult. And the only ones who are even remotely capable of defending themselves from that kind of behavior are lawyers. And even then, it still takes an ungodly amount of time, effort, and expenses.
What are teachers supposed to say when they teach about current events?
The only thing they've always said, and the only thing they ever will and ever will need to say:
America, fuck yeah!
It's one thing to fail because of religious, cultural, or whatever dogma hindering knowledge acquisition. It's a completely different thing when most professional, career scientists at the top of their field, pursuing the unknown while trying to remain as unbiased as possible, are calling it quits. the latter means that while there might be value in more experiments, that value is not enough to justify the cost, i.e. they'll revisit the idea if new evidence shows up in other experiments to warrant it.
To put it another way, the most important test have been conducted, and the results are not favorable. If the theory still ends up being useful, it would only be useful for a few edge cases. And as such, it may not actually describe anything previously unknown.
That having been said, it's not quite time to write off the Higgs quite yet. There's still a ways to go before the range of energy the Higgs is supposed to show up in is exhausted. You are talking about the Higgs when you say particle, right?
You weren't around for the blackout of '03 then I guess. It's no big deal unless you absolutely need refrigeration. But then that prompts all of the restaurants to cook and practically give away all of their food. It's better than letting it go to waste.
Almost every large building has and will be running on backup generators. After the numerous generator critical failures during '03, it shouldn't be an issue anymore for anyone. Last time was bad because a lot of generators had been sitting around rusting for years without any use. For many such places, there were enough generators that failed to make it a pretty close call. This time, you won't have electricity to run your computer or AC, but your building's hallways, and any other bit of critical infrastructure, will.
The biggest issue is water, which will only have enough pressure to reach around the 4th and 5th floors of most buildings. That's why people buy cases of bottled water and fill their tubs in advance. It's probably the most crucial thing. Though if you ask, people will help you fill up your buckets from their faucet on the first or second floor.
The other major problem is powering back on. Last time, it had to be done in zones over several days. That was a pain. But most outer boroughs experience enough power loss enough times a year for it to be nothing more than a minor inconvenience. At least it's not the middle of a 100+ heat wave. That's when places usually suffer power loss.
All in all, it can be a fairly pleasant experience.