Which is why I specifically used the example of hiking in the mountains where there is no cell phone service.

Never mind security, what about reliability? If I go hiking in the mountains where there is no cell phone coverage and e.g. scratch my face on a tree branch I do not want to get back to the car only to have it fail to recognize me and refuse to start. Frankly I also wonder about whether Ford are thinking clearly about this given the claim in the article that "Ford Motor Company [NYSE:F] already believes the technology can help improve privacy..". How can adding a camera to a car improve privacy? No matter what protections you put in place around the system if there is no camera there is no data on who is driving which has to be better privacy than a system which knows.

Actually they do not. Try using 'F=ma' with relativistic mass and you will not get far. You can only use the simple 'gamma' factor when dealing with relativistic momentum and then, at a fundamental level, it comes from the fact that the particle's velocity has to be redefined for relativity because there is no universal clock. This is not a pedagogical argument it is a fundamental physics argument: relativistic mass is a broken concept, the universe simply does not work that way and you will go wrong if you use it in any but the simplest situations.

That paper shows the solar neutrino problem not flavour oscillations. SuperK saw the first hints of this from atmospheric neutrinos, not solar neutrinos. However SNO was the first experiment to conclusively prove oscillations: they showed that the total flux of solar neutrinos was as expected but that only ~a third of them were electron neutrinos despite the fact that all of them started as electron neutrinos. Seeing a disappearance of a particular flavour does not prove oscillations: they might have somehow decayed or been absorbed through unknown processes. While this requires new physics neutrino oscillations was also new physics at the time so Occam's razor can not really pick between them.

Actually that is not true. The Standard Model originally had them with zero mass. This was disproven in 2002 by the SNO experiment which conclusively showed that neutrinos from the sun changed flavour which meant that they had to have a mass. The SuperK experiment also had some earlier results with atmospheric neutrinos which also suggested flavour oscillations. You are also under the misconception that mass changes with speed: it does not and is an invariant quantity the gamma factor in momentum comes from the velocity changing under relativity not the mass.

No, actually I'm not: trust me I'm a particle physicist! There are two misconceptions there. First a particle does not have to have a mass to have a momentum. Einstein's favourite equation is not actually 'E=mc^2' unless you are standing still. It is more correctly written: 'E^2=p^2c^2 + m^2c^4' where 'p' is momentum. In the case of a massless particle (m=0) this is just: 'E=pc' so a photon with a non-zero energy has a non-zero momentum but ALWAYS has a zero mass.

The second misconception is that the mass of a moving particle somehow changes. This is wrong and in fact you can show quite easily (if you know relativity) that the mass is something called a Lorentz invariant which means it is the same for all observers in all inertial reference frames. The misconception regarding the mass "getting bigger" at higher velocities comes from the formula for relativistic momentum for a massive particle "p=gamma*m*v" where 'gamma' is always greater than 1 for v>0. This factor is erroneously coupled with the mass to give what some textbooks call 'relativistic mass' (gamma*m). This is WRONG! One of the consequences of relativity is that space and time get 'mixed' differently for different observers. Velocity is 'space/time' so this is where the gamma factor comes from. This is very obvious to see if you look at acceleration. The relativistic form of Newton's second law is NOT 'F=gamma*m*a' which it would be if this was just an effect on the mass increasing.

See this paper: “Direct Evidence for Neutrino Flavor Transformation from Neutral-Current Interactions in the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory”, The SNO Collaboration, Phys. Rev. Lett. 89, 1, 011301 (2002). It is not possible for neutrinos to oscillate unless they have a mass difference which means that at least two of the neutrino flavours must have a non-zero mass. You are correct that it is likely to win the authors a Nobel Prize probably within the next few years but I'm not one of them (but I was an author on the Higgs discovery paper so that's ok! ;-).

Rubbish. European plants are far, far safer than Chernobyl and the risks of a catastrophic meltdown are far, far less but impossible means that there is absolutely no chance of that happening under any circumstance. I think that highly unlikely: look at Fukushima. Rare events and human stupidity happen and all the safety systems in the world are not going to stop that. That being said I think that nuclear power is frankly safe enough and less risky than the alternative which is fossil fuelled power stations. So I would support France's strategy but don't kid yourself that it is zero risk. However the cost of cleaning up the rare, occasional nuclear accident may well be far less than the cost of dealing with accelerated climate change and given that any radiation release will likely be slow and is very easy to detect the risk to human life is minimal - it is the cost of cleanup that is expensive.

True but the point is that if a reactor in France suffers a severe failure (which is far less likely than something like Chernobyl) parts of Germany may well get severely contaminated and not be inhabitable without a lot of expensive cleanup work. This is the disadvantage with fission-based nuclear power: there is a tiny, but non-zero risk of long term contamination of regions as well as a slight increase in the risk of cancer for those exposed.

You can argue, as I would, that this risk is very small and, I would go further, is far outweighed by the risk of releasing more carbon into the atmosphere. However is it not really possible to claim that when your next door neighbours are heavy users of nuclear power that you have escaped the risk of severe contamination because, in the unlikely event that their plants fail you will still get the radioactive fallout. Hence I do not see the sense in one European country shutting down nuclear power plants: either do it at the EU level or else you might as well benefit from nuclear power because you have the risks regardless.

If you could insulate a loft for $20 this would not be a discussion: at that price I'd pay for my neighbours as well! Unfortunately the real cost of insulating is far higher, try several thousand dollars and on most newish homes is standard - our loft is basically half full of polystyrene balls. Also the house construction in the US and Canada is typically wood which provides far less insulation than the cavity walls construction used in the UK and the cost of fixing that would be really prohibitive.

For this to be true you also need all your neighbours to stop using nuclear power and unfortunately Germany is right next door to France which has a huge nuclear power generation capacity. Remember how far the radioactive fallout cloud from Chernobyl went? The result is that Germany now still faces all the disadvantages of nuclear power without receiving any of the advantages.

Tell that to those convicted of trafficking in stolen goods. Contracts have to be legally fulfilled. What is being sold is not the physical ticket but the right to attend an event which can arguably be sold to an individual - instead of a ticket you could use photo-id and a list of names. The ticket is just a convenient, practical way to easily determine who has bought the right.

This whole premise sounds wrong and needs data to confirm it. The problem is that the article is wrong to claim that neutrinos move at the speed of light - they have a non-zero mass and so must move slower than this. However their mass is incredibly small (probably ~100,000 times less than an electron - so small that we have not actually measured it yet!) so they move very close to the speed of light. What sounds dodgy is that they are claiming that the primary effect of the non-zero neutrino mass is negligible while the secondary effect of the zero-mass photon coupling to virtual electron-positron pairs is more significant. A quick back of the envelope calculation suggests that the neutrino mass could cause a ~30 minute delay in the neutrino arrival over such a distance.

In addition they are basing this on being able to accurately calculate the scattering delay time of photons in a super nova. Less than a decade ago super nova models could not even get the star to explode (the explosion was not powerful enough and was overcome by gravity) so I have a hard time believing that they have perfected things to the extent where can really give a reliable number for the scattering delay time.

As usual extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and so far there is much of the former and none of the latter. Although it is also possible that the article is completely misrepresenting the claims but if so it is doing an even worse job of it that you suggest!

Depends where they built it. If it is on the east side there is a large refinery there and I cannot imagine it will out stink that! Also it is not burning the rubbish but is converting it into useful chemicals so it is not clear that it will produce anything like the same levels of odour and pollution that burning refuse will cause.

True but that is not commonly what happens. Generally the case is that the energy threshold is not fixed at all but, as the energy increases, you have to force the theory into ever decreasing areas of phase space in order to explain whatever phenomenon you are trying to describe.

Correct. The Higgs boson could exist and behave exactly as predicted by Higgs and yet not be the dominant mechanism which breaks the EW symmetry because something else does it first i.e. the symmetry is broken by some other mechanism and, although the Higgs is there, it is at some huge mass scale where its contribution to the breaking is tiny. Hence had the LHC found that nature used something else to break the EW symmetry that result would NOT had disproved the existence of the Higgs it would just have made it unnecessary and so Occam's razor applies and you lose interest in it as a possible theory.

That is falsifiable in principle. Assuming we find a way to probe the causes of the Big Bang then either we find god "lighting the blue touch paper" or we find some as yet utterly unknown natural mechanism which happens without space and possibly without time too (so 'happens' and 'natural' might not be the right words but we don't really have an appropriate vocabulary for such a situation).

For me jet lag is worse going from Canada to Europe and worse if I have meetings in dark rooms. CERN has several basement meeting rooms that are often used for meetings by the LHC experiments. If I get a meeting in there the morning of the first day I arrive then jet lag is murder whereas if I can be out and about on the site doing things for a day or two things go a lot better.

The other way I managed to avoid all jet lag was to volunteer for night shifts in the control room. Coming off shift at 8am is midnight back in Canada so a perfect time to go back to your hostel room and sleep and, as a bonus, you get double credit for night shifts! Interestingly though after 6 days of these shifts I found myself shifting despite not trying to so that after the shifts it was very easy to switch to European time for the few remaining days of my trip and there was zero jet lag.