...and did they heat it up to however many thousands of degrees it would reach during re-entry first? That's assuming it simply didn't burn up in the atmosphere first like many meteorites, some of which have very high metal content.

What you are getting is the reconstructed data. To be able to do anything scientifically valuable with it you have to understand the intricate details of the reconstruction software, the trigger, the calibration etc. etc. To be honest I would be amazed if anyone outside CMS will be able to do much with it at all. I'd also expect that there will be bandwidth restrictions on accessing the data since the dataset is multi-PB (if it is the full set of run I data).

We did a similar exercise with the D0 experiment at Fermilab several years ago and it was of interest to practically nobody. I expect there may be somewhat more interest with this being the LHC data but I'd be surprised if anything useful comes of it given the massive amount of work required to be able to do a useful analysis. The best I can think of is that this might make a really nice undergraduate course project or, with some pre-written, high level analysis code, perhaps even as outreach for high school students.

You are talking rubbish. Organizations issue fines all the time in the UK e.g. libraries can fine you if you are late returning a book etc. I doubt every library has a sworn judge and a panel of jurors on hand to adjudicate your fine.

Any organization can levy a fine through an agreement. Students typically sign that they agree to be bound by the terms of the university's code of student conduct in before they are allowed to enrol. That code will undoubtedly contain the relevant clauses allowing a discipline procedure to levy a fine on the student. Even without such a signed agreement the fine can still be enforced with the threat of losing you membership of the organization should you fail to pay.

I can't see any way that any of the above constitutes false representation or abuse of position and section 6 and 7 have to do with possession, making and supplying articles for use in fraud (did you even read the act before citing it?).

This is certainly not the behaviour you would expect from a university and I am frankly amazed that they are doing this to their own students. However if it is done within the discipline framework of the university and the students have signed on to follow that code then I would expect that their choices are limited to either paying it or dropping out and finding a better university to attend.

Correct but it does not stop there. It decays into an isotope with a 246k year half life and so on down a decay chain which eventually ends at lead.

They almost certainly did within the allowed budget. There are two problems with nuclear power spacecraft. The first is that if something goes wrong on takeoff you risk what is effectively a 'dirty bomb' going off somewhere in the Earth's atmosphere which is not good. The second, which does not apply in this case, is that if you make it into space safely you had better make sure that the craft does not return for Earth for a few billion years otherwise, again, it is like a dirty bomb going off in the atmosphere.

Clearly deep space missions like this mean that there is no chance of return but you still have the risk of a disaster on launch which is not entirely uncommon as the recent Antares Rocket launch showed.

I know that but I guess the joke was lost on you.

That's not entirely the right question. You need to account for which is more predictable for another human. If you are in the middle of a war zone with soldiers getting blown up by booby traps then you might expect a human soldier to be rather nervous and so you would approach them with extreme caution or get out of the way. However if you have a robot wandering down a street in a peaceful area and the right set of circumstances just happen to cause it to misidentify a random, innocent person as a target that person has no possible way to predict that they need to be extremely cautious.

The result is a complex combination of both a human's ability to know when they are in danger and the predictability of the gun owner. While a human may be more likely to make wrong decisions under pressure fellow humans are also going to be aware of this and take extra precautions. With a robot the decision will be entirely based on how good the robot makes a decision since the human has no way to know whether the robot is likely to be hostile or not.

Actually the one thing that the Standard Model is absolutely NOT based on is gravity. Gravity being so weak and have an long range actually is responsible for the structures at the largest scales of the Universe which is precisely where we see Dark Matter. The reason for this is that EM is so much stronger that it will force charge cancellation to a large high degree on smaller distance scales: if there is a charge imbalance opposite charges will be rapidly dragged in to create a balance. This cancels EM out at larger distance scales since the charges balance leaving only gravity (the strong and weak nuclear forces being short range [~nucleus] due to their physics).

No, the reason the Higgs is called the god particle is because you can't have Mass without it.

No, it is very different from the ether. The ether was the proposed medium which light propagated through. As such it was a continuous field not clumps of particles. Also the ether was massless and had no gravitational field. Dark Matter has a mass and causes a gravitational field which is how we know that it exists.

In which case it would hardly qualify as ordinary baryonic matter...

Well I suppose this explains why, after Uber has been operating for 2 years Toronto is suddenly in a rush to get the case heard by the courts.

If it is truly single player why would you need a network connection? The only reason for this is so that other player's actions can affect your game (either that or a as a form of DRM but they have denied the latter). While this might provide some protection it still allows hoards of idiots to impact your game and I don't want that. If the changes are made centrally then there is no need for an always-on connection: just provide optional updates from time to time.

No a Brit who made a typo probably assisted by auto-typo since 'n' is nowhere near 't' on the keyboard.

Even donations come with obligations though. If I donate to a charity to support science education in country A and they use the money instead to purchase needles for drug addicts in country B then you could sue them to get you money back since they are using it for a significantly different purpose even though both might be considered good causes.

Whether the a single player game is sufficiently different from the delivered MMO game is something for the courts to decide if it ever gets that far. However what is very shabby about this whole thing is that the announcement has come only 1 month before the release. Given their description of how essential the online servers are to the game it seems highly likely than they have known about this for a very long time and have only just come clean.

It's also a real shame. Part of the beauty of the previous games was that they made such a detailed, massive open sandbox which you could explore and admire the intelligence that went into crafting the procedural generation. Now you are going to be sharing the galaxy with immature, adolescent school kids and any unusual features you will ascribe to a human moderator putting them there. It's going to have more similarity to Eve Online than Elite.