This isn't a case of a judge just tossing out the 4th Amendment. The situation is that the cops had a court order allowing them to grab the location data from the cell towers. It wasn't a warrant, but IANAL and I don't really understand what the difference is between the two. At any rate, the courts knew what the police wanted, and gave them the go-ahead.

What the judge did in this case is duck the 4th Amendment issue completely, and seemingly intentionally. She ruled that since the cops had a court order, they were entitled to grab & use the cell data. It's clear that she didn't want to wade into the 4th-A discussion, preferring to punt that to another court -- quite possibly the supremes.

If the cops had gotten a "warrant" to get this data, I doubt anyone in the press (or on /.) would be interested in this case. So now we're down to arguing over whether a "court order" is different enough from a "warrant" to be worth putting on our Big Brother war paint.

The thing that worries folks in Japan is not the suitability of the engineering or the technology in general. The problem is the Japanese culture of silence, cover-up and cronyism. When you're faced with something potentially as disastrous as a nuclear plant meltdown, you want to have reasonable assurance that the government is actually *regulating* the plant operators, not participating the in cover-ups and denials that problems exist.

Nuclear power actually has a pretty good safety record, except when plant operators do something patently stupid (Chernobyl), criminally stupid (Fukushima), or just plain make a mistake (Three Mile Island). So what you really want is to know that the government is looking out for the public's best interests, and not allowing plant operators to do stupid things...but in today's Japan, that's not what happens.

Can the LDP change that culture? Probably not, because frankly they have been in control of Japan for most of a really long time. They *are* the problem, in many ways. If you're a Japanese citizen, the LDP wanting to re-start Japan's nuclear plants probably doesn't sound so great to you.

There are two proposed explanations for the signal seen at CMS, and I'm not sure I would describe either as "new." The color glass condensate is basically a nucleus that is flattened into a pancake due to relativistic length contraction in the direction of motion at high energies. This flattening effect spawns large numbers of gluons (the particles that mediate the Strong nuclear force), wich in turn exposes all sorts of interesting effects. The quark-gluon plasma is a state presumed to exist shortly (say, 10 microseconds or less) after the Big Bang, when the universe's energy was packed into an extremely small volume. At high energies and small distances, quarks (the components of hadrons i.e. protons and neutrons) and gluons are thought to separate easily, creating a hot soup of strong force particles. As the QGP expands and cools, it eventually "freezes out" and you get a shower of normal matter particles. This, too, is thought to have happened after the big bang.

Both of these conditions have been observed at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in the USA. The CGC was reported in 2003/2004, and the QGP in 2010/2011. So while observing them at LHC is exciting, neither is really "new." LHC's luminosity is much higher than RHIC's, though, so one would expect to be able to study both conditions more readily...

http://xkcd.com/1131/

Once in a while, Randall really nails it.

Man, are the educational publishers going to get cheesed about this.

Yes, but creating a quark-gluon plasma is more than just energy. You have to get the nucleon (protons + neutrons) nice and high so you have quarks to deconfine to make the plasma. That's why BNL and CERN use heavy nuclei like gold and lead in these collisions. In a string theory experiment, you would probably just go for protons. My guess is that leptons (electrons, muons) would be a better choice for string theory experiments, but they lose too much energy going around the ring in cyclotron-style accelerators so you have to go with linear accelerators instead...which then limits the energy you can impart to the particles.

It's "colder" but you have to understand that the universe cooled rapidly in the time immediately after the big bang. as the U expanded, the energy contained it was spread over a much larger volume, which effectively means that said volume had a lower temperature as time went on. The same is true for the quark-gluon plasma described in the article. Roughly speaking, this QGP would have the same properties that the universe had roughly 1 microsecond after the big bang (my estimate, could be off by quite a bit). The goal in all this is not necessarily to recreate the big bang, but to probe the properties of the QGP, which is a very interesting condition. The other goal is to be able to examine the "freeze-out," when the expansion of the plasma lowers its temperatures enough that it's no longer a soup of free quakes & gluons, but instead those gluons condense into particles like protons, neutrons and exotics.

The reason the QGP is interesting is that it's a prediction of quantum chromodynamics ("QCD") that says that when you have high energy densities (ie high temperatures) in very small regions, quarks gain "asymptotic freedom" fom each other and are no longer forced to be bound into doublets and triplets (aka mesons and hadrons). This is exactly the opposite of the low-energy case, where it's theoretically not allowed for single quarks to be observed directly.

Long and short of it, this experiment allows physicists to study conditions that prevailed shortly after the big bang, and to test QCD in ways that we haven't been able to pursue until recently. It's pretty cool, 5.5 TK temperatures notwithstanding .

It's clear that Microsoft is terrified of Apple and feels the need to do "something, anything" to be seen as innovative. Of course, being innovative is not easy, and in my opinion MS lost their ability to innovate quite a while back. Metro is new, so MS is grabbing on to it like a shipwreck survivor grabs onto anything that floats.

Of course, "new" is not necessarily "good," and in this case I think the jury is definitely out on whether Metro is good.

All in all, this feels like a death rattle to me.

Uh....what on earth would make you think/say that? The thermal expansion properties of water are (a) well understood and (b) essential to life on earth. See this page for more info...search it for 'water' and you'll find lots of references -- including the thermal expansion coefficients. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_expansion

The Fishbowl project was covered in great detail at the RSA conference a month ago. NSA has already built it, certified it, and conducted trials. Unless Boeing is just replicating Fishbowl, they may find it a tough sell.