Some of us don't vote because we consider it politically irresponsible to make a choice that we don't believe in. If I dislike (or like) all candidates in an election equally, not voting is a (even the) proper choice. The point: before you brush people off for "not participating" in government, make sure they really are being lazy rather than consciously abstaining.

Yes, there are measurements which indicate that photons have zero mass, and that at least certain kinds of neutrinos have nonzero mass. They are certainly not the same particle, and there's no way the neutrinos could be less massive than photons - even if photons do have a nonzero mass, we've measured that it has to be many orders of magnitude smaller than the known mass differences between different kinds of neutrinos.

Incidentally, "speed of light" c does not necessarily mean the speed of /light/ (photons) - see this for example. c is just a particular universal constant. It happens that massless particles, like photons (as far as we can tell), travel at this speed. Unfortunately we are stuck with the name "speed of light" from the days before relativity, when people didn't know that this speed was significant in any manner other than being the speed of light. The results from OPERA seemed to indicate that the neutrinos were traveling faster than c, so even if the photon did have a significant mass (and thus light did not actually travel at the "speed of light"), the results would still be just as surprising as they are.

No, speed is still distance/time (or rather, velocity is displacement/time). That's just a definition, it's not going to change. The effect of gravity is to distort spacetime so that measuring distance and time along any particular path is not so easy anymore.

I met one of the people involved in the project a few months ago, and from what he said (IIRC) it sounds like it is mostly about marketing and education. They're trying to increase public awareness of and interest in what the LHC does and why it's important, and they figure that giving people a way to easily interact with the experiment (even if it is kind of a one-way interaction) will help pique their interest. In other words, it's a PR tool.

Then again, I'm not directly involved, so I could be wrong...

That's not a universal experience, though. I've run a Tor exit node for a few years with an exit policy that only allows about a dozen commonly used ports, and I haven't gotten a single complaint. I'd be very surprised if I'm the only one with this kind of experience. So I wouldn't say "if you want to stay out of trouble, do NOT run Tor exit nodes;" I think my experience shows that you can drastically cut down on your chances of getting in trouble by putting some thought into the configuration, without shutting the node down entirely. (FWIW, I run it on a VPS, not on my own equipment) That being said, the idea of running a Tor node as an excuse to cover illegal downloading that you know the source of seems sketchy. Personally, I wouldn't do it in the OP's case. I just wanted to make the case that running a Tor node is not 100% guaranteed to bring the wrath of the *AA down on you.

I reposted your question to Physics Stack Exchange so you can get input from an additional group of people, several of whom have actually studied GR. (Disclaimer: it's not my website, but I'm a frequent contributor) Of course, most of the prerequisites I would think of have already been mentioned here (Newtonian mechanics, electromagnetism, special relativity, linear algebra, multivariable calculus, differential equations, differential geometry), but on PSE you won't have to filter out a bunch of irrelevant comments ;-)

For what it's worth, the main "thrust" of GR is encapsulated in two equations, which you can find here among other places: the geodesic equation and the Einstein field equations. You can use those to guide your progress: once you know enough to understand what they mean, you've successfully learned the basics of GR.

As a particle physicist, I fully endorse this ;-)

Honestly, I'm more concerned about the government of Schleswig-Holstein having the authority to control what links its citizens put on their web page this precisely than I am about Facebook collecting the data that it does.

Of course, I'm in the US, not in Germany, so I guess it's not really my fight...

I'm at Penn State, and what I've gathered from hearing people talk about it is that those on the upper floors of buildings felt it, but people walking around outside generally didn't. It seems like that might be the case throughout much of northern PA and further north.

The first thing that went through my head when I felt the shaking was that comic. (Sadly, an XKCD reader's first instinct is not to find shelter.)

I don't know about "perfect" - after all, if you never create the game in the first place, it will be literally impossible for anyone to pirate it. Plus, you can't beat the production budget of a game that doesn't exist.

Presumably you opt out of Google+ by not opting into it - just don't sign up.

The 1.5 is a mathematical expectation value: if they could run this experiment a large number of times, there would be 1.5 events detected on average. Of course, all the physicists involved know that they are not actually going to see exactly 1.5 events. Still, it's more informative to write 1.5 than 1-2.

As far as the 99.3%, I'm not familiar with the specific statistical techniques involved, but if you look at the paper they do provide references that (I assume) explain how that 99.3% value can be obtained.

Wish I could mod you +1 informative for being the most actually informative comment in this thread and the only one that explains the actual physical significance.

To be fair, that seems more like a parody of the tendency to kill off characters than an abuse of it. I imagine that the writers knew how ridiculous this was, they just wanted to have as much fun with it as possible. (Just like a scaled-down version of Kenny in South Park, now that I think about it)