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Comment I am Italian. This is the correct meaning. (Score 2) 303

by GhigoRenzulli (#37513702) Attached to: The Mythical Tunnel Between CERN and Central Italy

Our minister Mariastella Gelmini is both totally ignorant and unable to write in italian.

The original sentence is here:

http://www.istruzione.it/web/ministero/cs230911

The correct translation is:

Italy contributed to the construction of the tunnel between Cern and Gran Sasso laboratory, used for the experiment, giving about 45 million euros.

The tunnel is used for the experiment. The tunnel was build between Cern and Gran Sasso. There is no other interpretation possible: someone built a 750KM underground tunnel between Ginevra and Gran Sasso, in order to make the experiment.
And Italy proudly participated to the construction of this tunnel.

Since after ignorance always follow arrogance, our precious minister Gelmini promptly replied:

http://www.istruzione.it/web/ministero/cs240911

The tunnel to which I was referring is the one where protons runs. From protons collisions originates a neutrinos stream that through the earth reaches Gran Sasso.

It's a ridiculous attempt to fix a very stupid sentence, trying to masking her abyssal ignorance.

Welcome to Italy!!!

Submission + - Faster than light neutrinos detected by CERN (cosmosmagazine.com)

Submitted by GhigoRenzulli
GhigoRenzulli writes: Neutrinos are chargeless subatomic particles that come in three 'flavours', and are known to travel at close to the speed of light, although an exact speed is difficult to assign due to their unknown mass.

An early report by physicists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland has announced experimental data that purports to show neutrinos travelling faster than the speed of light.

If found to be correct, the new results, now posted on the physics website arXiv, would require a major rethink of the current model of special relativity. But what avenues exist for confirming the extraordinary data?
Idle

Submission + - Taken over by aliens? Google has it covered (cio.com.au)

Submitted by swandives
swandives writes: Imagine what would happen if all the Google engineers turned rogue and held the world’s Gmail accounts to ransom. Or if aliens attacked earth and wiped California off the map. Seems the folks over at Google's enterprise division have already considered these scenarios. CIO is running an article, as part of a larger interview with Google Enterprise director of security, Eran Feigenbaum. He's a fascinating guy — in his spare time he practises magic and mentalism and you may also have heard of him as Eran Raven, the contestant from NBC television show, Phenomenon.
Science

Submission + - Earth Ejecta Could Seed Life on Europa (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by
KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: "Various astronomers have studied how far rocks can travel through space after being ejected from Earth. Their conclusion is that it's relatively easy for bits of Earth to end up on the Moon or Venus. But very little would get to Mars because it would have to overcome both the Sun and the Earth's gravity. Now the biggest ever simulation of Earth ejecta confirms this result with a twist. The simulation shows that Jupiter is a much more likely destination than Mars. So bits of Earth could have ended up on Jovian satellites such as Europa. Astrobiologists estimate that Earth's hardiest organisms can survive up to 30,000 years in space, which means that if conditions are just right, Earth ejecta could seed life there."
Piracy

Submission + - BT ordered to block pirate links (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by achenaar
achenaar writes: A High Court judge has ruled that BT must block access to a website which provides links to pirated movies.

Newzbin 2 is a members-only site which aggregates a large amount of the illegally copied material found on Usenet discussion forums.

The landmark case is the first time that an ISP has been ordered to block access to such a site.
NASA

Submission + - Vertical Take off Drone Takes to the Sky NASA Ames (suasnews.com)

Submitted by garymortimer
garymortimer writes: Development of Proto5, our new proof-of-concept (POC) UAV for Verticopter-II

Before introducing a new design, we go through the same systematic process that was done for the engineering of the original Verticopter®. We start with a 3D conceptual design database created in Blender 2.5, then we create a second and mirrored design database for the flight simulator X-plane 9, optimizing airfoil, weight distribution, landing gear placement, etc then assess simulated flight response for the whole flight envelop going from CTOL to VTOL. Once the simulations are satisfactory, we move on to the fast prototyping stage and build a scaled UAV using Autodesk Inventor 2012 (so as a 3rd 3D design database)
Science

Submission + - Single Photons Do Not Exceed the Speed of Light (www.ust.hk)

Submitted by GhigoRenzulli
GhigoRenzulli writes: A group of physicists at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) led by Prof Shengwang Du reported the direct observation of optical precursor of a single photon and proved that single photons cannot travel faster than the speed of light in vacuum. HKUST's study reaffirms Einstein's theory that nothing travels faster than light and closes a decade-long debate about the speed of a single photon.
Robotics

Submission + - The flight of the artificial butterfly (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by GhigoRenzulli
GhigoRenzulli writes: In a bid the find out how a butterfly takes to the air, researchers have built their own artificial version.

They have created a model swallowtail butterfly that can fly just like the real thing. Swallowtails have large, slow beating wings that means they fly unlike other butterflies. Despite these limitations, the model insect proves that swallowtails still achieve forward flight with simple flapping motions, say the researchers.

Details of the artificial butterfly are presented in the journal Bioinspiration & Biomimetics, published by the Institute of Physics.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: ISP Throttling? 7

Submitted by giltwist
giltwist writes: I have had Time Warner's 15mbps Road Runner service for two years in my current residence and have been generally pleased. However, for the last week I have been suffering from bandwidth that is between one-half and one-fifth of my advertised speed between the hours of 6pm and midnight. I've gotten all the way to the third level of tech support and had an in-home service call, but TWC claims there's absolutely nothing wrong with any of my hardware or their network though they acknowledge the slowness. I've run Glasnost test on HTTP transfers ( http://broadband.mpi-sws.org/transparency/glasnost.php ) with a nominally positive result, but it noted that line noise made the results dubious. How can I find out if TWC is intentionally throttling my connection? If they are, do I have any alternatives besides finding a new ISP?
Mozilla

Submission + - New Critical Zero Day Found in Firefox (threatpost.com)

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: A month after an advisory was published detailing a new vulnerability in Firefox, Mozilla said it has received exploit code for the flaw and is planning to patch the weakness on March 30 in the next release of Firefox. Mozilla officials said Thursday that the vulnerability, which was disclosed February 18 by Secunia, is a critical flaw that could result in remote code execution on a vulnerable machine. The vulnerability is in version 3.6 of Firefox.

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