The reason for the shutdown in 2012 is to replace the faulty interconnects (too high resistance) in the quench protection system (QPS) which caused the accident in fall 2008. With the interconnects they have now they can only run the magnets at less than nominal current and still have the QPS protect the magnets from damage if there is a quench. Once these are replaced, the LHC should be able to operate closer to the design beam energy.

Within our current understanding of quantum chromodynamics (field theory of the strong interaction - i.e. the interaction between quarks) color confinement means effectively you cannot have 'free' quarks. Of course you can have color-neutral bound states of quarks, but so far the only stable quark bound state is the proton*. Assuming QCD is more or less correct the smallest bit we can work with is effectively protons and electrons. *The neutron is only stable within an atomic nucleus. Free neutrons will decay into a proton.

I have seen worse on exams first hand. On one test I saw 5/16 evaluated to 1/11 and (3m)/(4m) evaluated to 1/m. This person did this for division everywhere on the test. If it had happened once I would have just assumed it was a mistake made while hurrying. It was like they had just learned some insane version of division.

The truly scary part was this was in a first-year undergraduate course for physics majors...

I thought the flash hardware acceleration in 10.1 was a windows only thing? If that is true it won't help with the n900

So by their definition then all artists colluding to fix music prices at some value is competition? That seems little different than saying that company A is inherently undermining company B because they sell whatever widget for less.