what's the material that's used in batteries? lithium. how much lithium is there on the planet? not enough. this is the problem that's being swept under the carpet. we already have high prices on copper, as it's already in short supply due to its prevalence in electronics. the quantities required of neodymium (for the magnets in the motors), copper (for the moving coils in the motors) and lithium (for the batteries) to push around 2 tonnes of metal is basically... insane. there's not enough available on the planet. something has to give.

ok, for what it's worth, my take on what the higgs is, is that it's a [virtual] ultra-heavy proton, made up of the same [previously undiscovered] ultra-heavy quarks that make up the [virtual] W and Z Bosons. it takes a bit of explaining, but i've been looking into this... a lot.... and i surmise that the W and Z Bosons are just flavours of pions (2-quark particles) whilst the Higgs is just a flavour of the proton (3 quark particles). they don't appear "in the wild" so to speak because a) they're incredibly large b) they're hugely unstable, *but* in "virtual" form they're actually very easy to create (universe-speaking)

what's interesting is that there _should_ also be a "neutral" Higgs as well - based on an ultra-heavy neutron. hey look! there's two mass figures for the Higgs, and one of them was gamma ray decay particles only! and what's the difference between the 126.0 / 125.3 and mass of neutron divided by mass of proton? exactly the same to within 0.05%. funny that. .... the only problem is: i now need about 10 years worth of full-time maths training in order to catch up with the level of mathematics that's gone into QED in order to *prove* the above to the satisfaction of the rest of the particle physics community.... and that, essentially, is the whole problem with particle physics. the direction it's taken is so immensely complex that the number of people who can contribute successfully is vastly limited: thus, progress in this field isn't limited by computers or people's enthusiasm for the subject but by the direction that it's taken.

from a software engineering and reverse-engineering perspective, pure maths like this simply doesn't have the kind of "rapid prototyping" loop that allows progress to be efficiently made. each mathematical construct is an "ivory tower", where the smallest theoretical modification or tweak can require the entire edifice to be redesigned from the ground up (taking man-decades of intense thought in the process).

so - think of this: considered as a computer program, how could anyone "debug" the process by which particle physics has evolved?

well. that would explain why maharishi mahesh yogi was accused of all sorts of things. and why various scientists get "discredited". it would be interesting to consider how best to counteract these measures, although Mr Maharishi Bounces-on-the-Mattress Mahesh Yogi had a tactic that seemed to work: ignore them....

it will be interesting to see and learn what the long-term economic and social effects of these censorship attempts are. the effect of censorship is not just going to cut off the "pruhtesters", it'll cut off researchers from access to papers and equipment, businesses from the customers and suppliers, and, additionally, cut off government departments within venezuela from effective communication with each other in the day-to-day operations. looking further ahead i look forward to seeing whether other governments find this lesson useful or not.

... you know... i worked for pi technology in milton, cambridge, in 1993. they're a good company. they write automotive control systems, engine control management software, vehicle monitoring software and diagnosis systems and so on. one of the things i learned was that coding standards for mission-critical systems such as engine control have to be very very specific and very very strict. the core rules were simple:

1) absolutely no recursion. it could lead to stack overflows.
2) absolutely no local variables. it could lead to stack overflows.
3) absolutely no use of of malloc or free. it could lead to stack overflows.

now you're telling me that there are actually car manufacturers that cannot be bothered to follow even the simplest and most obvious of safety rules for development of mission-critical software, on which peoples' lives depend? that's so basic that to not adhere to those blindingly-obvious rules sounds very much like criminal negligence.

well... this is puzzling. i tried converting the value reported to MeV and accidentally divided by the atomic units constant 9.109 382 91 x 10-31 instead. what i got shocked the hell out of me: 1000x avogadro's constant. according to reports here http://phys.org/news/2014-02-p... the value is 0.000548579909067 atomic mass units. if however you divide that by the atomic unit of mass reported here http://physics.nist.gov/cgi-bi...|search_for=atomic+mass+unit you get, to 6 decimal places, avogadro's constant times 1,000.

i am... very very startled! the implications are that there is some sort of link between the mass of the electron and (if you look up the definition of 1 mole on wikipedia) the number of atoms in 12 kg of carbon. which is.... incredibly odd.

i don't think it's a systemic error, because the original experiment's value agrees with that of other measurements that have been made of the electron's mass. what it would mean is that there appears to genuinely be a link between the mass of the electron and avogadro's constant.

i heard that taxation on electronic "luxury" goods is at an insane level in indonesia, resulting in grey imports and smuggling. building a factory in indonesia would be a simple way to get round the problem.

The European Union's accounts have not been signed off for over 14 years. no chartered accountancy firm will touch them. what that makes the European Union is an "Organised Crime Syndicate". this is not a hoax or a joke: it is a fact. any organisation that operates outside the law and siphons money from people in an organised fashion is a criminal syndicate. it happens to be illegal to fund Organised Crime. therefore, following the logic through, all the Sovereign States that give the E.U. their citizens' taxes are also breaking the law. it therefore also follows that any citizen of an E.U. Sovereign State is, if they pay taxes, funding Organised Crime and is therefore also breaking the law.

as a citizen of a Sovereign State in the E.U the way to ensure that the law is not broken is therefore to contact a solicitor and arrange for any taxes being paid to be witheld - paid into an escrow account - pending resolution of the criminal activities of the European Union.

the article is mis-reported... or at the very least confusing. if you read the article carefully it describes failures of some of the researchers, followed by reporting the successful analysis and conclusions, possibly by a completely different team. the time-lines are not made clear, either. this sounds like a reporter decided to mis-represent the facts.

hang on... errr... if it's been pointed out that GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS have broken the law, remind me again why it's *edward snowden* that's being pursued for criminal acts?

although it has a built-in python command prompt i.e. it's python it does have that as an actual tab, with the electrum python module pre-loaded. really handy.

the equipment is being deployed in remote locations. i didn't explain _how_ remote but often it requires cherry pickers or climbing up ladders to install the kit. it's already 16kg: a UPS would a) not be enough b) would be too heavy (regardless of capacity) c) would be additional cost.

also, the answer is in the question itself, already. any UPS is going to be what... £50 minimum? at the lower capacity end (16gbyte to 80gbyte) the cost differential between a power-loss-protected SSD and a consumer-grade unprotected one is around a £15 variation.

so you'd be making it dangerous for on-site engineers to install the kit (too heavy to lift one-handed whilst up a ladder) and actually *increasing* the cost of the equipment. not sensible! :)