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Comment Re:Price point new products (Score 1) 504

So how do you organize your music? In a Artist/Album/TrackName.mp3 scheme?

I very often search for meta data in my library, like "all songs by that artist that were released in the 90s" or something. iTunes makes it extremely easy to do just that. It even allows for dynamic playlists that update according to several criteria you can set (like a "Top 20 of the last six months" playlist). And it all syncs automatically to my iPhone.

Without iTunes, I would have to organize the files in the file system myself. I would need a third party tool to rip my CDs, possibly another tool to manage ID3 tags, hopefully with automatic import from Gracenote. Searching and organizing those tags might need another tool, or maybe could be done using the file management tools of whatever OS you like. I don't see how that is easier than just installing iTunes and being done.

I can see how a simple file system approach might be preferable if you don't need to search meta data all the time, or if transfering music to and *back* from the device is important to you, but I vastly prefer the iTunes way.

Comment Re:Not like cowardly Westerners (Score 4, Insightful) 496

It's the Palestinian authorities that are acting like lunatics here. The very fact that they have much much bigger troubles like helping their citizens survive under all the pressure means that they shouldn't waste their time prosecuting people for being critical of Islam. It seems like they have their priorities mixed up and that makes it a question of freedom.

Comment Re:Novikov self-consistency (Score 1) 194

I can think of at least one way it might - the Higgs Boson is critical to our understanding gravity.

This is a common misconception. The Higgs mechanism only generates the current masses, it does not connect at all to General Relativity, which is the connection we'd need to understanding gravity in a quantum context.

Also, matter is usually made up of composite structures, like protons / neutrons, atoms etc. These masses are largely explained by bound states, the Higgs mechanism only makes up for a small percentage of the masses of those objects.

The Higgs mechanism is very interesting in the framework of particle theory, but it does not help with gravity and it certainly does not explain how the masses of all matter objects are generated.

Comment Re:Duh! (Score 1) 191

There are no neutral muons. The energy loss due to synchrotron radiaten is only a problem with electrons, the larger mass of the muons pretty much completely takes care of the problem. The radiation loss due to synchrotron radiation is negligible for muons.

Comment Many other options right now (Score 1) 191

The article, and the summary, is a bit misleading.

There are always many different designs being investigated, even up to fairly advanced stages. This doesn't mean that any of those is going to be build. You have to realize that in order to make decisions that cost several M$, you have to know what you can do and how to achieve it beforehand, in great detail.

CLIC is definitely one of the bigger things currently in investigation. The ILC (lepton machine) is another one. There's also big interest in Neutrino Factories, Superbeams, Betabeams, etc.

What we want to build (maybe in 2020) depends crucially on what the LHC finds and on new results in the neutrino sector (measurement of the 13-angle).

Comment Re:Before we get all sweaty about terms (Score 1) 306

Yes, you're right, of course, and he might just mean that.

What he describes happens, just as physicists sometimes develop a model to describe some natural phenomenon and end up discovering new math that is then later adopted by mathematicians.

But in both cases, I wouldn't describe that as the main purpose of the field. Physicists usually don't deal with pure math, mathematicians do. And mathematicians don't usually deal with observation, physicists do.

Comment Re:Before we get all sweaty about terms (Score 2, Informative) 306

...

If you can observe phenomena, reliably document previously unobserved phenomena, and from that produce useful but not mathematically precise practices or products you're a scientist.

If you can gather observed facts into a sheaf of postulates and a system of symbols that can predict unobserved phenomena, you're a mathematician....

Both describe a (natural) scientist. Mathematicians do entirely different things (they don't work with observed facts, they don't make postulates based on said facts, they definitely don't predict unobserved phenomena. That's all what science is for).

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