Physically perhaps but in terms of internet presence I would doubt it. As a non-American I'd think this was an entirely appropriate response if it were the US. It has the beauty of being non-violent, extremely humiliating and very effective at preventing them from engaging in further cyberattacks. This should send such a clear message that hopefully even their insane government can understand it. Indeed if anything it seems so well thought out and proportionate that it seems unlikely to be the US government given their previous record.

Really? Since the neolithic was later than the paleolithic what did people do that dropped the life expectancy so much? I realize that the number is heavily skewed by a large infant mortality rate and that those surviving to adulthood lived a lot longer than the average but still to drop 10 years while technology was improving seems very strange - how robust is the data supporting this huge drop?

What happened to stimulating the brain via the old fashioned method by having an exciting, provocative story populated by diverse and interesting characters? Have Hollywood fallen so far that the only way they can stimulate people's brain now is by the direct application of voltage?

No, not until your credit card has been charged. If they have done that then you have them under the credit card agreement but before that they can wriggle out of it as a mistake under their own terms.

Given the context - which is a post of Slashdot and not a paper - I'd stick with countless as in "too many to be counted" or "very many" given that I'm not willing to put in the large amount of effort that would be required to actually count them. Rather than the hugely overly technical considerations you are engaging in there is a very easy way to simplify this.

If I start with the glass on the table then there are is a very large range of momenta I can give the glass to arrive at the state where it is shards on the floor so long as I don't care which particular set of shards it makes. To convert from any given set of shards on the floor back to a glass I have to give each shard a precise linear and angular momentum such that they will reassemble themselves into the glass. Hence in the phase space of all possible momenta for all the shards I have to hit a single point where as for the reverse just have to hit a large area in a far lower dimensional phase space. The same applies to glasses colliding in space.

In the high energy limit the same will apply. The nuclei of the glass will collide to produce hadronic showers, each particle of which will have its own 4-momentum. However in this case it is clear that you cannot reverse the system since some of the interactions and subsequent decays will involve the weak force which we know is not symmetric under time reversal.

Have you actually ever taken a cab in London? The problem is the exact opposite of what you describe with only ~5% from minorities to the extent that they are trying to recruit more. As for "untrained hipster" they are required to pass The Knowledge before they get a license. They may have somewhat colourful characters but I've never had one who is not extremely competent, knowledgeable and driving a clear, well repaired cab.

....or C) that you forgot to account for entropy. To study time reversal violation you must have two states with identical entropy or you must account for the effects of entropy. The reason that a glass falling from a table and shatters is far more likely than all the pieces of glass coming together, leaping off the floor and forming a new glass is because of entropy. There are countless ways in which a glass on a table can be converted to broken shards on the floor but starting with the shards there is only one way that that process can be reversed.

Ummm...yes but the reason for that is because the fundamental physics governing the particles of which the starlings are made up prevent time travel and moving faster than light (which are actually one and the same). Assuming you are building a model out of simple, plastic lego bricks then regardless of what you are building we know that it will not be a conductor of electricity because the bricks you are building it from are all plastic insulators. Studying the fundamental physics of a system lets you know what is possible.

For example we know that there is a fundamental arrow of time despite the fact that at an everyday scale this is completely obscured by entropy. You could study all the flocks of starlings you like but it would be impossible to show that you have time reversal violations in it...and yet since the particles in that system are subject to the weak force we know that at some incredibly tiny, insignificant level it is there.

Whoa there it is a LOT simpler than that. If you have a system in state A and it changes into state B then your process is A-->B. If you reverse time then the process you have is B-->A. Now if both these states have identical entropy there are no phase space arguments to favour one state over the other and so both processes (A-->B and B-->A) should be equally likely if the laws of physics are the same with regard to the direction of time.

What these experiments showed are that for some systems A-->B is more likely than B-->A and so the laws of physics define an arrow of time. If time were reversed then A-->B would become less likely than B-->A which is how you could detect it. It's the temporal equivalent of looking in a mirror. If you have a perfect left-right symmetry you cannot tell wether the image you are looking at is the real object or the reflection. However if the object is not left-right symmetric it is easy to know which image you are seeing.

So it does prove that there is an arrow of time. Perhaps you ought to spend a little time understanding the physics before you start applying simple logic: it tends to lead to more accurate conclusions.

Actually we can do better than that. The arrow of time is baked into fundamental particle physics and we have known this since the 1990's when an experiment, CPLEAR, showed that kaons turn into anti-kaons at a different rate than they switch back. This is completely independent of entropy and the result was further improved on by the Babar experiment only a few years ago showing that the 'T violation' occurs in B-mesons as well.

The article is wrong when it says that the laws of physics work the same going forwards or backwards in time. They do not and there is data to prove it. So the 'arrow of time' does not need any entropy to define it - it is baked into fundamental particle physics.

Clearly you are not a pro at English and should not be giving tips. 'Afternoon' means, quite literally, after noon. Evening is usually taken as roughly from 6pm to ~10-11pm. Those living further north in the arctic circle still have a morning, afternoon and evening even if the sun does not rise at all.

If you 'road' your train then wearing down your third rail is not really an issue...the screaming pedestrians and motorists trying to get our of your way might be a bigger problem though.

For those of us up in Canada or Northern Europe you need to mount the pannels on a vehicle which heads a long way south or west trailing a cable if they are going to be pointing at the sun in the late afternoon since the sun sets here around 15:30-16:00 this time of year. Simply pivoting or pointing west is just not going to cut it.

Possibly because it often isn't coding in real C++. In ATLAS, and particle physics in general, we use this awful data analysis package called ROOT which is about the worst example of C++ code you can possibly imagine (although it has significantly improved over the years). This package uses a C++ interpreter so that you can write C++ scripts. Sadly this interpreter cannot implement the full set of C++ so major bits of functionality are missing like virtual functions so it's hard to really call this C++.

Unfortunately, while there are many issues with ROOT, it is incredibly fast at I/O and has lots of features which do what we need (if you can navigate past the bugs, memory leaks and dodgy documentation). One way to do help with this is to use the Python interface so many of us use the Python interface as a shield from the full horror of ROOT. The other alternative is to write compiled C++ code which gives you the complete C++ functionality but still leaves you with the minefield of linking to ROOT. To give an example of how bad this can be a few years ago they had a bug which made you code dependent on the comments i.e. by adding a comment line the code generated a duplicate symbol error when linked. After a day of tracking this down to a pre-processor macro I was told by the root development team that they already knew about this bug but could not fix it...that was also the day I switched to using the Python interface!

Agreed but they had better not make any mistakes and accuse someone who does not subsequently get convicted. While it is hard to see how someone arrested for drunk driving would be not convicted they do have a history of mistakes like this. A few years ago they busted an online child pornography ring and then went around and named people whose credit cards were used without stopping to think that some of those cards were stolen and used fraudulently.

I'm all in favour of doing what we can to stop drunk driving but deliberately naming and shaming people before they have a conviction is dangerous at best and just plain wrong if those people are not found guilty.

Clearly you have never done experimental physics. Not only are there plenty of 'back of the envelope' calculations that would take far longer to input into a CAS system than to solve but we also use notation that I've no clue how to put into a CAS system. For example in the Standard Model Lagrangian I have 'vectors' to represent spin and colour. These are written into the same term as a multiplication and yet each colour vector must only multiply with colour matrices and other colour vectors. This is achieved by the summation convention but I've never seen a CAS system that supports this properly in a way that is simple enough for 'everyday' calculations.