Isn't this the plot of an old Michael Crichton novel? The only difference is that the protagonist was affected by epilepsia rather than parkinson.

And here you go!

CMS is the Compact Muon Solenoid: a particle detector, a muon collider would be something very different. You can think of it as the successor to LEP (the old CERN electron collider, that was dismantled to make room for LHC), the same way LHC is the successor to Tevatron.

A muon collider would be a machine complementary to the LHC, being able to look for things LHC can't see and to look with grater precision at anything the LHC may find.

(and on LHC too) let me call the conclusions of the article bullshit.

It took Tevatron 10 years to accumulate as enough data to reach a 4 sigma result (let us not discuss the statistical details). It would have taken years to reach the 5 sigma level. On the other hand LHC has obtained in one year almost as much data as Tevatron in 10. By summer 2012 the amount of data recorded by LHC will be an impossible goal for Tevatron to accomplish. It just made no sense at all to keep the old machine on.

The sad thing is not that Tevatron has been shut down but that the USA government is not investing any money in using the Fermilab infrastructure for some awesome future project (I'd love to see them try a muon collider).

For direct download:
http://av.vimeo.com/48323/967/69379567.mp4?token=1319148574_68f532a970ac33e3a5fb0a2b7cb02a82

If it does not work you can use this: http://savevideo.me/

What this guy did is awesome, but for a second while reading the summary I got confused and hoped that someone had mounted a rocket on a balloon to be ignited when the balloon is about to reach its peak altitude. THAT would have been absolutely awesome!

Fire, exactly!

Just put them in an oven that can do more than 250C, and possibly reach 500C, the typical stability temperature of cobalt alloys, the material that usually make the ferromagnetic surface of hard disk platters. Bonus points if you can do 650C, then you will start melting the aluminum and approach the Curie temperature of cobalt alloys. There is physically no way to recover anything once you do that.

Btw I don't know about microwaves, but that may be a nice (and fun) option too. Of course you'd need to dismantle the shielding first, but as someone has mentioned, that wouldn't take more than 10 minutes.

Nobody knows, but neither did Maxwell 150 years ago when he formuleted his theory of electromagnetism, nontheless without it you wouldn't have radios, ipods or cell phones. Einsten had no idea what his general relativity was good for but without it you wuoln't have GPSs and Li-ion batteries.

I could go on for a while, but let me tell you that real scientists work because they want to understand nature better, regardless of any pratical use that may stem from their work.

paraniod_mode
In case you havn't noticed Mubarak didn't need any special law or a big red button to shut off internat access state-wide, just a few well placed phone calls to the the major ISPs.

I wonder if that could ever happen here in the 'civilized' west (in London they chirurgically shut off mobile comunication during the student riots, remember?) and what counter measures would we have.

Could we use the good old phone network to cohordinate? How many of you still remember their home phone number? you mother's? your friends'? How many public phones are there in your city?

So I started investigating the current status of mesh wireless network. There is a significant number of people walking around with a wifi enabled linux phone nowdays, are they enough to build an on-the-fly mesh network? We already have some of the software stack available (http://www.olsr.org/?q=node/30), what seems to be missing is a simple user interface and a messaging system.

And then then what about pratical issues: battery life, interferencies... We should really be experimenting with this stuff now. It may prove to be quite a useful resource in other emergencies too.
end: paranoid_mode

paraniod_mode
In case you havn't noticed Mubarak didn't need any special law or a big red button to shut off internat access state-wide, just a few well placed phone calls to the the major ISPs.

I wonder if that could ever happen here in the 'civilized' west (in London they chirurgically shut off mobile comunication during the student riots, remember?) and what counter measures would we have.

Could we use the good old phone network to cohordinate? How many of you still remember their home phone number? you mother's? your friends'? How many public phones are there in your city?

So I started investigating the current status of mesh wireless network. There is a significant number of people walking around with a wifi enabled linux phone nowdays, are they enough to build an on-the-fly mesh network? We already have some of the software stack available (http://www.olsr.org/?q=node/30), what seems to be missing is a simple user interface and a messaging system.

And then then what about pratical issues: battery life, interferencies... We should really be experimenting with this stuff now. It may prove to be quite a useful resource in other emergencies too.
end: paranoid_mode

In case you havn't noticed Mubarak didn't need any special law or a big red button to shut off internat access state-wide, just a few well placed phone calls to the the major ISPs.

I wonder if that could ever happen here in the 'civilized' west (in London they chirurgically shut off mobile comunication during the student riots, remember?) and what counter measures would we have.

Could we use the good old phone network to cohordinate? How many of you still remember their home phone number? you mother's? your friends'? How many public phones are there in your city?

So I started investigating the current status of mesh wireless network. There is a significant number of people walking around with a wifi enabled linux phone nowdays, are they enough to build an on-the-fly mesh network? We already have some of the software stack available (http://www.olsr.org/?q=node/30), what seems to be missing is a simple user interface and a messaging system.

And then then what about pratical issues: battery life, interferencies... We should really be experimenting with this stuff now. It may prove to be quite a useful resource in other emergencies too.