I can't speak to this paper but for the CERN papers the reason there are so many authors has far more to do with the fact that to get at the physics you need a 14-story tall incredibly complex detector that has its data collected and analyzed by software consisting millions of lines of code. You need a few thousand people to build and operate such detectors and to write and debug the code that analyzes the data to get at the physics. That's why there are so many authors.

Many of us would love to have our own table-top experiments but nobody knows how to make one that small which can get at the physics we are interested in.

All directions look back to the Big Bang because it happened at every point of the universe. The "Big Crunch" is pretty much ruled out by the accelerating expansion but this has introduced a new possible ending to the universe: the "Big Rip". In this scenario nothing stops the accelerating expansion driven by increasing dark energy.

As the expansion accelerates, the causally connected region of the universe shrinks and, if nothing stops this, at some point in the extremely distant future even atoms and then nucleons etc. will get ripped apart as the causally connected region shrinks below their size until it reaches the planck length at which point there will be a "big rip" as space-time itself is pulled apart. One intriguing, but complete guess, at what happens then is that the huge energy density triggers a new Big Bang at each and every point in the universe i.e. our universe will give birth to a new universe at every single point in it.

While that scenario is extremely hypothetical it seems a lot more optimistic end for us that just expanding forever until heat death stops everything...but it will be a while before we know whether it is right.

So, you would have the young vote against their own interests to help the aged (who really do need help) as well?
Everyone votes with what they believe will work best both for themselves and for everyone. Believing that just because someone votes other than the way you think they ought to shows that you have a massive bias. I've literally voted for every major party in the UK, all based on manifestos of what they say they're going to attempt to do, on the basis that I think that manifesto makes the most sense for the state of the country at the time.

Honestly don't care if there's been a GenX president, as I'm not from the USA. I'm fairly sure there will be at some point.

Every day ruzzian drones are used to murder civilians, including 1 year old children, not just fight against military targets, this is called 'safari'. If these creatures are not stopped in Ukraine, they will be targeting YOUR civilians next.

The argument for funding universities used to be that they were funded by the increased tax rate that higher earners pay because, with very few exceptions, higher earners have either benefited from a university education themselves or have benefitted from the works of others with university educations.

The great thing with that system was that those who needed a university education but who ended up in a lower paying job like teacher or nurse were not saddled with massive debts and instead had their education paid for by those going into business and earning far more employing an educated and healthy workforce. the great thing with that old social contract is that it justified higher taxes for the more wealthy and they, along with the rest of society, got to benefit from it. Instead now we have a system where it's hard to justify higher taxes on those earning more because they are almost entirely excluded from the benefits and jobs critical to society, like teachers, are becoming increasingly hard to fill.

Not in the UK because UK universities no longer have tenure. Unless something has changed since I left the government forced universities to employ lecturers on fixed term contracts that do not have to be renewed when they expire.

The ability to derail a train if you hit the rear brakes while the engine is going full out. The system is designed to safely apply rear brakes at the same time as the forward brakes, ensuring the whole of the train experiences a braking effect.

The courses used to be fully funded by a grant here in the UK. All you needed was to have the academic credentials to get in, and that was the tough part. About 15% of people went on to higher education (in the early 80s); the theory was that over your working life, you'd more than repay to the government in taxes what was spent on your training for your reasonably "high flying" job. Which was fairly true.
The wonderful thing about that was that selection was entirely on how academically competent you were (rather than practically competent, which was more for vocations and apprenticeships); it opened up social mobility quite nicely.

Then more courses were added. with increasingly niche and impractical subjects, many of which had a handful of hours of lectures a week, and by the mid 90s, about 25% of the school leavers went to University. The government decided it could no longer afford to send all these people to Uni, so introduced Student Loans instead of Grant, which had the immediate effect of starting to dissuade the poorer (though sometimes academically gifted) people from going to Uni.
Then after that in 1998 came tuition fees which needed to be paid (introduced by a Labour government, who were the last ones anyone would think would do this due to the chilling effect on social mobility that the extra financial encumbrance brought).

As parents weren't used to the eye-wateringly high cost of higher education that existed in places like the US, there was only so much that could be politically asked of people to pay, so course fees were capped. Still too expensive for poor, and quite a millstone around the necks of recent graduates.

All the increased degree taking (around 50% of the UK population now have degrees by the time they're 30) means degrees aren't worth what they were, and command far less salary, rendering them not such a great pathway (except you now almost need a degree to flip burgers in McDonalds).

Seeing as there's a limited amount of people you can funnel through the degree channel, and the cap definitely hasn't been keeping up with inflation, then something needs to give. Fixed costs of buildings and utilities remain the same, so the only factor left is to reduce the courses and the academic staff involved with those (fewer courses means fewer administrators, along with fewer lecturers).
I don't think most families see the allure of vastly higher tuition fees that would allow Universities to continue in their current mode, as the return on investment simply isn't there. Apprenticeships are starting to find the appeal that they used to have (two of the most successful youngsters that I know did Engineering apprenticeships, and are now on salaries not far short of mine, while I know a boatload of Degree graduates with crippling debt over their heads, and without the grounding to do a role that would pay that back in any comfortable timespan.

Couple this with the financial crash of 2009 (which is having a generational financial impact) and COVID (which will definitely be having a generational financial impact), there really isn't the money anywhere to pass along to these institutions.

No, in general, they don't.. The old tend to try and look out for the young, and help where they can.. That's been my experience anyway..

Sorry I did not realize we were talking about trains from 50-100 years ago when guards vans (or brake vans) used to be used on freight trains. This was back when the trucks had no continuous brakes and so you needed a van with a handbrake that could be applied at the thend of the train. Modern trains do not need them because now, even trucks have air brakes. My apologies if you are still operating on knowledge you gained from reading Thomas the Tank Engine but modern trains are not like they were back then.

That's exactly why vacuum brakes, later replaced by air brakes, were introduced. If the hose fails then the pressure drops and the brakes apply and if the hose is blcoked then the brakes cannot disengage. I suppose that leaves the case where the hose gets blocked while the train is in motion but given that passenger trains in Europe have been using this system for over a century without it being a noticeable cause of accidents that seems to be exceptionally unlikely.

It depends on the reason for the "mistake". If the leak was due to gross incompetence or corruption, and looking at recent UK governments one of those seems highly probable, you can't trust the person who made it to fix it. The only way they can take responsibility in such cases is to resign to make way for someone who can.

Boeing don't need any help with that, they seem to be doing great all by themselves.

Technologies like OAUTH 2.0 have been around for a long, long time, and their purpose is to provide a verifiable audit-trail for users.

And it works! Although there have been (and will always be) security issues, the reality is that technologies like SAML and OAUTH do provide a very useful level of trust.

Except that, although these technologies do allow for a useful transfer of identity, the agents widely used to provide this identity (the IDP) is never an entity that provides a uniformly useful level of identity.

Here I am: Bill Jones (not my real name) citizen of the UK (not my real country, either) and I have no way to properly assert that to, say, Bank of the West (not my real bank, either) or Northern Airlines. (not my real airline)

If I have to assert my true identity, I have a state-issued driver's license or passport. Why do I have no way to assert either of these identification documents electronically?

Why can't I use my passport ID to assert myself to the bank, or the airline?

Seems to me that it would be HIGHLY USEFUL if I could. And it seems to be self-evident and proper that the agencies that issue drivers licenses or passports could offer electronic identification, even if it's sourced out to a tech company with a good reputation.

In the US, it's now become increasingly common to have a unified electronic ID to interact with agencies: see id.me. This is a start, and I know government agencies work GLACIALLY SLOWLY so maybe by the time my grandkids are having babies this could be a thing.

Eh?

> At some point you have to ask why you're using RAID at all. If it's for always-on, avoiding data loss due to hardware failures, and speed, then RAID 6 isn't really am great solution for avoiding data loss when disks get to these kinds of sizes, the chances of getting more than one disk fail simultaneously is approaching one, and obviously it was never great for speed.

If you're at this point, then using drives at all is probably already off the table. But I think this position is probably ridiculous.

I have many years of experience managing file clusters in scopes ranging from SOHO to serving up to 15,000 people at a time in a single cluster. In a cluster of 24 drives under these constant, enterprise-level loads, I saw maybe 1 drive fail in a year.

I've heard this trope about "failure rate approaching 1" since 500GB drives were new. From my own experience, it wasn't really true then, any more than it's true now.

Yes, HDDs have failure rates to keep in mind, but outside the occasional "bad batch", they are still shockingly reliable. Failure rates per unit haven't changed much, even though with rising capacities, that makes the failure rate per GB rise. It still doesn't matter as much as you think.

You can have a great time if you follow a few rules, in my experience:

1) Engineer your system so that any drive cluster going truly offline is survivable. AKA "DR" or "Disaster Recovery". What happens if your data center gets flooded or burns to the ground? And once you have solid DR plans, TRUMPET THE HECK OUT OF IT and tell all your customers. Let them know that they really are safe! It can be a HUGE selling point.

2) Engineer your system so that likely failures are casually survivable. For me, this was ZFS/RAIDZ2, with 6 or 8 drive vdevs, on "white box" 24 bay SuperMicro servers with redundant power.

3) If 24x7x36* uptime is really critical, have 3 levels of redundancy, so even in a failure condition, you fail to a redundant state. For me engineering at "enterprise" level, we used application-layer logic so there were always at least 2 independent drive clusters containing full copies of all data. We had 3 drive clusters using different filesystem technologies (ZFS, XFS/LVM) and sometimes we chose to take one offline to do filesystem level processing or analysis.

4) Backups: You *do* have backups, and you do adhere to the 3-2-1 rule, right? In our case, we used ZFS replication and merged backups and DR. This combined with automated monitoring ensured that we were ready for emergencies, which did happen and were always managed in a satisfactory way.