StartsWithABang writes: At the end of the 19th century, Lord Kelvin famously said, "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement." He was talking about how Newtonian gravity and Maxwell's electromagnetism seemed to account for all the known phenomena in the Universe. Of course, nuclear physics, quantum mechanics, general relativity and more made that prediction look silly in hindsight. But in the 21st century, the physics of the Standard Model describes our Universe so well that there truly may be nothing else new to find not only at the LHC, but at any high-energy particle collider we could build here on Earth. If there are no new particles found below about 2–3 TeV in energy—particles that the LHC should detect if they’re present—it’s a reasonable assumption that there might not be anything new to find until energy scales of 100,000,000 TeV or more. And even if we build a particle accelerator to the fullest capacity of our technology around the equator of the Earth, we still couldn’t reach those energies.

BarbaraHudson writes in with the latest in the Assassin's Creed Unity debacle. This time it's good news. "As an acknowledgment of the botched launch of Assassin's Creed Unity, Ubisoft has offered free additional content to everyone who purchased the title, cancelled the game's season pass and offered a free game to users who purchased the pass. The anticipation for Assassin's Creed Unity was such that the myriad of bugs and technical issues experienced at launch felt like an even greater slap in the face for gamers. In a blog posted yesterday, Yannis Mallat, CEO of Ubisoft Montreal & Toronto said: 'Unfortunately, at launch, the overall quality of the game was diminished by bugs and unexpected technical issues. I want to sincerely apologize on behalf of Ubisoft and the entire Assassin's Creed team. These problems took away from your enjoyment of the game, and kept many of you from experiencing the game at its fullest potential.'"

Daniel_Stuckey writes "Dotcom today released his debut album Good Times, which consists of 17 pretty terrible EDM tracks produced by the Mega mogul himself. According to a press release, 'The music celebrates Kim's ever-present philosophy of inspiring people to feel good, have fun and live life to the fullest. Kim was inspired by the Trance and Dance tracks he listened to during his high-speed driving times on the German Autobahn.' It's anything but subtle, as you might guess from an album advertised on the back of a 100-strong fleet of buses. In an interview with Wired at the end of the year Dotcom admitted he sounded 'like crap, obviously,' but added, 'Fortunately there's a thing called Auto-Tune so they make it sound OK.'"

A while ago you had a chance to ask oceanographer and Director of Special Projects at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, David Gallo, about the mysteries of the deep and the tech we're using to get there. Below you'll find his answers to your questions.

destinyland writes "The New York Times' site just published their first best-seller list which includes ebooks. 'To give the fullest and most accurate possible snapshot of what books are being read at a given moment you have to include as many different formats as possible,' a book editor explained in November, 'and e-books have really grown, there's no question about it.' Interestingly, the rankings of the top 7 best-selling ebooks are unchanged if you also include their print sales."

DustyShadow writes "In the case of Blockowicz v. Williams, The US Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals refused to force Ripoff Report to remove allegedly defamatory comments posted by a user. The Ripoff Report has a well-publicized no-takedown policy, even if the author wants to remove his/her post, so the Ripoff Report refused. The Blockowiczs then claimed that the Ripoff Report violated FRCP 65(d) because the Ripoff Report was 'in active concert or participation' with the initial posters by refusing the injunction's removal order. The district court (and the Court of Appeals) disagreed with the Blockowiczs. Absent the 'active concert or participation,' the website was outside the court's control. Ripoff Report has released a statement concerning this case: 'In keeping with our core mission of protecting speech to the fullest extent of the law, we decided that it was not just our right but also our duty to ask questions and dig deeper before we could comply with such an order. Other sites claim they support free speech, but when the going gets rough, they will usually protect their bottom line rather than the Constitutional rights and freedoms this country was founded upon. Unlike other sites, even when the speech involved is harsh or negative and even if our position sometimes generates negative press for us, we think that the First Amendment requires us to put our principles before our pocketbook and fight against censorship.'"

Asus' new high-end laptop could finally be the traveler's best accoutrement, touting twelve-hour battery life thanks to intelligent, second-by-second switching between the two GPUs and automatic, on-the-fly re-clocking of the Intel Core i7 CPU. All this also comes in with a price tag of just over $1,000. "ASUS's solution is different because it's user-transparent; even a novice user will get the fullest possible benefit because the laptop itself is deciding when to switch. The same principle applies to the dynamic CPU clocking. ASUS includes a desktop widget to track CPU clock speed. While using the UL80JT, I could see it moving up and down with what I did; up with program openings and CPU-intensive processes, and way down at idle. Between the GPU switching, dynamic clocking, and ASUS's other power management features, the UL80JT manages to consume less than half as much power as the unibody Macbook while browsing."

brothke writes "The 1962 song Wipe Out, with its energetic drum solo started, was the impetus for many people to take up playing the drums. Similarly, Nmap, the legendary network scanner, likely interested many in the art of hacking, and for some, started a career for security professionals and hackers. Nmap and its creator Fyodor need no introduction to anyone on Slashdot. With that, Nmap Network Scanning: The Official Nmap Project Guide to Network Discovery and Security Scanning, is a most useful guide to anyone interested in fully utilizing Nmap." Read on for the rest of Ben's review.

boyko.at.netqos writes "Microsoft's new Vista TCP/IP stack might be beneficial to businesses looking to increase use of their IT infrastructure... if they did it right. Ted Romer at Network Performance Daily writes: '[Vista] now allows us to throttle outbound traffic at a client or server. For example, you can throttle the bandwidth of a particular subnet to a particular server, giving some departments more access to the servers that they need. You can even restrict outgoing bandwidth for certain peer-to-peer applications like bit torrent. This shaping can also be handy when applied to servers, allowing less bandwidth for certain users/departments, and more for others. While consumers may debate whether Vista is a worthwhile upgrade, I believe it to be important for enterprise customers who will best be able to put Vista's capabilities to their fullest potential. Of course, I'm getting it for DirectX 10 games, but that's just me.'"

An anonymous reader writes, "The first reviews of Intel's new quad-core Core 2 Extreme QX6700 have emerged this morning and opinion is mixed. TrustedReviews were blunt: 'There is nothing new on display here. Very few people will need quad cores...' while Tech Report think 'many owners of this beast may be stuck waiting for new applications to arrive that use it to its fullest ability.' The boys at bit-tech managed to overclock to 3.47GHz and found the first killer application: quad-core support in the Source Engine! Nice!"

Built with the Doom 3 engine and touting numerous innovations on the First Person Shooter genre, Prey is a study in contradictions. While it delivers on many interesting twists and environmental elements, the low difficulty and hackneyed character design drains some of the novelty from the experience. Despite frustratingly similar corridors and brain-dead enemies, the quality of the innovation somehow combines with the touchstones of retro-gaming to create that ephemeral quality: fun. Much better than Doom 3, and with the new-car smell that Quake 4 was lacking, Prey is a fully functional refit of the corridor-shooter genre. Read on for my impressions of Human Head's latest.

Jay Stelly is a senior engineer at Valve, and on the last day of the conference he kicked off the morning with a discussion on Physics in Half-Life 2 (HL2). The physics simulation, and inventive physics-related puzzles used throughout the game, were complicated elements to implement. He discusses the problems they faced, relates some of the humorous demos they used to flesh out their ideas, and laid out the ways that good engineering can make design that much better.

r3lody (Raymond Lodato) writes "Novice users and power users of *nix will enjoy reading From Bash to Z Shell: Conquering the Command line by Oliver Kiddle, Jerry Peek, and Peter Stephenson. In this moderate-sized book from Apress, the authors delve into both bash (the Bourne Again Shell) and zsh (Z Shell) to enable you to use them to their fullest advantage. Topics range from the simple editing of the command line to redefining key sequences, down into creating functions for editing and command-line completion. Some areas are covered in other books, but this one goes into some little-seen side streets and alleyways to show you the shortcuts to more efficient use of the shell." Read on for the rest of Lodato's review.

RaidRaider writes "Hardware Analysis makes a good effort at answering the question that has been on every enthusiast's mind; what are the specs for a baseline system I need to enjoy Half-Life 2 to the fullest? They take a good hard look at the Steam survey results and work their way up from there, replacing CPUs, graphic cards and add more memory. They back it all up by offering the demos used up for download so you yourself can gauge exactly what kind of upgrade you need."

Kevin Mitnick has been crazy-busy with media tours and book promotion stuff, and apologizes for taking so long to answer your questions. But answer he has, at length and in detail, with a brief intro at the start to correct a story in which he says he was misquoted. He has some other things on which he wants to set the record straight, too. Lots of them. Strong stuff here.

co-op-ted-out asks: "Myself and several other high school students from local school districts are currently co-op employees at a fiber-optic company. The first several weeks of the program were quite interesting and informative, but over the last month or so we have been used primarily as cheap labor in simple, repetitive jobs, such as equipment tests and upgrades. Although we are certainly getting a glimpse at a high tech industry, several of the other students and I don't feel that the company is living up to its end of the bargain, nor do we believe we are being used to our fullest potential. We certainly didn't sign up for this program in order to be cheap labor; we signed up because it was marketed to us as an "engineering project," and the majority of us plan to pursue engineering-related careers. What can we do as students to improve our experience, and what guidelines should any company follow when conducting a cooperative education program such as this, particularly with high school kids? Is there anyone out there who has found a successful way to run such a program?"

It's been a long week for etoy.com. On Monday, a judge issued a preliminary injuction fining them $10,000 each day that their website was hosted at their domain. They shut it down right away, of course. They're just internet artists. They don't have six billion dollars like the company that filed the suit: eToys.com. It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas. Click More. Update: For more information about etoy, see the freshly-updated dmoz category.

Ex Machina writes "According to the legal jargon on Pez.com: "You may not embed Metatags (hidden text used by web search engines to find websites) into your website using any of the registered or unregistered trademarks of Pez Candy, Inc. or its affiliates, in particular the PEZ® mark. Any such use of Metatags will be considered trademark infringement and will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. " Is there a precident for this case? I do believe this would fall under fair use--- for example, product reviews could be blocked if this was legitimized by a court. I fear lawyers. "

Pater has given us a write up on the famous panther book, Advanced Perl Programming. So, if you just can't get enough Perl, and who can, check it out. Besides, Slashdot is programmed in Perl, and we all love Slashdot, right? Riiigght.

Mike Hicks wrote in with an interesting note: The Committee for the Moral Defense of Microsoft, a pro-microsoft site has been running for awhile now to provide the other side to TMS. It's a fair site. Wrong in several key ways, but this is an excellent way to use the internet to its fullest potential, by posting other ideas. The funny part is that the machine the site runs on, like most of the net, runs Apache. Normally I don't find this kinda stuff all that interesting, but for some reason, this one struck me as cool. Telnet into port 80, and type HEAD / HTTP/1.0