Thank you! I wish I got here sooner so that I could have gotten that 5, Insightful.

Wrong. We do know what happens when you smash particles at high energies. Particle accelerators across the globe, Fermilab the most prominent until now, have been doing it for years. The energy the LHC is going to smash at, while much greater than any before, still isn't that much. Divide the energy, 14TeV, by c^2 to get the mass. 14TeV/c^2 is about 15,000amu, the mass of 15,000 hydrogen atoms or 2.5x10^-20 grams. Even if the LHC did manage to create a black hole out of all that mass, it would be too little to draw anything in and would evaporate in less than a second.

And in the event the LHC does cause great damage (more likely to be to the power grid than anything), CERN will be responsible for paying up. The physicists will not go on trial, CERN will, because CERN is responsible for the LHC in the same way Fermilab is responsible for the Tevatron. That's why people start corporations—so they don't become responsible when something goes wrong.

RTFM: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi#Computation_in_the_computer_age

Yeah, I think that someone needs to set up a pi computation BOINC project and just keep calculating. The real question is "would it be feasible?" I guess they'd have to go about it a different way than {SETI,Folding}@Home. Instead of giving the client a "chunk" of instructions, you could just give it one digit. The algorithm for finding a particular digit (the BBP or Bellard's formula) could be stored on the client's computer indefinitely, and the computer could simply be instructed to extract a single digit or a block of digits and send them back to the host.

PiHex already did this, sorta, but in binary and only was after specific ranges of digits. I think the main deciding factor would be speed. How many digits can the average computer (or slightly above average, since that's the kind of people who would sign up) compute in about a second? A minute? An hour? Is it linear? We ought to run benchmarks before doing anything like this.

I only have 2 open. It usually hovers around 2-5, but if I'm working on a presentation and accompanying handout, listening to music, and working on my (unpublished) web site through ssh, the count goes up to at least 8. Sometimes I'll have even more in other workspaces.

When I was 12, I actually started teaching myself programming with TI-BASIC on a school-supplied graphing calculator. HTML and GW-BASIC quickly followed, then it was on to Visual Basic and C++. If I were to do it again today, though, I'd probably start with Python—it's easy to learn and can do great stuff. I would certainly steer clear of things like Alice and HTML, which don't really teach the fundamentals of programming very well.

Really. I read the complaint, and it sounds pretty leak-proof, but don't you think they should be suing the manufacturers of the products, instead of the poor retail stores? Because really—what could Best Buy do about this? Not sell stuff? No, the manufacturer should be made to include the GPL in the manual of the affected products, with a link to where one can download the source code. I think that would be fair. As it stands, though, I think they should go through with the lawsuit, and bring it to the attention of the public that Free Software (as in Freedom) is not something rare and unclean, but something that none of us could live without in modern life.

Both rovers have been in this same sort of situation before. The first time it happened, NASA took a full-scale model out into their back yard to test various methods of getting them out. They've gotten the rovers out of sand before, they can do it again.

Definitely!

My upgrade has been quite painless, though that might be because I simply did a fresh install. My hardware is fairly old (Athlon XP processor, 1GB RAM) and Karmic is running quite well. Conky works, OpenGL works, Flash works, etc. The only thing that tripped me up was the switch to GRUB2, which left me, like many others, wondering where "menu.lst" went.

I voted Work/School Related, because that's closest to Wikipedia for me (though teachers hate it). Considering I use it so often, I always set Wikipedia to my home page.

I agree. I doubt Apple would actually implement advertising in their OS because their customer loyalty is based on good service since their customers pay a premium. If Apple gets this patent and doesn't use it, then no one else would be able either (without Apple's permission).

It's a joke. Period. Physicists have a sense of humor too, and the whole community is laughing at our sorry butts for falling for it. The two physicists that are perpetrating this joke seem more like pranksters than crackpots to me. On the other hand, it was a very well-played joke.

Lulz. I thought the same thing.