But look how fast we can make those little fuckers go!
It’s just like slot car racing, round and round, but… you know… faster. And yeah, it’s more expensive than a regular slot car track, I guess. But still, those particles will beat any slot car you care to pick! So there’s that. Welllll not those fancy slot cars with them high performance motors, I mean, that’s a completely different ballgame there, we can’t compete with that.
But still, those particles whizzing around, it’s gonna be pretty cool. I reckon we should do it.
So anyway, thank you for reading my financial proposal for the SuperLHC.
piracy isn’t theft, but how do you feel about “stealing” from a thief? in the case of corporate software, the company already stole the surplus value created by their developers’ labor.
Publishers and film makers too. Keep it in print or lose rights (though I’d rather have much shorter copyright periods). Changed products get their own copyright, but the old version falls out if you stop selling it.
The problem is that you’d need the quarter-million dollar electron microscope to test your reverse-engineered modern version, and if you get something wrong and you fry it…
That being said, I wonder why labs don’t just make a VM. Hardware passthru is definitely a thing, parallel port cards exist (as do serial port) and you can back up a VM to whatever modern storage you want. Maybe the problem is proprietary cards/connectors? PCI-X or older?
I had to reverse-engineer a floppy disk encryption scheme that was performed by some DOS software that directly talked to the IDE floppy controller. There’s no emulating that. A USB floppy drive can’t even be operated in the same way.
It was easier to just crack the (admittedly trivial) encryption.
You can get PCIe to PCI cards. I think PCIe is pretty much backwards compatible with PCI and only little logic is required. And PCI-X cards do work in PCI slots at reduced bandwidth.
Tho, if a system works without issue, why touch it? Only if parts become hard or expensive to come by a replacement makes sense.
I'm sure some do, but there's also a certain simplicity to "back up the Win95 machine" and "collect working Pentium 2's from eBay," particularly for fields that are not interested in IT for its own sake. A virtual machine adds an extra layer of abstraction and complexity, though I'm sure there's a slow trickle as entities have trouble replacing hardware or luck into technically savvy and ambitious staff. I've certainly seen my share of data being entered into a Windows 10 app that sure as shit seems to be a terminal emulator running some green-text dinosaur, or else it's got a set of Visual Basic widgets that seem like they'd be compatible with one.
The rant in the post has some merit to it, but the thing it sort of misses is also the reason not to use VM. It works just fine. It hasn’t been updated in 20 years because it still works. It does what it says on the box. Why put it in a VM? What would you gain from it? If you need Internet just grab a laptop and have it sit next to the main computer. That way users have a much smaller chance to break something vital. Pretty much all the control computers are air gapped anyway. No updates or anything to break things you reeeeally don’t want to break.
The only case I’ve seen VMs being used is if the old computer breakes and you can’t really find something that’s compatible with old-as-fuck software om bare metal. I work in a cleanroom and we got sooo many systems that are windows 95 or older (DOS anyone?). Electron microscope, etching systems, probe stations
The merit is security, as you can manage what goes into the VM as oppose to having the hardware where people can just plugin a flash drive or network cable.
Then there is also the improvement to not needing to maintain the old hardware, and having a backup of the entire system that you can just copy to a different system and have everything running again.
Sure I can see it being a security feature, random USBs are not a good thing, but I feel like it is quite minor with an air gapped system, no?
The backup is a good point. Though from this I started wondering how difficult it is to get the VM to communicate with old hardware. Like, the hardware might use some random method of actually communicating with the computer, ans getting that through to the VM might be problematic? I have no clue, just spitballing here.
Fun fact, they were going to build one in the US crossing the borders of LA, TX, AR. They even dug out the damn hole, but they shit canned the whole project so now we’re just left with a random giant circular hole underground.
Edited AK to AR. That would have been a bit excessive.
Alas, I don’t think he will much care to build a subway-but-shitty between one farm outside Waxahachie, TX, to another farm outside of Waxahachie, TX. Not enough density of mouthbreathing Elon stans there.
Thanks for clearing that up, I thought I was finished or near completion. Glad they decided to stop production when they did but sucks that we didn’t get it.
Zounds, a collider over 3000 miles wide would have been quite the achievement! Here’s hoping they get back to it; that’s gotta be worth a ton of science points.
The feds give the states more than $16b per year to build and run shitty, custom made IT systems for their Medicaid programs. It’s basically a subsidy to IT companies. There are thousands of examples like this, where spending money on fundamental science is clearly a better investment.
Ok… What are you even talking about? Most fusion solutions use the same second stage for power generation as many other power generation solutions. Heating water to spin a turbine. That is the same thing as all coal, natural gas, petroleum, and solar thermal. In a roundabout way you could even say hydro is just generating power from heated water if you abstract it to include the rain cycle that moved the water behind the dam. There is literally 0 “weakening” that is needed to generate power from fusion under the current predominant paradigms that are being researched. Tokomaks and inertial fusion both generate fusion and bleed the excess heat off to boil water. The only method with promise that does not use this method compresses colliding superheated plasma vortex rings in a strong magnetic field to induce fusion causing the plasma’s magnetic field to ramp up and push back against the containment field. The flux is captured directly into an electrical current that is shunted into a capacitor bank so it can be slowly discharged into the grid. This last method is the only one that has the potential to overload the grid if some sort of runaway event happens, though I don’t see how it would happen as every stage of it is reasonably confined by well-known physics.
Sure, yes, but my point was that we don’t have evidence specifically for the existence of dark matter.
We have evidence that is not explained by visible, detectable mass.
Dark matter is the current favored theory which happens to explain discrepancies between what is observed and what is expected.
But I don’t think we can logically conclude dark matter is the only explanation, which is what your original statement seems to imply. It is the best explanation that we have so far.
If we place objects on the dining table the night before and observed them lying on the floor the next morning, we can’t claim “we have evidence for sleepwalking residents.” There may be another theory that explains it, such as: the cat is knocking the things off the table. We need additional evidence to determine which theory fits or else come up with a new theory.
But it is visible, it’s visible in terms of gravitational effects. We can “see” the effects of dark matter. That is evidence specifically for dark matter, i.e. matter that is very hard or impossible to detect via the electromagnetic spectrum but is observable through gravity.
Dark matter is the explanation, the question is more what form does it take.
It just takes a bit of acknowledgement that actually the EM spectrum is not the only way to view the universe. In fact it’s just one of four (maybe five) fundamental forces. We’re just used to that being the default for seeing because it’s how we physically see. It’s an anthropocentric bias to say something doesn’t exist because we can’t view it via EM radiation despite the fact gravity is clearly showing it to us.
You could use your logic to argue against the existence of black holes. We don’t see them by definition but they are most certainly there.
“In astronomy, dark matter is a hypothetical form of matter that appears to not interact with light or the electromagnetic field. Dark matter is implied by gravitational effects which cannot be explained by general relativity unless more matter is present than can be seen,…”
Unless you’re aware of some case where dark matter has interacted with light or EM fields?
So we see these gravitational effects that either means general relativity falls apart under conditions we have yet to identify or there is more mass than we can detect with the EM spectrum.
I’m not arguing against the existence of dark matter. You’re misunderstanding my intent.
I’m not even arguing. I’m just pointing out that your original statement isn’t quite correct.
But Dark Matter is a great scientific theory. It probably will hold up. I can’t wait to see what we learn next!
Anyway I probably shouldn’t have even responded because it doesn’t matter in the big scheme of things and my thumbs are tired from arguing against bigoted assholes in other places (I’m on a phone) so… peace
I would argue that Wikipedia is wrong or misguided. There is no serious debate about whether or not dark matter exists. I also think you’ve completely missed the point of my argument regarding the EM field just being only one way to detect the existence of things.
We have gravitational evidence. We can only ever infer the existence of anything. An example of this is we didn’t actually see the Higgs Boson we just deduced it’s existence from the cascade of interactions that happens when particles collide. Similarly we can deduce from the gravitational evidence that dark matter exists.
When you admit that night time doesn’t exist simply because you’re not there to observe it while you sleep. We know somethings there. We know there’s matter that isn’t adding up. We just don’t know what it is.
Easy. When scientists come up with a verifiable theory that explains observed gravitational effects in the universe that can’t be explained by general relativity, given visible matter.
While we haven’t detected dark matter in a lab, it isn’t on the same level as a metaphysical soul.
I’m not aware of any physical phenomena for which a soul is the best theory currently available.
Whereas dark matter is the best theory so far to explain observed gravitational effects^1 that cannot be explained by general relativity and detectable matter alone. Yes, it may be due to something else (other theories exist and maybe someone will come up with another better one).
1 includes: “formation and evolution of galaxies,[1] gravitational lensing,[2] observable universe’s current structure, mass position in galactic collisions,[3] motion of galaxies within galaxy clusters, and cosmic microwave background anisotropies.” - wikipedia
That’d be a valid comparison, if there were any evidence of a soul existing. The effects of matter, on the other hand, are clearly visible - or invisible, in the case of dark matter.
Yes but at the same time we used to have all the evidence in the world indicate that planet Vulcan was just behind the sun, and then it turned out that no it wasn’t. If Dark Matter can’t be found no matter what experiment we do. Then maybe we are mistaken about its existence
Just because something seemingly doesn’t interact with EM fields doesn’t mean it isn’t there, it’s just something that only really interacts with the rest of the universe on a gravitational level.
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