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> the first fundamental particle observed since the quarks in the 1980's

A minor correction -- the tau neutrino wasn't discovered until 2000.


He didn't intentionally upload code to Germany. He uploaded to xp-dev.com, and the server happened to be in Germany.


According to this:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/big-shift-for-gas-guz...

we exported $37.1B worth of vacuum tubes last year. I could be wrong but that amount seems wildly implausible. Could the category actually be "Vacuum tubes, etc." where "etc" is semiconductors?


The only things I really know of that would still use vacuum tubes are esoteric high-end audiophile amplifiers, and some "old school" guitar amps (Marshall, Hiwatt, etc). Is there really that big a market? Are they used for anything else?


You are overlooking things like magnetrons, x-ray tubes, photomultipliers, CRTs (which still have a lot of applications outside of the video display sphere), krytons and so forth. It's not all about diodes, triodes, tetrodes and pentodes.


Wikipedia lists some other modern uses including (most unexpectedly) in particle accelerators:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_tube#Vacuum_tubes_in_the...


I believe NORAD computers still use vacuum tubes.


One of my professors told me a few years ago that tubes were still used heavily in high-power commercial radio stations. Could be dated info though.


My money is on someone getting "facts" off Wikipedia or similar without doing any smell testing on the numbers.


Just to be clear: what they've ruled out is the Standard Model version of the Higgs boson. There are actually many possible kinds of Higgs bosons, the SM version being the simplest.


Reminds me of this article on how hard it is to convince companies to use static analysis:

http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2010/2/69354-a-few-billion-lin...


Mangosteens may be legally imported to the US from SE Asia if irradiated. They may also be imported from Puerto Rico.

The Chicago fois gras ban ended in 2008.


> it's possible there are actually meth-heads who are also into identity theft

Not just possible, it's actually quite common, and has been for awhile. For example, see this article from 2004:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4460349/


Standard gravitons are already constrained to be almost massless, so i'm guessing the article is referring to Randall-Sundrum type massive gravitons in 5D.


Why does their detectability depend on the mass? My understanding is that both the standard and Randall-Sundrum gravitons can only be identified through missing energy; neither are possible to directly detect through any feasible experiment. Does the low upper bound on the mass constrain the cross-section?


I believe the main RS discovery channel is looking for a p pbar -> graviton -> e+ e- resonance, where p is a parton (i.e., quark or gluon).


Is the following reasoning correct? If the standard graviton is massless, it can't decay into r rbar for any particle r (because of momentum conservation). The standard graviton could have a tiny mass, but the low upper bounds on it means that the cross section is too tiny to be observed. RS gets around this because at LHC energies the RS graviton has a larger high-energy effective mass (because of extra dimesions) while still satisfying the low-energy experimental mass limits.


> FYI there is no such thing as a "kind of" or "selective" default.

Yes there is. If this plan goes through, S&P will downgrade Greece's credit rating from CCC to SD ("selective default").


I thought enterprise value was market cap plus debt?


Yes, enterprise value (EV) is equity market capitalization (stock price times # of shares) plus the market value of debt (this can be lower than the book value of debt). Financial analysts often prefer to calculate something called "Net Enterprise Value", which is EV minus "excess cash" (total cash minus "required cash", where required cash is usually calculated as a certain % of sales). Net Enterprise Value gives you the present value of all future cash flows to the firm (you are ignoring the value of today's excess cash, which doesn't come from future cash flows). This is particularly useful when looking at companies like AAPL with tons of cash.


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