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Nostradamus quatrain 9 44:
Leave, leave Geneva every last one of you,
Saturn will be converted from gold to iron,
Raypoz will exterminate all who oppose him,
Before the coming the sky will show signs.
http://www.virginmedia.com/digital/s...p?vmsrc=vmhpld
cool! :afrog: I can't wait. Hopefully no-one will stop... whoever is switching on the machine.
(PS: Where is the date of that article? :confused: )
Trust Virgin Media not to display the date, but what to expect when the company is named after someone who has never done the business :rolleyes:
It's on todays main page at http://www.virginmedia.com/
Your ISP won't ban you if you change your homepage to a news site. :afrog:Quote:
Originally Posted by schoolbusdriver
Well, atleast they're being optimistic.
Code:<meta name="keywords" content="world, Armageddon, death"/>
:lol:Quote:
Originally Posted by syntaxeater
10 minutes before the Large Hadron Collider is turned on ... Stephen Hawking realizes that this is a miscalculation in his Hawking Radiation theory.
Uh-oh there's a one in 50 million chance that a global catastrophe is going to occur.Quote:
The Collider
The collider basically consists of a ring of supercooled magnets 17 miles in circumference attached to huge barrel-shaped detectors.
When it is at full power, two beams of protons will race around the huge ring 11,000 times a second in opposite directions. They will travel in two tubes and speed through a vacuum that is colder and emptier than outer space.
Large detectors and cameras will collect data as the protons collide and 15 petabytes of data will be collected each year equivalent to a pile of CDs 12miles tall
No danger
Martin Rees, a physicist, has estimated the chance of an accelerator producing a global catastrophe at one in 50 million which is about the same odds as winning some lotteries.
For 15 petabytes (hadn't heard of a petabyte before) of data to be stored you better have a really good hard drive.
Dont worry - they're uploading the files to gmail. and since your account is continually growing - they should have the first pictures avaliable by, say... 2140.Quote:
Originally Posted by EntityX
(Over 7008.324757 megabytes (and counting) of free storage so you'll never need to delete another message.)
Petabyte is 1,000 terabytes right?Quote:
Originally Posted by EntityX
I bought a terabyte external HD for around 220 dollars.
15,000 Terabyte disks maybe for 200 dollars each? So 3 million dollars?
I looked it up on wikipedia and you're correct. A petabyte is 1,000 terabytes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petabyte
It goes Mega(million, 10 to the 6), Giga(billion, 10 to the 9), Tera(trillion, 10 to the 12), Peta(quadrillion, 10 to the 15), Exa(quintillion, 10 to the 18), Zetta(sextillion, 10 to the 21) and Yotta(septillion, 10 to the 24).
And a "petahert"? :confused: PHz... :D
i thought peta was against hurtingQuote:
Originally Posted by BillGeek
raypoz?
I don't suppose a collider creates a ray of positrons?
anyway, the thing simply LOOKS like a doomsday device.
Never could figure out why they just didn't launch a small version of one of these things into space. Automatic superconducting thanks to temp, no background radiation, etc. and more importantly, less destruction of earth.
Surely the mayan calendar wasn't off this far?
The world will end on 13/13/1313.
I reckon it will create an unstable black hole that will last a fraction of a microsecond and disappear causing no harm whatsoever. The real danger is how many graduate scientists they hire on minimal wages to sift through 5 years of research data to find the fact they created a blackhole.
If earth is destroyed in the space of 7 minutes I'll have just enough time to post a final msg on VBF before total infrastructure fails.
i'd like to see the math involved. I was not aware that black holes were particles.
I guess there was no global catastrophe, at least not one that I'm aware of. It was supposed to be turned on yesterday. Here's another article I found on the Large Hadron Collider.
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/20...achenbach-text
Quote:
If all goes right, matter will be transformed by the violent collisions into wads of energy, which will in turn condense back into various intriguing types of particles, some of them never seen before. That's the essence of experimental particle physics: You smash stuff together and see what other stuff comes out.
Quote:
It sounds scary, and it is. Building the LHC in a tunnel was a prudent move. The particle beam could drill a hole in just about anything, although the most likely victim would be the apparatus itself. One minor calamity has already happened: A magnet all but jumped out of its skin during a test in March 2007. Since then 24 magnets have been retrofitted to fix a design flaw. The people running the LHC aren't in a rush to talk about all the things that can go wrong, perhaps because the public has a way of worrying that mad scientists will accidentally create a black hole that devours the Earth.
Quote:
The LHC experiments may help physicists understand our good fortune to be in a universe that grew with just enough more matter than antimatter.
It may be that it hasn't been turned on yet. According to the Virgin Media article it was supposed to be turned on "this Sarturday" and the article was posted earlier this week. I was looking to see if there's some article that reported what happened when it was turned on. I found a USA Today article that says it will be turned on some time next month and the article was updated 2 and a half days ago. http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science...collider_N.htm
The USA Today article says that it may not run at full power until 2010.
I'll tell you one thing... that's one massive machine!!! :eek:
they weren't real specific. one in 40 million chance of global destrcution? is that a number that encompasses the life of the machine, or is it per use?Quote:
Originally Posted by EntityX
because people manage to win the lottery every day with worse odds than that.
or... what if that odd is per collision?
What are people worrying about? It's not like we are going to notice that we created a black hole which sucks us in... Everyone dies instantly and nobody will ever realize what happened... Unless there is some kind of heaven after all, but then we could just set up www.vbforums.heaven and no harm done...
I say we through a wrench in the LHC. www.vbforums.heaven can wait.
no we won't... we will hit the event horizon where time slows to a crawl and spend eternity in there watching the universe die around us.Quote:
Originally Posted by NickThissen
Don't you know anything?
I say there is no way a black hole is going to be created. You need enormous amounts of matter smashed into a tiny space. That's how black holes typically get created. When there's so much matter which results in enormous gravity overcoming the forces that hold atoms together and crushing the atoms into smaller areas than they normally occupy.
You might have some kind of mini-black hole but not something that's going to suck the whole earth in. You'd have to feed an enormous amount of matter into the black hole to make it powerful enough to suck the whole earth in. The amount of matter that you'd have to feed into it to do that isn't present here on earth.
For anyone interested in learning more about black holes I'd recommend The Collapsing Universe by Isaac Asimov. It was written over 20 years ago and I read it over 20 years ago but I don't think the theories have changed that much.
It says that even though gravity is a weak force when dealing with small amounts of matter because it keeps on adding up as you keep increasing mass gravity ends up overcoming the forces that hold atoms together when you have a great enough mass and it can crush the atoms into neutron stars or when the mass is even greater black holes. You need enormous amounts of matter to do that and we don't have enough matter in our solar system to create a black hole.
Only stars that are of sufficiently high mass are candidates to become black holes. Our sun isn't massive enough to become a black hole. So even if you fed all the mass from our sun into the LHC it wouldn't be getting enough mass to create a true black hole. You might create some kind of quasi-black hole that has a localized effect but I don't see it swallowing planet Earth.
I'm no expert on black holes. I just read part of a wikipedia article about them. It says the colliders like the Large Hadron Collider can create micro black holes. Micro black holes are not going to threaten a planet. They have masses much less than that of a star. Their effects are nothing like black holes that have the mass of a large star.
So yes the LHC could create one or more black holes but they would be micro black holes that do not have an effect anything like the black holes that have the mass of a large star or greater.
they don't need to have that large of a mass. If it behaves like a black hole it will not only generate gravity but be affected by it. It will burrow itself to the center of the earth and i don't care how long it takes, it will eventually eat the planet.Quote:
Originally Posted by EntityX
This is from the widipedia article on black holes.
Micro black holes don't have the stability of the high mass black holes. I don't believe that they would do what you are fearing they would do because micro black holes do not behave like the other classification of black holes.Quote:
Micro black holes (also mini black holes) have masses much less than that of a star. At these sizes the effects of quantum mechanics are expected to come into play. There is no known mechanism for them to form via normal processes of stellar evolution, but certain inflationary scenarios predicted their production during the early stages of the evolution of the universe. According to some theories of quantum gravity they may also be produced in the highly energetic reaction produced by cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere or even in particle accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider. The theory of Hawking radiation predicts that such black holes will evaporate in bright flashes of gamma radiation. NASA's GLAST satellite, to be launched in 2008, will search for such flashes as one of its scientific objectives.
If only you knew. :blush:Quote:
Originally Posted by mendhak
I need to step in here and clear this up. This is one issue that pisses me off, mainly because Wiki has it wrong. When dealing with transfer speeds, the numbers are based on the decimal system (10^x). But when dealing with storage, it's binary (2^x). A kilobyte is 1024 bytes (2^10).Quote:
Originally Posted by EntityX
Megabyte = 1024KB
Gigabyte = 1024MB
Terabyte = 1024GB
Petabyte = 1024TB
Hard drive manufacturers use terminology as "false" advertising because most people don't know what the terminology is. Ever get a 120 gig drive, only to find out it reads as 111 gigs? Look at the casing. Lower case first letter means 10^x, upper case means 2^x. They advertise 120gB, which equates to 111GB.
Oh, and b=bit, B=byte. One byte = 8 bits.
Somebody sticky this damn post so I never have to type it again.
Is a petabyte the preferred method of eating petabread?
No. http://www.vbforums.com/attachment.p...7&d=1218052355Quote:
Originally Posted by timeshifter
pita bread makes the cheese sweat.
In fairness to wikipedia I'll quote them:
If you look at the wikipedia link I posted it will show both the decimal and binary forms of the different prefixes. In post # 11 I was just giving the decimal value for the prefixes but the wikipedia article has both.Quote:
A petabyte (derived from the SI prefix peta- ) is a unit of information or computer storage equal to one quadrillion bytes, or 1000 terabytes. It is commonly abbreviated PB. When used with byte multiples, the prefix may indicate a power of either 1000 or 1024, so the exact number may be either:
I don't know how anyone can get pissed off about units of measurement, but just for the record...
kilo = 1,000
mega = 1,000,000
kilobyte (kB) = 1,000 bytes
megabyte (MB) = 1,000kB
kibi = 1,024
mebi = 1,048,576
kibibyte (KiB) = 1,024 bytes
mebibyte (MiB) = 1,024KiB
There. But everyone except salesfolk use powers of two in computing anyway, regardless of what they call them.
And by the way kilo is 'k' not 'K'
if wiki has it wrong, then why don't you FIX IT!!!!!:mad:Quote:
Originally Posted by timeshifter
That's the whole purpose of Wiki: Readers can edit it!
Surely, if the topic was that obvious, it wouldn't still be "wrong".
there isn't a standard on hard drive sizes anyway.Quote:
Originally Posted by penagate
I remember a huge lawsuit years ago (lost) because people were upset that the filesystem was using up their drive's storage capacity.
Therefore a 500gb hard drive had a usable capacity of about 465gb.
they were under the opinion that this was entirely the fault of seagate and WD.
and let's not get in the whole base-2 versus base 10 thing.
Kilobyte is standard. giga means one million. The argument is whether or not giga is actually one million or one thousand kilobytes. Ridiculous. A million is a million.
Having caught up on this thread, I'm a little disappointed the world didn't end last Saturday.
I thought it was because of the ambiguity between 1,000 and 1,024 in the drive specifications. Or did it extend to capacity lost through formatting as well?Quote:
Originally Posted by Lord Orwell
I'm fairly certain that hard drive manufacturers (and ISPs) in various countries are now obligate to state that "one kilobyte means 1,000 bytes".