Our Nightmare

Maybe you have already heard about software patents. Tree years ago this attempt has been stopped, but... We need to "fight" for our rights and freedom again. Take a look to the site, and help us to stop the software patents!
http://stopsoftwarepatents.org/. The lawyers have no idea, what they are doing:

Though they face a groundswell of interest in stopping software patents their typical excuse is: "We don't grant software patents, we don't really know what software patents are." or "Why exclude software?" or "We just execute the law.".
http://stopsoftwarepatents.org/

Some quotes about the software patents:

"Software patents are hindering innovation. Patents should be granted when there is real innovation and real investment in innovation." —Niklas Zennström, CEO, Skype, Silicon.com

"Let me make my position on the patentability of software clear. I believe that software per se should not be allowed patent protection. […] We take this position because it is the best policy for maintaining a healthy software industry, where innovation can prosper." —Douglas Brotz, Adobe Systems, Inc.

"The Company believes that existing copyright law and available trade secret protections, as opposed to patent law, are better suited to protecting computer software developments." —Oracle Corporation

Large Hadron Collider malfunction and pizza defrosting?!

Our collider has been faced with several problems, during this week. The past week was full with hacker attacks, this week is to malfunction. Last Thursday the transformers of LHC that enables the cooling down of the instrument to the operating temperature (-273 Celsius degrees) broke down. They are replaced, but the LHC will be able to continue the testing in a few weeks. :(

I found a great video what explains, what exactly the Large Hadron Collider does:


Another interesting thing is that the discussion between the lead scientists is not the quest for the mysterious particle but how to defrost a pizza! :) A good way to show and explain for the everyday peoples, how is the LHC powerful. So if the energy of beam is 10 trillion watts, it will take just 30 nanosecond (billionths of a second) to defrost a pizza. Take care! While you are defrosting your pizza the beam need to circulate over the pizza. In the another case the beam would drill into your pizza.
Read the full story about defrosting here.

Quick Galaxy Dictionary for Dummyes

Guide to the Galaxy

CERN
The European Organisation for Nuclear Research, located near Geneva on the Swiss-French border.

PARTICLE
An object which is sub-atomic – smaller than an atom – and has a definite mass and charge.

HADRON
A particle with mass, made up of smaller units called quarks that are bound together.

LHC CERN’s Large Hadron Collider that has been under development for 20 years.

PARTICLE ACCELERATOR
A machine used to accelerate streams of particles in a defined direction at high speeds.

COLLIDER
An accelerator in which two beams travelling in opposite directions are steered together to induce high-energy collisions between particles.

HIGGS BOSON
A theoretical particle which is thought to give matter its mass, known as the “God particle.”

The LHC should confirm whether it exists.

Source:
http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/south-wales-news/cynon-valley/2008/09/18/cynon-scientist-at-the-helm-of-the-big-bang-experiment-91466-21826441/

LHC owning in media

It became very famous within a short time. I'm a little bit disappointed with IT technicians work in LHC... In the last week there was a lot of news about hacking, attacking LHC's computer system, control panel, and website. Yeah, because it's famous, and dangerous. But, generally, why?! I mean, there is machine with over 9 billion $, it explorers your life, my life, our life, and they are attacking it. I think(hope) they want to point over the security bugs of their system. In this way this is OK. Even better when a "good" hacker replaces your website's banner with: you are hacked or something, or when a "bad" hacker playing with LHC's control panel. So you can start to fear. :)

Have some fun:

In the news you can read about the first black-hole created by the LHC. Yeah, it is a financial black-hole, with his 10 billion $. :)

...Large Hadron Collider has created a financial black hole so big that all the economies of the west will collapse into a deep depression that will make 1929's Black Tuesday look like a very trivial thing indeed...

Clifford Rutley

Read here the full story.

Black Tuesday:
The main bank companies are said to everyone, that their money is loosing from it's value with every single day. So, what the peoples did? They are grabbed out all of their money from these banks. What the banks did? They are called back their debts, and taxes from the peoples. It's worked exactly, as they are planned it. That was the world's biggest robbery.

For an everyday people like me, this week was more media-related than scientific. Sad :(

LHC

Large Hadron Collider is the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator complex.


It collides the opposing beams of protons with very high kinetic energy. The world's largest particle accelerator is used to explorer the limitations and the critical values of the Standard Model of particle physics. The LHC was built by CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research), near to Geneva (Switzerland). Map.

Why is the LCH so interesting for us?
With experimenting we can collect new informations about our world, we can get answers for the most annoying questions from physic. The collected data can be used in many ways, example in other sciences, like physic, chemic, medicine.

September 10, 9:00 AM. The beams were started and circulated over the LHC, and the first high energy collision is planned to October 21.

Nowadays the Large Hadron Collider become very famous, together with some paranoias about destroying the world, making black holes and, ... destroying the world, or simply destroying anything. As CERN reported, LHC is safe for testing, and will not endanger our planet. You can read more about the Safety of the Large Hadron Collider.

I'll try to track as fast as I can the major changes, news with LHC. If you want to read the latest informations add Google Alert by clicking here.

And of course if you are paranoiac, check the world's status at http://hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com/ :)

Some good news

KDE 4.1.1 is out!
The most important changes:

• Significant performance, interaction and rendering correctness improvements in KHTML and Konqueror, KDE's webbrowser
• User interaction, rendering and stability fixes in Plasma, the KDE4 desktop shell
  
• PDF backend fixes in the document viewer Okular
• Fixes in Gwenview, the image viewer's thumbnailing, more robust retrieval and display of images with broken metadata
• Stability and interaction fixes in KMail

Kudos for the developers and for the community. KDE 4 is changed significantly since <4.0. The new Plasma technology is fast and very useful. At this time it has some screen corruptions with my GeForce Go 6100 card, but they are caused by nVidia's driver. Good news: nVidia is hiring programmers for linux driver development :).


More about KDE 4.1.1.

Chrome

Blehh... I was offline for more than 7 days. True nightmare.
There was some important changes in the open-source world, example Google's web-browser.

Chrome is another web-browser in the browsers war. It has tabs, like Mozilla, quick dial like Opera, and the other similar properties... As you can read on KDE related blogs, some things are missing from the announcement, example: they mention Apple's WebKit, Mozilla's Firefox but nothing about KDE/KHTML. Google is known about their great web-services, Gmail, Blogger, Google search, Picassa, iGoogle, my guess is that they have more complex plans than a new web-browser, maybe a platform or an operating system... And finally I've found some unfamiliar things in Terms of Service:

... By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. ...

Read more about this.
So, at this time Chrome have - at my browsers list. I hope they'll change the terms in future.