Satellite Back From The Dead

Papa Legba writes "Just ran across this amazing story about an amateur satellite that has returned from the dead. AMSAT-OSCAR 7 was launched in 1974 for radio hobbyists to use. In 1981 the onboard batteries died and the satellite went silent. Then on June 21st 2002, 20 years later, a hobbyist testing some new equipment made an amazing discovery. AMSAT-OSCAR 7 is live once more, both broadcasting and accepting signals. The theory expounded is that the dead battery short that took the satellite offline has cleared and it is now only running on its solar cells. While this does restrict it to daytime use, it is amazing that it works at all. " This was in the science section before - but worth the front page.

Comments

How does this work?

[You'reAFuckingMoron]

This was in the science section before - but worth the front page.

You'll have to forgive me, but I don't understand how SlashDot works. Both articles are in the "Science" section, under the "Space" topic. Why is one on the front page, and one not on the front page?

If the "Front Page" bit has nothing to do with the "Section" bit, why not just click the "Front Page" bit on the original story, instead of running two stories and fragmenting the comments? Aren't the comments valuable at all around here? Or do only the stories matter?

And, are "topics" orthogonal to "sections", or do the sections partition the topics, or what? What the hell is a topic, and why does each story only seem to have one?