Slashdot Mirror
North Magnetic Pole Moving East Due To Core Flux
National Geographic is reporting that the migration of Earth's magnetic pole has accelerated again and is now racing in Russia's direction at a blazing 40 miles per year. This movement began in earnest around 1904 at about 9 miles per year and has been accelerating since. "Geologists think Earth has a magnetic field because the core is made up of a solid iron center surrounded by rapidly spinning liquid rock. This creates a 'dynamo' that drives our magnetic field. Scientists had long suspected that, since the molten core is constantly moving, changes in its magnetism might be affecting the surface location of magnetic north. Although the new research seems to back up this idea, Chulliat is not ready to say whether magnetic north will eventually cross into Russia. 'It's too difficult to forecast,' Chulliat said. Also, nobody knows when another change in the core might pop up elsewhere, sending magnetic north wandering in a new direction."
It is actually pretty cool that this happens at the time our technology is so advanced that we can have electronic compasses that simply use GPS to figure out where they are so they can point to the geographic north pole, instead of towards the magnetic one. Imagine how inconvenient it would have been for people if this had happened a view hundred years earlier; they would have to do some extra calculations to navigate their ships.
Yay for technology!
First of all, allow me to commend you for the perfect analogy — laws are programs, and law-making is programming... Now, to answer your questions...
Linux kernel is reviewed by thousands of people back and forth all the time. There are automatic tools verifying syntactic and even (rudimentary) semantic correctness. Thousands of "tinderboxes" test any changes for hours every days and report any deviations. The history of changes (diffs) is publicly available at all times, studied and discussed by even more people.
The two thousands pages of the bill in question has never been read in full by a single person — and when such a feat was undertaken, by the time the hero finished, the bill was already amended to bribe another Senator, etc. No automatic verification tools exist, of course — even a spell-checker would break. The entire country will be the tinderbox — production testing the below alpha-quality software. Oh, and the earlier prototypes (State-wide programs) have been failures...
And you object to somebody rejecting that software because it is too complex? What happened to coding guidelines, with each function and non-trivial block being carefully commented?
The metric is very simple — if I can't finish reading (and understanding!) it without somebody "committing" a significant change somewhere, it is too long... The "Senate version" was moved to vote after an all-nigher in the Speaker's office, for crying out loud. All those fancy promises (by the most technically advanced Administration, like, ever, dude) of legislation being posted online for days prior to vote have turned into lies. Unreadable, spaghetti-like code, no testing, and not even code review. Who could possibly object?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
If I can't be expected to understand the laws as a normal human, then I can't reasonably be expected to follow them either.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?