Sounds like we'll end up in the situation described in Power Nap, where everyone takes sleep supplements to stay awake. Except poor Drew, who's allergic to them, hence providing the story's initial premise.
In some ways the idea of sleep supplements is very enticing, as we could do a lot more if our bodies didn't need to rest for at least 1/3 of each day. Misusing Adderall is along a similar vein, where the purpose is to stay productive and keep your mind sharp for longer than is usually possible. If there were no negative effects this would become a common practice and acceptable, rather than an addiction that needs to be treated.
The regular lead bullets from even a small caliber short barrel weapon is too fast for eyes to see. But the speed of light phasers being fired by the storm troopers leave a neat clean visible tracer lines. That leads straight back to the location of the gun which helps Harrison Ford ample time to find good spot to dive into, no antique plane needed.
I can't believe I'm replying to a joke post but... (a) you're mixing your movies, phasers are Star Trek and blasters are Star Wars. (b) Blasters supposedly shoot charged plasma - you fill them with gas, they excite it to a plasma somehow, and the glowing plasma is what's shot at the targets. Don't ask me about turbo lasers on capital ships.
(Cue a follow-on stream of comments correcting mistakes I've made, lol.)
I really wish my dad had talked to me about girls. Not the birds and the bees bit, but about how girls and boys are both the same: afraid to get their feelings hurt, unsure how relationships should progress, often hurtful to others by accident. He could have explained that the easiest way to let someone know you like them is to smile and say "Hi" every time you see them. To not be afraid of physical contact like dancing or holding hands. That even if you say or do the wrong thing, make an embarrassing mistake, if the other person likes you they'll still like you afterwards. That a good first date involves just spending time together talking and getting to know one another (and that I should therefore avoid movies for a first date!) It took me years to figure that stuff out, and looking back I can see a dozen points in my life where a simple explanation from my dad could have opened my eyes and saved me grief. Thankfully my wife recognized that I was clueless the moment we met, and simply told me how she felt.
In Canada, the Radio Shack name was sold off years ago to Circuit City, and then when CC went under, bought up the Bell telco conglomerate, rebranding the stores as 'The Source' as another place to sell their cell phone packages and accessories. It looks familiar to Radio Shack, without any of the glory day components available for sale, selling cheap RC cars, computers and terrible audio equipment. The majority of stuff was labelled under a knock-off looking "Nexxtech" brand name. Again, inferior quality, but top-notch pricing.
So that's why I can't find anything useful there. I came back from New Zealand a few years ago, and was told by friends that Radio Shack was now "The Source", but when I went in they no longer had any of the stuff I needed. No bins of resistors or alligator clips or motors. No rolls of speaker wire, phone or network cabling. I have yet to find a replacement store that stocks hobby electronics like that, and I don't see the point in buying $5 of resistors off ebay and having to pay more than that in shipping.
I'm in the Canadian maritimes, if anyone has any recommendations for a new place to shop, I'd appreciate it.
The point of the article is made near the end, which is to use less time-outs (which should still be used, as a time of reflection), and more "time-ins", which is apparently teaching your child about emotional events as they occur through the day. Based on the examples given, I would guess "time-in" is something we already do with our kids; it's just talking over events like "Wasn't it funny when Sarah sneezed milk out her nose?" Then listening to our kids tell their version. The new thing is to somehow "teach" them what that emotion means. I'm OK with a psych doing research that confirms common parental practices work, but there was a lot of vague hand-waviness about "teaching" emotions, and they skimmed over the fact that once a child is in school or daycare, the majority of their daily events aren't shared with their parents. Discussing such events therefore requires discovering them, which is difficult when the response to "How was your day at school?" is a terse "Okay".
PS: I actually read through TFA, which was rather long and filled with the author's opinions more than the psych's study results and opinions.. I don't recommend reading the article by the way, it was a lot of filler text with very little discussion of the main topic. It could use an editor's review - for example, it alternates between "time-out" and "timeout". Plus the title is misleading - it explicitly says time-ins aren't a counter-point to time-outs, it simply encourages that time-ins be added to the daily routine.
Since the first anchored text in the summary isn't actually linked to anything, here's The Independent's article. I'm guessing this is the one timothy intended to link to.
"claiming responsibility for the hacking of multiple news websites, including CBC News" - CBC being the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. "suggested the attacks were meant to coincide with the U.S. Thanksgiving on Thursday" - which had very little effect on us Canadians, seeing as our Thanksgiving was a month ago. Smooth move, morons.
I still have a copy that my dad bought me 30 years ago, and as of two years ago it still works fine. It's been used a fair bit, but I'm sure it is better condition than a copy that spent 30 years in a landfill. Are you sure there are people willing to spend $50 for a game with so many bugs (in this case, both programmatic and probably literal)? I'm willing to bet there are so many copies out there like mine, and so many people who hate the game, that nobody will be willing to spend more than $5.
PS: The gameplay and controls were just as bad as I remembered. Getting out of pits without falling back in was hard enough, but finding a way around the glitchy screen transition points was super frustrating.
It's important for non-Canadians to realize that Parliment Hill is not the White House or US Senate. Parliment in Canada is a public commons. There is no security at all on the ground of Parliment and the space is routinely used for large scale public protests and demonstrations, less than a couple of dozen yards of Parliment itself. It's a different ball game.
That's not true. You used to be able to drive onto parliament hill, which was great at Christmas to see all the lights. But in the past few years they've stopped all car traffic except cleared vehicles, they've got Ottawa police providing security along with accusations of kickbacks for the service (I can't find the link as Google is flooded with today's stories on the shooting), they have always had security within the buildings themselves (eg: security guards preventing MPs from entering the House for a vote), etc.
Sure we let people in to do tours and such, but you can get a tour of the White House too. Besides, what good would it do to assassinate Harper (our Prime Minister)? He's only PM because his party formed government and he's the current head of his party. Kill him and someone else from his party just takes his place - it would be horrible, but it wouldn't stop our country the way it might if another country's head of state were killed.
Well, this comes just a few days after one soldier was killed and another injured in what's being called an intentional attack by a "radicalized" Canadian. That attack was south of Montreal (about 2 hrs drive from Ottawa), so there may be no connection, but it does make one wonder. I'm sure people are worried that these two incidents are related, and might be harbinger of more to come.
Just a few days ago in a town south of Montreal, Quebec, a man hit two soldiers with his car, killing one of them. They're saying he was "radicalized" and waited in the parking lot for 2 hours before the attack. I haven't seen anyone provide info to tie the two attacks together, but I'm sure the question will come up.
I suppose Facebooks new Safe Check would be useful today - my family have already text me to let me know they're safe, but it would be great to know none of my friends have been hurt.
Heck, 13 years ago at a Canadian federal government job we swapped our web servers for blades.
Which was pretty bleeding-edge at the time, since the first blade server was 2001. So not sure what your point about the government is - they weren't late to the party, far from it.
If I hadn't posted on this story, I would mod the above interesting. I just assumed we were at least a couple of years behind the curve. We were buying off the shelf hardware, nothing custom.
I read the blog post, and he's just comparing having a beefy server with multiple VMs to instead having a bunch of blade servers. How is this new? Heck, 13 years ago at a Canadian federal government job we swapped our web servers for blades.
Reading comprehension is hard. The group built the mockup and sold it for $5000. The person who picked it up from them claimed to be an XBox enthusiast, but actually worked for the FBI.
Did you read to the end? I saw this quote:
While he was traveling in Prague, "I actually woke up, and lo and behold there is five grand sitting in my bank account," Wheeler said. "It came through, and we went 'OK!' and we sent it."
Where he said "we" (his group) sent it. Then I read the very next bit:
Around August 9, 2012, someone identified in the indictment as "Person A" went to Leroux's residence in Maryland and picked up the device. Person A was instructed to send the device to an address in the Seychelles. But Wheeler said he heard through the group that the package never arrived.
Where he said that "Person A was instructed to send the device" and "he heard through the group [xbox enthusiasts who paid for it] that the package never arrived." So the story says that a group paid for it, he gave it to someone with instructions to send it to that group, then the group said it never arrived. The article continues with:
According to the indictment, Person A -- whose real name Wheeler said he knows -- gave the package to the FBI.
So the guy was supposed to send it to the purchasers (who you'll recall complained that it never arrived), but he gave it to the FBI instead. There's a follow-on quote where Wheeler says the FBI bought the device, but that seems to contradicts his earlier statement that his first warning about being caught was that the purchasers complained the shipment never arrived.
You can be convicted for just looking at pictures.
I'm assuming you're talking about someone else (e.g.: an adult) looking at the picture a child took of herself. Which would show that person's intent to use as child porn, right? But it wouldn't by itself show the child's intent to create or distribute the image as child port. The OP's point was about "[t]aking pictures of yourself", not looking at pictures. I think the OP was saying that if the person taking the selfie didn't intend for it to be shared, then the act of taking that pic wouldn't be considered as creating child porn.
The point makes sense to me, but I'm not a lawyer (and I live in Canada), so I can't comment on whether American law works like that.
From the way the article describes it, the FBI actually stole the group's home-made XBox-like computer. The group used stolen login credentials to get the XBox specs and built a rig to spec with parts bought from NewEgg. Apparently a group of XBox enthusiasts paid $5000 for it (they knew it was a home-made rig), but then the guy who was supposed to send it to them handed it to the FBI instead.
To summarize: Group builds a computer with same specs as XBox. Group agrees to sell it to another group, and is paid $5000. During delivery it instead ends up in the hands of the FBI.
I'm in Canada, and we've been using chip cards for a few years now. I just called my bank 45 minutes ago after noticing a fraudulent charge on my credit card from August 30th. Since I bought a bunch of stuff at Home Depot in May/June, I'm assuming they managed to clone my card from the stolen data. The charge was only $4.56, at a gas station halfway across the country, so I would guess that someone was testing the clone to see if it was a valid card number (maybe testing one number from a batch of 100s or 1000s, to see if the numbers were legit.)
Just so we're clear, I'm not saying the fraudulent purchase itself was made using the chip. I only ever use chip + pin when making purchases, but I suppose a cloned card could use NFC (eg: PayWay) for a purchase that small, or even just the magstripe, neither of which requires them to have compromised my pin. My point is that I thought I was being safe using chip + pin, but still got hit regardless. Fortunately, banks seem to be good about this sort of thing, and my new card is on its way.
Goddamn it - Funny and Overrated shouldn't be next to each other in the moderation drop-down. Now I have to post here just to undo my mistake. Is there a way I could suggest to Slashdot devs that Overrated be moved up to be with all the other downmods at the top of the drop-down list, rather than tucked in between Funny and Underrated, so I don't hit it by mistake?
I don't see what the fuss is about. The odds of being hit by a CME have to be quite low. Let's work it out together:
To make the math simple, let's first assume CMEs can be fired in any direction.
For a CME to hit the Earth, it has to occupy the same space as us at the same time.
The Earth is approx 1 AU from the sun at any given time; so to hit the Earth, the CME has to hit a particular spot on a sphere of space 1 AU in radius.
So the probability of a given CME hitting Earth is approximately equivalent to the ratio of half the Earth's surface area (since only half faces the Sun at a time) to the surface area of a sphere with a radius of 1 AU.
Google says:
1 AU = 149,597,871 km
Surface area of a sphere is 4*pi*r^2, so our orbital sphere has an area of approx 2.8 x 10^17 km^2.
Surface area of the Earth = 510,072,000 km^2, or 5.1 x 10^8 km^2
Therefore the probability of being hit by a given CME is (2.8 x 10^17) / (5.1 x 10^8) = 5.5 x 10^-8, or a 0.0000055% chance.
Now the number of CMEs per year is actually higher than I expected, which I suppose explains why we do in fact get hit between 0 - 70 times per year. However the number of annual large CMEs is quite low, with none of the sites I visited actually agreeing on the number (most seemed to agree it's less than 5 per year in a solar maximum.) Let's say there are 5 per year. That only brings the chance of being hit by one of them up to 0.000028% per year. So if I live to be 100, the chances I'll see one in my lifetime are only 0.0028%.
caveat: These calculations ignore CME cross-section (essentially width and height) and duration (essentially length), since I couldn't find any accurate information on those. If you find those, you can factor them into these calculations by multiplying by the cross-section, multiplying by the % duration that the CME's strength is high, and multipyling by the Earth's average orbital velocity. That will modify the probility to take into account the volume of space the Earth occupies while the CME is traversing the edge of our 1 AU sphere, and how much of the surface of the sphere is touched by the CME.
The accepted story was submitted by itwbennett, and links to a story on itworld.com. I think it's a fair assumption that it was submitted by Amy Bennett, ITworld's Managing Editor. According to her achievements, she's had 2^9 submissions accepted, from which we can conclude that Slashdot editors probably prioritize her submissions. I imagine her submissions are fairly well written, link to a somewhat reputable source, and have already been deemed interesting enough to the IT crowd for a story on ITworld. So they get fast-tracked, and other worthy submissions are reviewed later, deemed to be duplicates, and discarded.
Would be nice if her submissions lead off with the fact that she was the managing editor for ITworld though, just to make it clear that she's just trying to feed traffic to her own site. (Which is a valid action if the story is original and interesting, but should require a disclaimer.)
Slashdot Mirror
In some ways the idea of sleep supplements is very enticing, as we could do a lot more if our bodies didn't need to rest for at least 1/3 of each day. Misusing Adderall is along a similar vein, where the purpose is to stay productive and keep your mind sharp for longer than is usually possible. If there were no negative effects this would become a common practice and acceptable, rather than an addiction that needs to be treated.
The subhead could be "Demonstration models available in store, purchases restricted to Apple website or Apple Store app."
Sensationalizing your headline is fine in mainstream media, let's please aim toward more rational headlines on venerable Slashdot.
The regular lead bullets from even a small caliber short barrel weapon is too fast for eyes to see. But the speed of light phasers being fired by the storm troopers leave a neat clean visible tracer lines. That leads straight back to the location of the gun which helps Harrison Ford ample time to find good spot to dive into, no antique plane needed.
I can't believe I'm replying to a joke post but... (a) you're mixing your movies, phasers are Star Trek and blasters are Star Wars. (b) Blasters supposedly shoot charged plasma - you fill them with gas, they excite it to a plasma somehow, and the glowing plasma is what's shot at the targets. Don't ask me about turbo lasers on capital ships.
(Cue a follow-on stream of comments correcting mistakes I've made, lol.)
I really wish my dad had talked to me about girls. Not the birds and the bees bit, but about how girls and boys are both the same: afraid to get their feelings hurt, unsure how relationships should progress, often hurtful to others by accident. He could have explained that the easiest way to let someone know you like them is to smile and say "Hi" every time you see them. To not be afraid of physical contact like dancing or holding hands. That even if you say or do the wrong thing, make an embarrassing mistake, if the other person likes you they'll still like you afterwards. That a good first date involves just spending time together talking and getting to know one another (and that I should therefore avoid movies for a first date!) It took me years to figure that stuff out, and looking back I can see a dozen points in my life where a simple explanation from my dad could have opened my eyes and saved me grief. Thankfully my wife recognized that I was clueless the moment we met, and simply told me how she felt.
Haven't we seen this technology before on Slashdot? Yep, here we go: 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010.
In Canada, the Radio Shack name was sold off years ago to Circuit City, and then when CC went under, bought up the Bell telco conglomerate, rebranding the stores as 'The Source' as another place to sell their cell phone packages and accessories. It looks familiar to Radio Shack, without any of the glory day components available for sale, selling cheap RC cars, computers and terrible audio equipment. The majority of stuff was labelled under a knock-off looking "Nexxtech" brand name. Again, inferior quality, but top-notch pricing.
So that's why I can't find anything useful there. I came back from New Zealand a few years ago, and was told by friends that Radio Shack was now "The Source", but when I went in they no longer had any of the stuff I needed. No bins of resistors or alligator clips or motors. No rolls of speaker wire, phone or network cabling. I have yet to find a replacement store that stocks hobby electronics like that, and I don't see the point in buying $5 of resistors off ebay and having to pay more than that in shipping.
I'm in the Canadian maritimes, if anyone has any recommendations for a new place to shop, I'd appreciate it.
Your submission is still there - when I go to the Submissions page, it's currently on the second page of submissions, second last from the bottom.
The point of the article is made near the end, which is to use less time-outs (which should still be used, as a time of reflection), and more "time-ins", which is apparently teaching your child about emotional events as they occur through the day. Based on the examples given, I would guess "time-in" is something we already do with our kids; it's just talking over events like "Wasn't it funny when Sarah sneezed milk out her nose?" Then listening to our kids tell their version. The new thing is to somehow "teach" them what that emotion means. I'm OK with a psych doing research that confirms common parental practices work, but there was a lot of vague hand-waviness about "teaching" emotions, and they skimmed over the fact that once a child is in school or daycare, the majority of their daily events aren't shared with their parents. Discussing such events therefore requires discovering them, which is difficult when the response to "How was your day at school?" is a terse "Okay".
PS: I actually read through TFA, which was rather long and filled with the author's opinions more than the psych's study results and opinions.. I don't recommend reading the article by the way, it was a lot of filler text with very little discussion of the main topic. It could use an editor's review - for example, it alternates between "time-out" and "timeout". Plus the title is misleading - it explicitly says time-ins aren't a counter-point to time-outs, it simply encourages that time-ins be added to the daily routine.
Since the first anchored text in the summary isn't actually linked to anything, here's The Independent's article. I'm guessing this is the one timothy intended to link to.
"claiming responsibility for the hacking of multiple news websites, including CBC News" - CBC being the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. "suggested the attacks were meant to coincide with the U.S. Thanksgiving on Thursday" - which had very little effect on us Canadians, seeing as our Thanksgiving was a month ago. Smooth move, morons.
Oops, down-modded by accident, sorry about hat. Wish I could undo mods within 10 seconds or something. Posting to undo my mod.
I still have a copy that my dad bought me 30 years ago, and as of two years ago it still works fine. It's been used a fair bit, but I'm sure it is better condition than a copy that spent 30 years in a landfill. Are you sure there are people willing to spend $50 for a game with so many bugs (in this case, both programmatic and probably literal)? I'm willing to bet there are so many copies out there like mine, and so many people who hate the game, that nobody will be willing to spend more than $5.
PS: The gameplay and controls were just as bad as I remembered. Getting out of pits without falling back in was hard enough, but finding a way around the glitchy screen transition points was super frustrating.
It's important for non-Canadians to realize that Parliment Hill is not the White House or US Senate. Parliment in Canada is a public commons. There is no security at all on the ground of Parliment and the space is routinely used for large scale public protests and demonstrations, less than a couple of dozen yards of Parliment itself. It's a different ball game.
That's not true. You used to be able to drive onto parliament hill, which was great at Christmas to see all the lights. But in the past few years they've stopped all car traffic except cleared vehicles, they've got Ottawa police providing security along with accusations of kickbacks for the service (I can't find the link as Google is flooded with today's stories on the shooting), they have always had security within the buildings themselves (eg: security guards preventing MPs from entering the House for a vote), etc. Sure we let people in to do tours and such, but you can get a tour of the White House too. Besides, what good would it do to assassinate Harper (our Prime Minister)? He's only PM because his party formed government and he's the current head of his party. Kill him and someone else from his party just takes his place - it would be horrible, but it wouldn't stop our country the way it might if another country's head of state were killed.
Well, this comes just a few days after one soldier was killed and another injured in what's being called an intentional attack by a "radicalized" Canadian. That attack was south of Montreal (about 2 hrs drive from Ottawa), so there may be no connection, but it does make one wonder. I'm sure people are worried that these two incidents are related, and might be harbinger of more to come.
I suppose Facebooks new Safe Check would be useful today - my family have already text me to let me know they're safe, but it would be great to know none of my friends have been hurt.
Heck, 13 years ago at a Canadian federal government job we swapped our web servers for blades.
Which was pretty bleeding-edge at the time, since the first blade server was 2001. So not sure what your point about the government is - they weren't late to the party, far from it.
If I hadn't posted on this story, I would mod the above interesting. I just assumed we were at least a couple of years behind the curve. We were buying off the shelf hardware, nothing custom.
I read the blog post, and he's just comparing having a beefy server with multiple VMs to instead having a bunch of blade servers. How is this new? Heck, 13 years ago at a Canadian federal government job we swapped our web servers for blades.
accuracy dropped to 56% (around change)
Then I watched the video in the article, where they actually say:
Participants demonstrated 56% accuracy (around chance)
i.e.: 56% is pretty close to the 50% you'd expect from just guessing. That one letter makes a big difference.
Reading comprehension is hard. The group built the mockup and sold it for $5000. The person who picked it up from them claimed to be an XBox enthusiast, but actually worked for the FBI.
Did you read to the end? I saw this quote:
While he was traveling in Prague, "I actually woke up, and lo and behold there is five grand sitting in my bank account," Wheeler said. "It came through, and we went 'OK!' and we sent it."
Where he said "we" (his group) sent it. Then I read the very next bit:
Around August 9, 2012, someone identified in the indictment as "Person A" went to Leroux's residence in Maryland and picked up the device. Person A was instructed to send the device to an address in the Seychelles. But Wheeler said he heard through the group that the package never arrived.
Where he said that "Person A was instructed to send the device" and "he heard through the group [xbox enthusiasts who paid for it] that the package never arrived." So the story says that a group paid for it, he gave it to someone with instructions to send it to that group, then the group said it never arrived. The article continues with:
According to the indictment, Person A -- whose real name Wheeler said he knows -- gave the package to the FBI.
So the guy was supposed to send it to the purchasers (who you'll recall complained that it never arrived), but he gave it to the FBI instead. There's a follow-on quote where Wheeler says the FBI bought the device, but that seems to contradicts his earlier statement that his first warning about being caught was that the purchasers complained the shipment never arrived.
You can be convicted for just looking at pictures.
I'm assuming you're talking about someone else (e.g.: an adult) looking at the picture a child took of herself. Which would show that person's intent to use as child porn, right? But it wouldn't by itself show the child's intent to create or distribute the image as child port. The OP's point was about "[t]aking pictures of yourself", not looking at pictures. I think the OP was saying that if the person taking the selfie didn't intend for it to be shared, then the act of taking that pic wouldn't be considered as creating child porn.
The point makes sense to me, but I'm not a lawyer (and I live in Canada), so I can't comment on whether American law works like that.
From the way the article describes it, the FBI actually stole the group's home-made XBox-like computer. The group used stolen login credentials to get the XBox specs and built a rig to spec with parts bought from NewEgg. Apparently a group of XBox enthusiasts paid $5000 for it (they knew it was a home-made rig), but then the guy who was supposed to send it to them handed it to the FBI instead.
To summarize: Group builds a computer with same specs as XBox. Group agrees to sell it to another group, and is paid $5000. During delivery it instead ends up in the hands of the FBI.
I'm in Canada, and we've been using chip cards for a few years now. I just called my bank 45 minutes ago after noticing a fraudulent charge on my credit card from August 30th. Since I bought a bunch of stuff at Home Depot in May/June, I'm assuming they managed to clone my card from the stolen data. The charge was only $4.56, at a gas station halfway across the country, so I would guess that someone was testing the clone to see if it was a valid card number (maybe testing one number from a batch of 100s or 1000s, to see if the numbers were legit.)
Just so we're clear, I'm not saying the fraudulent purchase itself was made using the chip. I only ever use chip + pin when making purchases, but I suppose a cloned card could use NFC (eg: PayWay) for a purchase that small, or even just the magstripe, neither of which requires them to have compromised my pin. My point is that I thought I was being safe using chip + pin, but still got hit regardless. Fortunately, banks seem to be good about this sort of thing, and my new card is on its way.
Goddamn it - Funny and Overrated shouldn't be next to each other in the moderation drop-down. Now I have to post here just to undo my mistake. Is there a way I could suggest to Slashdot devs that Overrated be moved up to be with all the other downmods at the top of the drop-down list, rather than tucked in between Funny and Underrated, so I don't hit it by mistake?
Google says:
Therefore the probability of being hit by a given CME is (2.8 x 10^17) / (5.1 x 10^8) = 5.5 x 10^-8, or a 0.0000055% chance.
Now the number of CMEs per year is actually higher than I expected, which I suppose explains why we do in fact get hit between 0 - 70 times per year. However the number of annual large CMEs is quite low, with none of the sites I visited actually agreeing on the number (most seemed to agree it's less than 5 per year in a solar maximum.) Let's say there are 5 per year. That only brings the chance of being hit by one of them up to 0.000028% per year. So if I live to be 100, the chances I'll see one in my lifetime are only 0.0028%.
caveat: These calculations ignore CME cross-section (essentially width and height) and duration (essentially length), since I couldn't find any accurate information on those. If you find those, you can factor them into these calculations by multiplying by the cross-section, multiplying by the % duration that the CME's strength is high, and multipyling by the Earth's average orbital velocity. That will modify the probility to take into account the volume of space the Earth occupies while the CME is traversing the edge of our 1 AU sphere, and how much of the surface of the sphere is touched by the CME.
It isn't as if another version was already submitted earlier, perhaps with a better summary for the editors to use:
http://slashdot.org/submission...
The accepted story was submitted by itwbennett, and links to a story on itworld.com. I think it's a fair assumption that it was submitted by Amy Bennett, ITworld's Managing Editor. According to her achievements, she's had 2^9 submissions accepted, from which we can conclude that Slashdot editors probably prioritize her submissions. I imagine her submissions are fairly well written, link to a somewhat reputable source, and have already been deemed interesting enough to the IT crowd for a story on ITworld. So they get fast-tracked, and other worthy submissions are reviewed later, deemed to be duplicates, and discarded.
Would be nice if her submissions lead off with the fact that she was the managing editor for ITworld though, just to make it clear that she's just trying to feed traffic to her own site. (Which is a valid action if the story is original and interesting, but should require a disclaimer.)