Re:Anchor it to an asteroid?!?
on
Going Up?
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· Score: 2
No, a meteorite, according to the dictionary, is a meteor that reaches the surface of the earth without being completely vaporized, which might describe it after some enormous disaster (terrorist attack?) which brings it out of orbit and down on our heads. While in orbit, the appropriate terms would be asteroid, planetoid, moon (it's in orbit around the earth), or (possibly) moonlet (because of its likely small size).
From a moral and ethical standpoint, you're absolutely correct - it's wrong to discriminate against people on the basis of things like this. But it is not illegal.
Try talking to somebody in the legal department of whatever corporation you work for. The company can discriminate on the basis of anything that they aren't specifically forbidden by law from discriminating on. If the state (or city) you work in doesn't have a law prohibiting discrimination on the basis of (for example) "sexual preference", then your employer can legally fire you for a sexual preference they don't like.
Even in places where there are laws prohibiting discrimination, they can always find a reason to fire you. Everybody makes mistakes. If your manager (or designate) documents every single mistake you make for a year or two, they can make anybody look incompetent enough to fire you on that basis. If you throw in assigning you only unpleasant tasks with high risk for error, you don't have a chance.
With all of that, you still have more protection under the law than your parents or grandparents did. Employers actually have to document a reason for a firing to protect themselves from a lawsuit.
The frightening thing about genetic testing is that there is nothing you can do about it. OK, my XYZ123 gene is defective - I have exactly the same control over this as I have over my race, or whether I was born with the right number of functioning body part in the usual places. On that basis, we need laws specifically to prevent discrimination against genetic defects.
The "face" is a rather uninteresting area. Here's a link to photographs of it taken with the Mars Global Surveyor which is in orbit around Mars now and photographing the entire surface in more detail than anything before. The area they are proposing landing the probe in includes areas with potential sedimentary rocks. Since the existence of sedimentary rocks potentially implies water, this is far more interesting than most random areas (especially if they're considering anything related to searching for life).
Of course, you realized that the "face" was mostly a coincidental artifact of lighting and relatively low resolution photography, and were trolling, and I've just fed the troll...
There are a number of good reasons we should send a mission to Pluto.
First, Pluto is currently believed to be the largest member of the Kuiper Belt objects. We know very little about these bodies, mostly because they are very small and at great distance. They have similarities to both comets and asteroids, and study of them should tell us a great deal about the formation of our Solar System.
Pluto is unique among the planets. Studies of the other planets don't tell us much about Pluto. As such, it is a better target for research than, say, Uranus or Neptune, both of which resemble Jupiter and Saturn, planets we are studying in detail.
Prior to 1979, it was generally believed that Pluto was larger than Mercury. Since we couldn't measure the actual size directly, the size had been derived based on assumptions that it was similar to the Moon or Mercury - basically a dark, rocky surface. In 1979 there was a series of eclipses of Pluto by Charon, and it was determined that the planet is significantly smaller than previously thought. The significance of this is that the surface of Pluto is probably ices, not rock. Other than (maybe) some of the moons of the outer planets, this means that Pluto is a better target than most objects in the Solar System for study to learn the basics about icy bodies. Unfortunately, it is nearly impossible to study well without sending a spacecraft.
As far as life, it is so cold there that any life would probably not resemble anything we would ordinarily recognize as life. In any event, searching for life would require a landing, and nobody is planning anything like that.
The moon landings had far more significance than "because it's there." In science, it's necessary to verify theories by actual observation. At some point we had to actually have rock samples, and direct, close up observations of the surface. People were sent mostly because it was politically easier to get money to send astronauts than unmanned probes. Unfortunately, the same fools who think using encryption should increase the penalties for crime are the ones who decide the budgets for NASA.
You're too late. You already can get your house wire-tapped, computer(s) seized, and e-mail (and all other 'electronic' communication) read because someone suspects that [you] made a false statement on a student loan application. That was passed years ago. They want to add even more things they can use as excuses. This kind of thing has been going on for twenty or thirty years now.
OK, I'm considering... Let's see... Something about trying to type with your eyeball... Not sure there... Maybe - inhaled dust(?) from inside keyboard?... 3rd century Indian dynasties?... Something about sneezing... A definite sense of growing annoyance with the whole process... With a frozen turkey?... Hemorrhoids?... Something about your left ear...
I think you're actually agreeing with me. My point was primarily that you have to actually have something to show before you produce the binary. There can be a considerable period of time coding before something exists which even maybe a user could get some use from. Until that point is reached, binaries are a waste of time. Demonstration implies at least some minimal usable functionality. In fact, if your idea of when binaries should be released is when a demo is producable, I would say that it should have been a lot earlier than that.
Doesn't it come down to who you are gearing the current code towards? At first, you need coders to review, fix, and add to the code. Once you have some (somewhat) stable code that resembles what you want the end result to be, the binaries should be available for non-coders to do their thing with. There will be a period of time in there where it's not so black and white, and that is when the politics will get involved.
If the project is still pre-alpha, then it's probably a bit premature to have binaries around. The question is what your definition of "pre-alpha" code is. Binaries should be available when the code has stabilized enough to give the users of the binaries a resonable idea of what the end result is supposed to be.
In most places where the diet is primarily vegetarian it's because of food shortages. In the same places the expected life span is considerably shorter than in the wealthier nations. Cancer and Alzheimers are primarily diseases of elderly people. When a relatively small percentage of the population lives to become elderly you wouldn't expect to see much of those diseases.
It's also worth noting that one out of every three people who die in the world die of some form of dysentery. Death by dysentery is almost unheard of in the wealthier nations. When we are able to help the poorer peoples of the world protect themselves from conditions like starvation and dysentery, we will start seeing them die of the same sorts of things we are (in a general sense).
The thing medical people seem to ignore/forget is that you're going to die, and you're going to die of something. They've been working to eliminate the various causes of death on the almost unconscious theory that if you remove all causes of death then people won't die. If they somehow made it so we could live forever, people would still die of suicide, and they would decide that the desire to die is a treatable condition which they should find a cure for.
I don't disagree with the idea that we should eat well, exercise, and all that, but the whole blaming health problems on "bad life style choices" is just another way of blaming bad things that happen to you on the "fact" that you're a bad person. If you get cancer, it's because you did bad things like smoke, hang around people who smoke, eat wrong, or not exercise enough. In the end, no matter what you do, you're going t oget sick and die, and some doctor will say that it's because you made some bad choice earlier in your life.
Just remember that the power companies here are just large corporations, in existence to make money for the shareholders. Social duty? The board of directors of any of these corporations would laugh you out of the room for even suggesting they should care about anything other than the almighty dollar. The only reason they go along with anything vaguely resembling social duty is the potential losses which might occur if they pissed of some legislature somewhere.
You should remember that Chernobyl happened because a group of researchers manually shut off the safety precautions built into the reactor and then ran it at levels above what was considered safe. All things considered, it's no surprise at all what happened. Similarly, the recent nuclear accident in Japan was caused when a couple nuclear workers did things they had been explicitly told not to do.
That having been said, historically it is clear that people will do stupid things like override safety precautions on nuclear reactors. Any future designs for such things will need to account for such actions as much as possible. The really bad part of this is that when things go wrong with a nuclear reactor, they can go really wrong. The big difference between the problems caused by nuclear reactors versus fossil fuel power plants is that the nuclear accidents are so much more visible and obvious. Fossil fuel plants cause a great deal of environmental damage, but a lot of it relatively subtle, and it certainly doesn't make the headlines like a nuclear accident does.
Actually, no it isn't. To quote from Webster's Collegiate Dictionary:
catholic 1: Comprehensive; Universal; broad in sympathies, tastes or interests
For once, a Slashdot editor does something literate and he gets flamed for it by those who miss it. BTW - I'm replying to your post because your the only one who obthered to log in. Why waste time replying to AC's.
Actually, with or without the Linux, they only need a license for one copy of OS/390. With the Linux, they are just running each copy of Linux as a separate task under OS/390. Without the Linux they would just be running something else. Now, for the something else they might have needed hundreds or thousands of licenses, and that could run into some serious money - mainframe software licenses are expensive like you can't believe. A copy of PKZIP on a mainframe costs something like USD $30,000 a year for the license (it depends on the specific box). So, you're correct on your basic point - Linux is the reason they are able to do this economically.
If you've ever actually coded something more than the typical programming class trivial stuff it's actually impossible to ensure there are no bugs in the code. The practical reality is that you find all the likely bugs until you run out of time and have to release the code.
You can't remove all the bugs and bug bits from the strawberry jam. It's not possible. So you do it good enough. If the parts are small enough and rare enough, few enough customers ever notice, so spending more money on removing still more bugs bits doesn't improve profits. And, in the end, all of this is about profits.
Actually, Pluto was thought to be bigger than Mercury until the late 1970s. The actual size of Pluto was first determined shortly after the discovery of Pluto's moon, Charon, when the Pluto/Charon system went through a period of mutual eclipses. The original estimates of size were made based on the brightness and distance. It turned out that Pluto was lighter in color than had been originally thought.
As far as the size of a planet, if and when something is found that is larger than Pluto, that's when the conversations will become interesting. In the meantime, objects such as this one (and all the asteroids) are referred to as "minor planets".
Keep in mind that a black hole, as far as orbital mechanics is concerned, is no different than any other object of the same mass in the same orbit. If you replaced the moon with a black hole of the same mass, it would produce pretty much identical gravitational effects as the current moon does. The biggest difference would be the extremely high energy radiation emission that would occur when something falls in. That would be the sort of thing that might ruin your day.
As far as this Space Debris Protest page, the author seems to underestimate the vastness of space. The situation is similar to you being the only person in the world and throwing the only bottle into the ocean. Realistically, without some way of tracking it, you have no chance of finding that bottle again. The difference in space is that the bottle is too large an example and the ocean is too small by something like 10 orders of magnitude. Eventually, someday, mankind will forget that the Pioneer and Voyager probes are there. And, realistically, no one will ever find them.
Amendment 10: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Actually, I would argue that this amendment from the Bill of Rights clearly supports the states' rights line of reasoning. I definitely agree with you that states' rights have, historically, been used as a support for some extremely nasty things. On the other hand, the framers of the Constitution also wanted to avoid giving too much power to the federal government.
Actually, the Torah is just the first five books of the Bible (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy). The King James Bible has a reasonable translation of the Torah into English. As with any translation from one language into another, there are points where you could debate that the translation would be better with a different word or phrase, but the overall translation is good.
As far as the exact, original source(s) of the material, I'm sure you could take entire courses covering various alternative theories.
Actually, an astronomer at McDonald observatory in Texas went nuts about 20 years ago and fired a 45 caliber handgun several times into one of the big scopes there (the 102-inch, I think). It made a few chips in the mirror a couple inches across. They took some black construction paper and cut out little masks to cover the chips and taped them on. They covered less than 1% of the mirror, so it didn't make a big difference.
Yeah, they'll be really upset at you, but you probably can't do that much actual damage to the mirror without something pretty substantial.
Actually, current cosmology believes the universe is approximately 15 billion years old, although you are correct that its supposed to have started at a single point. Yes, everything in the universe appears to be flying away from everything else, with exceptions for local mutual gravitational effects (on the scale of galaxy clusters). Objects which are extremely far from us (say 10 billion light years and up) seem to be moving at significant percentages of the speed of light away from us. And there appears to be a nice, linear relationship (Hubble's law) between the speed and the distance. If you want to read some basic stuff on it, a good site is http://www.hubbleconstant.com/
On a related topic, another response to your post mentioned the recent claim that the universe apears to be accelerating. So far, this claim is based only on studies of supernovae at the most extreme distances we can detect them. One of the assumptions the researchers made on that study is that the maximum brightness and the decay curves are the same for these distant supernovae as for the closer ones. I guess what I'm getting to is that the conclusion that the universe is accelerating in expansion is not entirely accepted as being fact yet. The results are good enough to lead to further research to confirm them, but it's been only about 2 years since publication.
The issue is not with mineral deposits in the ground. It's with mulitple-hundred mile long power lines. When you combine a long conductor with a moving magnetic field you can generate some incredible voltages. When the power grid went down last time it was because the generated voltages were large enough to fry the circuit breakers in the power stations. After the first station went down, the others started trying to kick in extra power to compensate. With the extra voltage fluctuations from the magnetic storm, other stations went down. After a few stations were down, the others were unable to provide enough power for the grid, so the whole thing went down.
As to whether they've fixed things so it won't happen again, I guess we'll see tonight.
Imagine the fun when your _employer_ gets the idea that you can vote from your workplace because it's more "convenient" (convenient for whom?), and, by the way, this is who you should vote for.
A MusicDNA Analyzer can be located, for example, on the web crawler of a large search engine, to ensure that the search engine only points to legal music. Alternatively the analyzer can be incorporated into a piece of client software residing on a PC to ensure that the music being transferred is the correct music and the complete song.
Isn't another way of looking at this that the program will only allow the use of approved music? Isn't this yet another way of shutting down independent musicians? If you're a musician and you don't get on their approved list, this software would also mark your stuff as unapproved.
The real use of software like this is to produce a list of approved content. The real question is, "approved by whom?"
Slashdot Mirror
No, a meteorite, according to the dictionary, is a meteor that reaches the surface of the earth without being completely vaporized, which might describe it after some enormous disaster (terrorist attack?) which brings it out of orbit and down on our heads. While in orbit, the appropriate terms would be asteroid, planetoid, moon (it's in orbit around the earth), or (possibly) moonlet (because of its likely small size).
From a moral and ethical standpoint, you're absolutely correct - it's wrong to discriminate against people on the basis of things like this. But it is not illegal.
Try talking to somebody in the legal department of whatever corporation you work for. The company can discriminate on the basis of anything that they aren't specifically forbidden by law from discriminating on. If the state (or city) you work in doesn't have a law prohibiting discrimination on the basis of (for example) "sexual preference", then your employer can legally fire you for a sexual preference they don't like.
Even in places where there are laws prohibiting discrimination, they can always find a reason to fire you. Everybody makes mistakes. If your manager (or designate) documents every single mistake you make for a year or two, they can make anybody look incompetent enough to fire you on that basis. If you throw in assigning you only unpleasant tasks with high risk for error, you don't have a chance.
With all of that, you still have more protection under the law than your parents or grandparents did. Employers actually have to document a reason for a firing to protect themselves from a lawsuit.
The frightening thing about genetic testing is that there is nothing you can do about it. OK, my XYZ123 gene is defective - I have exactly the same control over this as I have over my race, or whether I was born with the right number of functioning body part in the usual places. On that basis, we need laws specifically to prevent discrimination against genetic defects.
The "face" is a rather uninteresting area. Here's a link to photographs of it taken with the Mars Global Surveyor which is in orbit around Mars now and photographing the entire surface in more detail than anything before. The area they are proposing landing the probe in includes areas with potential sedimentary rocks. Since the existence of sedimentary rocks potentially implies water, this is far more interesting than most random areas (especially if they're considering anything related to searching for life).
Of course, you realized that the "face" was mostly a coincidental artifact of lighting and relatively low resolution photography, and were trolling, and I've just fed the troll...
There are a number of good reasons we should send a mission to Pluto.
First, Pluto is currently believed to be the largest member of the Kuiper Belt objects. We know very little about these bodies, mostly because they are very small and at great distance. They have similarities to both comets and asteroids, and study of them should tell us a great deal about the formation of our Solar System.
Pluto is unique among the planets. Studies of the other planets don't tell us much about Pluto. As such, it is a better target for research than, say, Uranus or Neptune, both of which resemble Jupiter and Saturn, planets we are studying in detail.
Prior to 1979, it was generally believed that Pluto was larger than Mercury. Since we couldn't measure the actual size directly, the size had been derived based on assumptions that it was similar to the Moon or Mercury - basically a dark, rocky surface. In 1979 there was a series of eclipses of Pluto by Charon, and it was determined that the planet is significantly smaller than previously thought. The significance of this is that the surface of Pluto is probably ices, not rock. Other than (maybe) some of the moons of the outer planets, this means that Pluto is a better target than most objects in the Solar System for study to learn the basics about icy bodies. Unfortunately, it is nearly impossible to study well without sending a spacecraft.
As far as life, it is so cold there that any life would probably not resemble anything we would ordinarily recognize as life. In any event, searching for life would require a landing, and nobody is planning anything like that.
The moon landings had far more significance than "because it's there." In science, it's necessary to verify theories by actual observation. At some point we had to actually have rock samples, and direct, close up observations of the surface. People were sent mostly because it was politically easier to get money to send astronauts than unmanned probes. Unfortunately, the same fools who think using encryption should increase the penalties for crime are the ones who decide the budgets for NASA.
What can we do to get this thing killed?
You're too late. You already can get your house wire-tapped, computer(s) seized, and e-mail (and all other 'electronic' communication) read because someone suspects that [you] made a false statement on a student loan application. That was passed years ago. They want to add even more things they can use as excuses. This kind of thing has been going on for twenty or thirty years now.
It sure gives new meaning to "First Person Shooters".
OK, I'm considering... Let's see... Something about trying to type with your eyeball... Not sure there... Maybe - inhaled dust(?) from inside keyboard?... 3rd century Indian dynasties?... Something about sneezing... A definite sense of growing annoyance with the whole process... With a frozen turkey?... Hemorrhoids?... Something about your left ear...
I think you're actually agreeing with me. My point was primarily that you have to actually have something to show before you produce the binary. There can be a considerable period of time coding before something exists which even maybe a user could get some use from. Until that point is reached, binaries are a waste of time. Demonstration implies at least some minimal usable functionality. In fact, if your idea of when binaries should be released is when a demo is producable, I would say that it should have been a lot earlier than that.
Doesn't it come down to who you are gearing the current code towards? At first, you need coders to review, fix, and add to the code. Once you have some (somewhat) stable code that resembles what you want the end result to be, the binaries should be available for non-coders to do their thing with. There will be a period of time in there where it's not so black and white, and that is when the politics will get involved.
If the project is still pre-alpha, then it's probably a bit premature to have binaries around. The question is what your definition of "pre-alpha" code is. Binaries should be available when the code has stabilized enough to give the users of the binaries a resonable idea of what the end result is supposed to be.
In most places where the diet is primarily vegetarian it's because of food shortages. In the same places the expected life span is considerably shorter than in the wealthier nations. Cancer and Alzheimers are primarily diseases of elderly people. When a relatively small percentage of the population lives to become elderly you wouldn't expect to see much of those diseases.
It's also worth noting that one out of every three people who die in the world die of some form of dysentery. Death by dysentery is almost unheard of in the wealthier nations. When we are able to help the poorer peoples of the world protect themselves from conditions like starvation and dysentery, we will start seeing them die of the same sorts of things we are (in a general sense).
The thing medical people seem to ignore/forget is that you're going to die, and you're going to die of something. They've been working to eliminate the various causes of death on the almost unconscious theory that if you remove all causes of death then people won't die. If they somehow made it so we could live forever, people would still die of suicide, and they would decide that the desire to die is a treatable condition which they should find a cure for.
I don't disagree with the idea that we should eat well, exercise, and all that, but the whole blaming health problems on "bad life style choices" is just another way of blaming bad things that happen to you on the "fact" that you're a bad person. If you get cancer, it's because you did bad things like smoke, hang around people who smoke, eat wrong, or not exercise enough. In the end, no matter what you do, you're going t oget sick and die, and some doctor will say that it's because you made some bad choice earlier in your life.
Just remember that the power companies here are just large corporations, in existence to make money for the shareholders. Social duty? The board of directors of any of these corporations would laugh you out of the room for even suggesting they should care about anything other than the almighty dollar. The only reason they go along with anything vaguely resembling social duty is the potential losses which might occur if they pissed of some legislature somewhere.
You should remember that Chernobyl happened because a group of researchers manually shut off the safety precautions built into the reactor and then ran it at levels above what was considered safe. All things considered, it's no surprise at all what happened. Similarly, the recent nuclear accident in Japan was caused when a couple nuclear workers did things they had been explicitly told not to do.
That having been said, historically it is clear that people will do stupid things like override safety precautions on nuclear reactors. Any future designs for such things will need to account for such actions as much as possible. The really bad part of this is that when things go wrong with a nuclear reactor, they can go really wrong. The big difference between the problems caused by nuclear reactors versus fossil fuel power plants is that the nuclear accidents are so much more visible and obvious. Fossil fuel plants cause a great deal of environmental damage, but a lot of it relatively subtle, and it certainly doesn't make the headlines like a nuclear accident does.
Actually, no it isn't. To quote from Webster's Collegiate Dictionary:
catholic 1: Comprehensive; Universal; broad in sympathies, tastes or interests
For once, a Slashdot editor does something literate and he gets flamed for it by those who miss it. BTW - I'm replying to your post because your the only one who obthered to log in. Why waste time replying to AC's.
Actually, with or without the Linux, they only need a license for one copy of OS/390. With the Linux, they are just running each copy of Linux as a separate task under OS/390. Without the Linux they would just be running something else. Now, for the something else they might have needed hundreds or thousands of licenses, and that could run into some serious money - mainframe software licenses are expensive like you can't believe. A copy of PKZIP on a mainframe costs something like USD $30,000 a year for the license (it depends on the specific box). So, you're correct on your basic point - Linux is the reason they are able to do this economically.
Bravo! +1, Insightful!
If you've ever actually coded something more than the typical programming class trivial stuff it's actually impossible to ensure there are no bugs in the code. The practical reality is that you find all the likely bugs until you run out of time and have to release the code.
You can't remove all the bugs and bug bits from the strawberry jam. It's not possible. So you do it good enough. If the parts are small enough and rare enough, few enough customers ever notice, so spending more money on removing still more bugs bits doesn't improve profits. And, in the end, all of this is about profits.
Actually, Pluto was thought to be bigger than Mercury until the late 1970s. The actual size of Pluto was first determined shortly after the discovery of Pluto's moon, Charon, when the Pluto/Charon system went through a period of mutual eclipses. The original estimates of size were made based on the brightness and distance. It turned out that Pluto was lighter in color than had been originally thought.
As far as the size of a planet, if and when something is found that is larger than Pluto, that's when the conversations will become interesting. In the meantime, objects such as this one (and all the asteroids) are referred to as "minor planets".
Keep in mind that a black hole, as far as orbital mechanics is concerned, is no different than any other object of the same mass in the same orbit. If you replaced the moon with a black hole of the same mass, it would produce pretty much identical gravitational effects as the current moon does. The biggest difference would be the extremely high energy radiation emission that would occur when something falls in. That would be the sort of thing that might ruin your day.
As far as this Space Debris Protest page, the author seems to underestimate the vastness of space. The situation is similar to you being the only person in the world and throwing the only bottle into the ocean. Realistically, without some way of tracking it, you have no chance of finding that bottle again. The difference in space is that the bottle is too large an example and the ocean is too small by something like 10 orders of magnitude. Eventually, someday, mankind will forget that the Pioneer and Voyager probes are there. And, realistically, no one will ever find them.
Amendment 10:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Actually, I would argue that this amendment from the Bill of Rights clearly supports the states' rights line of reasoning. I definitely agree with you that states' rights have, historically, been used as a support for some extremely nasty things. On the other hand, the framers of the Constitution also wanted to avoid giving too much power to the federal government.
Actually, the Torah is just the first five books of the Bible (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy). The King James Bible has a reasonable translation of the Torah into English. As with any translation from one language into another, there are points where you could debate that the translation would be better with a different word or phrase, but the overall translation is good.
As far as the exact, original source(s) of the material, I'm sure you could take entire courses covering various alternative theories.
Actually, an astronomer at McDonald observatory in Texas went nuts about 20 years ago and fired a 45 caliber handgun several times into one of the big scopes there (the 102-inch, I think). It made a few chips in the mirror a couple inches across. They took some black construction paper and cut out little masks to cover the chips and taped them on. They covered less than 1% of the mirror, so it didn't make a big difference.
Yeah, they'll be really upset at you, but you probably can't do that much actual damage to the mirror without something pretty substantial.
Actually, current cosmology believes the universe is approximately 15 billion years old, although you are correct that its supposed to have started at a single point. Yes, everything in the universe appears to be flying away from everything else, with exceptions for local mutual gravitational effects (on the scale of galaxy clusters). Objects which are extremely far from us (say 10 billion light years and up) seem to be moving at significant percentages of the speed of light away from us. And there appears to be a nice, linear relationship (Hubble's law) between the speed and the distance. If you want to read some basic stuff on it, a good site is http://www.hubbleconstant.com/
On a related topic, another response to your post mentioned the recent claim that the universe apears to be accelerating. So far, this claim is based only on studies of supernovae at the most extreme distances we can detect them. One of the assumptions the researchers made on that study is that the maximum brightness and the decay curves are the same for these distant supernovae as for the closer ones. I guess what I'm getting to is that the conclusion that the universe is accelerating in expansion is not entirely accepted as being fact yet. The results are good enough to lead to further research to confirm them, but it's been only about 2 years since publication.
The issue is not with mineral deposits in the ground. It's with mulitple-hundred mile long power lines. When you combine a long conductor with a moving magnetic field you can generate some incredible voltages. When the power grid went down last time it was because the generated voltages were large enough to fry the circuit breakers in the power stations. After the first station went down, the others started trying to kick in extra power to compensate. With the extra voltage fluctuations from the magnetic storm, other stations went down. After a few stations were down, the others were unable to provide enough power for the grid, so the whole thing went down.
As to whether they've fixed things so it won't happen again, I guess we'll see tonight.
You know the War on Drugs is getting completely out of control when they start testing 3000 year old mummies.
Imagine the fun when your _employer_ gets the idea that you can vote from your workplace because it's more "convenient" (convenient for whom?), and, by the way, this is who you should vote for.
A MusicDNA Analyzer can be located, for example, on the web crawler of a large search engine, to ensure that the search engine only points to legal music. Alternatively the analyzer can be incorporated into a piece of client software residing on a PC to ensure that the music being transferred is the correct music and the complete song.
Isn't another way of looking at this that the program will only allow the use of approved music? Isn't this yet another way of shutting down independent musicians? If you're a musician and you don't get on their approved list, this software would also mark your stuff as unapproved.
The real use of software like this is to produce a list of approved content. The real question is, "approved by whom?"