It's not like this stuff is new. It's just getting more complete - and intrusive.
These ARE documents used by governments to certify to other governments that they'll take this person back, exactly who it is they're certifying, and where he's been the last few years.
Your galaxy? Are you posting from NGC 4736, or just visiting Earth for a while? Sometimes I feel like I'm from there. Most of the people I meet are really odd. B-)
Either way, I'm sure you can see that Earth isn't worth invading, right? Right? Been there, done that. All I got was a damned teeshirt. But the artichokes were very tasty - especially in a Mongolian firepot with squirrel broth and seasoned with a bit of thulium and phenol - and the little thorns on the ends of the leaves make great antenna scratchers.
Another argument for variability of "constants"
on
Galaxy Sans Dark Matter
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
No (or negligible) dark matter in our galaxy, eh?
When we're looking farther away, we're looking back in time, too. So perhaps the observations could be explained by "constants" of physics (notably the gravitational constant) varying with the age of the universe, rather than by the gravitational pull of some otherwise-unobservable dark matter.
Let's see if "dark matter" is "more dense" the farther away we look... B-)
You will want to use a solid state disk when you are at Everest base camp.. Also: You will need a laptop rated for the low ambient temperature. Ordinary LCD displays freeze and break as a result of ice expansion.
"Another problem has been pills that have low (or nill) active ingredient concentration."
Yep, they're called 'homeopathic remedies'. Seen a couple of ads on tv, one was at least a full minute long, pimping homeopathic crap. Very disturbing.
What I'm talking about is products sold as a particular drug and strength which in fact are fakes with either a different (typically lower) strength or just no active ingredient at all.
Another problem has been pills that have low (or nill) active ingredient concentration. Some of these are generics - others are just flat-out counterfeit.
A particular problem is thyroid hormone - which even normally has significant variation of activity between brands. Fine tuning of the concentration during is necessary to prevent serious ill effects (including permanent brain damage or death). So substituting a pill with a different strength can be a serious hazard. (That is why endocrinologists prescribing it will normally specify the brand or manufacturer and "do not substitute".)
Unfortunately, both generics with virtually no active ingredient and actual counterfeit pills with no active ingredient at all have been making their way into insurance company pharmacy plans from foreign manufacturers. (Recently a doctor studying this had the experience of cutting a pill in half and finding that it was fake. The real manufacturer's product had an internal layer that was missing in the counterfeit.)
I never understood why people could be against Microsoft yet for Ron Paul at the same time. Isn't Ron Paul for small government hence no anti-trust laws (not mandated in the Constitution, right) which means that Microsoft wouldn't be punished for being a monopoly? Microsoft wouldn't be able to pervert the legal system, legislature, and bureaucracy into protecting and promoting its monopolistic practices, either.
We're willing to take our chances on whether they have a "natural monopoly" without the 3-trillion-pound gorilla mostly fighting on their side.
Oh, joy. Paultards have taken to spamming in-comment now... In comment? Nah. Didn't you notice the two hyphens just above it. That means it was his sig line.
Last I checked, Maine came out with 56% for Romney, 21% for McCain, and 19% for Paul. More importantly, that race is just a "beauty contest" and doesn't count for anything. What matters is the delegates chosen to go to the state convention.
Ron got 35% of those delegates, totally TROUNCING McCain. The state's delegates to the national convention are chosen at the state convention by a process that should preserve that margin.
(Note: Some of the smaller precincts - maybe 10% of voters - haven't had their caucuses yet. So the numbers may change slightly.)
>However, this hasn't translated to him even breaking into the double digits, much less winning ANY of the primaries.
He broke double digits this past weekend in the Maine caucus, getting 19% of the vote. He trounced Huckabee, who only got 6%, yet Paul is supposed to be excluded from this discussion for some bizarre reason. More importantly, while he came in just a tad behind McCain in the Main "preference" vote, he beat the pants off him in the count of delegates to the state convention, getting 35% of 'em. (At least so far: A few small precincts haven't had their caucuses yet.) That will probably translate to a similar proportion of Maine's delegates to the national convention, again trouncing McCain in Maine.
He's on the ballot here in Ohio, and I'm going to vote for him since I agree with him far more than I agree with any of the other candidates. Ditto with me here on the left coast.
That sort of thing could mean a big surprise tomorrow: California's Republican party changed the rules this year - from "winner take all" to "congressional district winner takes three". Ron Paul's campaign is apparently the only one to figure out that hitting all the districts is useful - and that heavily Democratic districts where political correctness and anti-war sentiment is rampant count as much toward the nomination as conservative districts dripping in Republicans.
Imagine how "Bring the Troops Home Now" Paul vs. "Stay For 100 More Years" McCain might play out in the state that brought you the Summer of Love, Dianne Feinstein, Barbara Boxer, and Nancy Pelosi.
At that point, everyone either goes back to the old large party, or rushes to the growing, previously small party, and we have two stable parties again.
And the last time that happened was the election that put Lincoln into office as the first president of that new, small party, the Republicans.
With the Neocon faction having full control of the Republican party right now (and taking it down), and Ron Paul's under-the-radar success despite the media blackout, perhaps the situation is ripening for another change of dynasty.
He's a kook because he's an honest man trying to succeed as a politician.
But he's succeeded: 10 terms in congress (so far) - with progressively increasing margins (despite being penalized in the pork brought back to his district for his opposition to earmarks). Broke the all-time presidential candidate contributor rake-in record last quarter (and he did it with individual contributions averaging around $100, not party, corporate, and PAC money.) Beating the media-anointed front-runner in several early primary/caucus states.
He's shown that an honest man CAN be a successful politician. And started a movement that is bringing OTHER honest players into the game. (Watch as the precinct leaders of his campaign start running for office. That is already being planned online. B-) ) Even if he misses the presidential nomination it won't invalidate his success to date.
If being so massively correct and successful makes him a "kook" then we need more kooks like that. (And we're about to get them, big time. B-) )
So they pay corporate taxes in Nevada, where there are no corporate taxes, and they pay their employees in Washington, where there is no income tax?
Or they can pay corporate taxes in Nevada, where there is no corporate tax, and pay their employees in Nevada, where there is also no income tax.
Then if the employees buy stuff in Oregon, where there is no SALES tax, there's a lot of money that stays in their pockets. B-) (How convenient that Oregon is adjacent to both Washington and Nevada.)
(That's part of why I set up my retirement home there - so I could cash out my stock options without paying CA's confiscatory state income tax. Unfortunately the company I'm working for sold itself to a foreign firm, and the options were "exercised and sold" for me while I'm still working in CA. B-b )
Nice to see somebody noticing and describing one of the important pieces of the puzzle.
The purpose of elections in a republic is NOT because there's something "right" or "nice" about selecting the government officials and rules that are preferred by a majority of the voting population. (In fact, sometimes that's actually a bad idea. "Democracy" is often three wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.)
The purpose of elections is to increase the stability of the country and pacify it internally. They do this by attempting to figure out which way the war would come out, if it were actually fought over the issue.
To do this, elections must convince the losing side that they can't reverse the result by resorting to force.
That means they don't have to be perfect - but they have to be convincingly good enough.
- A wide race will be convincing. If the exact numbers are off it doesn't really matter.
- A really close race may come out wrong. But if it's close it also means a war won't reverse the result: Too many additional people will get annoyed and oppose those who try the violent option. So the losers might exhaust the peaceable remedies: Recounts, courts, etc. Then they gripe about it non-stop until the next election. And EVERYBODY tries to fix the system to be more accurate and avoid this hassle next time. Repeat until the elections are believable and/or the margin is broad enough that there's no serious dispute.
But the easiest way for an election to be believably fair and honest is for it to be VISIBLY fair and honest. Count the votes behind locked doors or inside a software-driven black box and you substitute trust for visible honesty.
Once the people stop trusting the elections their stabilizing effect is gone. Then losers may think they are strong enough to reverse the result and (when the winners start doing things that hurt their interests) morally justified in making the attempt. Then you are just asking for civil "unrest", comities of vigilance, death squads, coups, and civil or revolutionary war.
So it's far more important that the election procedures be VISIBLY honest and their approximate accuracy known than that they be dead-on accurate.
Which is what we're seeing now. Computerized black-box voting killed the audit trail and enabled the possibility that a small number of people could introduce large and undetectable changes to the result. Then came a close election with important issues at stake. Regardless of whether the black boxes gave an accurate count or were corrupted, there was no way to SHOW they were right - or close enough not to matter. So the losers were unconvinced.
Repeat after four years, and again after eight, adding in a foreign war, massive government spending, "security" intrusions on civil rights, and attempts by media conglomerates to swing the election exposed by comparison to uncontrolled Internet communication. Now you're starting to approach a scenario where large groups of losers start thinking "Maybe the elections were stolen. Maybe we've been conquered. Maybe there are enough of us to reverse this. Maybe violence will work. Maybe the system is corrupted to the point that violence is the only answer. Maybe violence is PROPER."
This is WHY it is more important that the elections be VISIBLY, CONVINCINGLY accurate than that they just be accurate.
Even that article doesn't give the results - just a loose characterization of them.
But it DOES show that they've (so far) only discovered a couple ways that some parts of the behavior's laws are clearly different from what was previously assumed: That the spacing is non-isotropic in the short range and that the birds are interacting with particular individual neighbors, rather than interchangeably with whatever other birds are within a certain distance.
Still got a year to go on the three-year project. Maybe we'll get a mathematical/algorithmic description of what the swarming birds are up to once they file their final report.
Here's how it played: for ISO accreditation we were required to document everything we did. Apparently it guaranteed quality. The owner of the business found more value in making sure employees knew what they were doing, and getting them to do it. We could tell if somebody was deviating from the process because our products wouldn't pass the test suite. ISO 900x accreditation isn't about having a good process or achieving high quality. It's about repeatablity, even with changes of employees (including sudden loss of loremasters through accident, death, or resignation).
It matters that all the procedures have a traceable documentation on how to do them - including how to find the rest of the documentation - and that the employees know how to find the documentation they need for their job and to know that it's current. But the documentation can be on dead trees, backed-up filesystems, or the upper left corner of the whiteboard in Joe's cube.
Having the ISO cert lets your customers know that you can be counted on to produce more stuff of the same standard in the future. Whether it's high or low quality is between you, your customers, and your competitors - as long as the stuff (or services) you produce next month is no worse than what you were producing when you got the cert.
"Google thinks it's a newspaper"? No, the article's discussing how the courts giving Google similar protections to newspapers...
On the other hand, Yahoo's recent financial difficulties seem to stem from not understanding that they ARE primarily a virtual newspaper and taking that into account in their business model.
IMHO the most likely reason for the correlation is this:
- The non-engineer and non-ruling-class part of the population is socialized to believe that tampering with something will make it worse. (Keeps the sheep in the herd and passive.)
- Engineers are socialized to believe that, in the absence of human effort entropy will take over, and it is their job to redesign things to be better than they were. (Risky to the entrenched authority, but necessary. Somebody has to make the machinery work.)
(You see this in a lot of places - but especially in mainstream fiction ("Trying to improve things makes them worse, so suffer in silence.") versus science fiction ("Redesigning things well makes them better, so get cracking."), where the central messages of the two forms reflect exactly this pair of paradigms. Science fiction also contains the cautionary tale ("If you break it THIS way it will get so bad you CAN'T fix it again, so don't screw it up!") And science fiction deals with social as well as technical issues. (The social cautionary tales usually take the form of dystopias.)
So non-engineers, faced with a major system problem, are inclined to complain to authorities or demonstrate - petitioning rulers to change things in their favor. Meanwhile, engineers are inclined to take direct action to rehack the system and "solve the problem". When the system with a refractory problem is political, it is hardly surprising to find engineers over-represented in the direct-action organizations.
Thus the "do it yourself" mindset, alone, is enough to explain the effect, without postulating a higher-than-average susceptibility to "extremeist" ideologies.
So get your telescopes out; it's a 10th-magnitude object. Or just hold your breath as the time approaches
Don't bother holding your breath. At magnitude 10.3 it's too dim to see without a telescope to gather extra light. By a factor of 50 or so (even on a clear dark sky).
... absolute idiots who think that money grows on trees and don't know that when something seems to good to be true it usually is...
Actually, (US) money DOES grow on trees - under the bark - and on cotton plants. But it has to be processed through the US mint and the Federal Reserve system.
It's not backed with anything (except the willingness of the government to accept it as tax payments and the force of government to invoke against US-based creditors who refuse to take it at face value to pay off debts). The government and (within certain rules) the Federal Reserve banks can print as much as they want - diluting the value of the existing cash, bank accounts, and other dollar-denominated assets and transferring this value to themselves.
And the whole house of cards can collapse very rapidly - "hyperinflation" - when people stop trusting it.
This is another failiure in the long history of trying to detect gravity waves.
And I see lots of replies pointing out that gravity waves apparently do exist (usually citing the rotating binary star pair that are spiraling in at the rate predicted by general relativity).
Of course if gravity waves as predicted do exist and behave according to the predicted mechanism, I expect the physicists who designed this detector would have done it right and that it would detect them.
But that raises a question I have NOT seen answered:
Has this particular detector ever given an indication of actually detecting a gravity wave?
The negative result would IMHO be more significant if we knew that the detector was operating and actually had detected waves - or something - from other events.
Ebola is NOT AIRBORNE. It is transmitted by direct contact and bodily fluids.
Unfortunately there is a variety of hemorrhagic fever that IS easily transmitted, probably airborne. It arrived in the east coast US with a shipment of primates and wiped them out in a lab. (Fortunately it was not transmissible to humans or we would have had quite the epidemic on our hands.)
Though ebola is not airborne (so far) it is very easily transmitted by contact - especially since it causes major fluid leakage.
If by taking out the VP30 gene they have reduced the pathogenicity of the virus enough to get the authorities to apply the more appropriate BSL3 tag to the mutant strain, they've succeeded in making an important stride towards expanding the field, while introducing a very minimal risk of an outbreak.
Taking out the VP30 gene is a moderate crock if they're going to culture it in cells that contain the transplanted gene. This is "safe" only until some gene crossover event restores the gene to a viral genome - after which the reconstituted virus not only is fully potent but has a slight advantage and takes over the culture.
Yes, giving the virus an extra hurdle to clear makes things safer, IF the handling restrictions aren't relaxed as a result. But just as "non-lethal" weapons (which are really just "less likely to be lethal or maiming") encourage more common usage by law enforcement and military rather than just switching, a "safe virus" is an invitation to lax handling.
Slashdot Mirror
(Also: Hair color, eye color, height, weight, sex, ...)
It's not like this stuff is new. It's just getting more complete - and intrusive.
These ARE documents used by governments to certify to other governments that they'll take this person back, exactly who it is they're certifying, and where he's been the last few years.
Since when are pictures and finger prints NOT biometric data?
No (or negligible) dark matter in our galaxy, eh?
When we're looking farther away, we're looking back in time, too. So perhaps the observations could be explained by "constants" of physics (notably the gravitational constant) varying with the age of the universe, rather than by the gravitational pull of some otherwise-unobservable dark matter.
Let's see if "dark matter" is "more dense" the farther away we look... B-)
Yep, they're called 'homeopathic remedies'. Seen a couple of ads on tv, one was at least a full minute long, pimping homeopathic crap. Very disturbing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWE1tH93G9U Homeopathic remedies are a separate issue.
What I'm talking about is products sold as a particular drug and strength which in fact are fakes with either a different (typically lower) strength or just no active ingredient at all.
Another problem has been pills that have low (or nill) active ingredient concentration. Some of these are generics - others are just flat-out counterfeit.
A particular problem is thyroid hormone - which even normally has significant variation of activity between brands. Fine tuning of the concentration during is necessary to prevent serious ill effects (including permanent brain damage or death). So substituting a pill with a different strength can be a serious hazard. (That is why endocrinologists prescribing it will normally specify the brand or manufacturer and "do not substitute".)
Unfortunately, both generics with virtually no active ingredient and actual counterfeit pills with no active ingredient at all have been making their way into insurance company pharmacy plans from foreign manufacturers. (Recently a doctor studying this had the experience of cutting a pill in half and finding that it was fake. The real manufacturer's product had an internal layer that was missing in the counterfeit.)
We're willing to take our chances on whether they have a "natural monopoly" without the 3-trillion-pound gorilla mostly fighting on their side.
Like this one:
Ron got 35% of those delegates, totally TROUNCING McCain. The state's delegates to the national convention are chosen at the state convention by a process that should preserve that margin.
(Note: Some of the smaller precincts - maybe 10% of voters - haven't had their caucuses yet. So the numbers may change slightly.)
He broke double digits this past weekend in the Maine caucus, getting 19% of the vote. He trounced Huckabee, who only got 6%, yet Paul is supposed to be excluded from this discussion for some bizarre reason. More importantly, while he came in just a tad behind McCain in the Main "preference" vote, he beat the pants off him in the count of delegates to the state convention, getting 35% of 'em. (At least so far: A few small precincts haven't had their caucuses yet.) That will probably translate to a similar proportion of Maine's delegates to the national convention, again trouncing McCain in Maine. He's on the ballot here in Ohio, and I'm going to vote for him since I agree with him far more than I agree with any of the other candidates. Ditto with me here on the left coast.
That sort of thing could mean a big surprise tomorrow: California's Republican party changed the rules this year - from "winner take all" to "congressional district winner takes three". Ron Paul's campaign is apparently the only one to figure out that hitting all the districts is useful - and that heavily Democratic districts where political correctness and anti-war sentiment is rampant count as much toward the nomination as conservative districts dripping in Republicans.
Imagine how "Bring the Troops Home Now" Paul vs. "Stay For 100 More Years" McCain might play out in the state that brought you the Summer of Love, Dianne Feinstein, Barbara Boxer, and Nancy Pelosi.
More like, an enthusiastic support base. Even more like: A LARGE support base.
His meetup membership alone (groups + waiting list) is now 72.8% of the US troop strength in Iraq. And still surging.
With so many ACTIVE, internet-savvy supporters, mentioning his name in any forum indexed by Google creates a slashdotting.
At that point, everyone either goes back to the old large party, or rushes to the growing, previously small party, and we have two stable parties again.
And the last time that happened was the election that put Lincoln into office as the first president of that new, small party, the Republicans.
With the Neocon faction having full control of the Republican party right now (and taking it down), and Ron Paul's under-the-radar success despite the media blackout, perhaps the situation is ripening for another change of dynasty.
He's a kook because he's an honest man trying to succeed as a politician.
But he's succeeded: 10 terms in congress (so far) - with progressively increasing margins (despite being penalized in the pork brought back to his district for his opposition to earmarks). Broke the all-time presidential candidate contributor rake-in record last quarter (and he did it with individual contributions averaging around $100, not party, corporate, and PAC money.) Beating the media-anointed front-runner in several early primary/caucus states.
He's shown that an honest man CAN be a successful politician. And started a movement that is bringing OTHER honest players into the game. (Watch as the precinct leaders of his campaign start running for office. That is already being planned online. B-) ) Even if he misses the presidential nomination it won't invalidate his success to date.
If being so massively correct and successful makes him a "kook" then we need more kooks like that. (And we're about to get them, big time. B-) )
So they pay corporate taxes in Nevada, where there are no corporate taxes, and they pay their employees in Washington, where there is no income tax?
Or they can pay corporate taxes in Nevada, where there is no corporate tax, and pay their employees in Nevada, where there is also no income tax.
Then if the employees buy stuff in Oregon, where there is no SALES tax, there's a lot of money that stays in their pockets. B-) (How convenient that Oregon is adjacent to both Washington and Nevada.)
Washington has no personal income tax ...
Nevada doesn't, either.
(That's part of why I set up my retirement home there - so I could cash out my stock options without paying CA's confiscatory state income tax. Unfortunately the company I'm working for sold itself to a foreign firm, and the options were "exercised and sold" for me while I'm still working in CA. B-b )
Nice to see somebody noticing and describing one of the important pieces of the puzzle.
The purpose of elections in a republic is NOT because there's something "right" or "nice" about selecting the government officials and rules that are preferred by a majority of the voting population. (In fact, sometimes that's actually a bad idea. "Democracy" is often three wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.)
The purpose of elections is to increase the stability of the country and pacify it internally. They do this by attempting to figure out which way the war would come out, if it were actually fought over the issue.
To do this, elections must convince the losing side that they can't reverse the result by resorting to force.
That means they don't have to be perfect - but they have to be convincingly good enough.
- A wide race will be convincing. If the exact numbers are off it doesn't really matter.
- A really close race may come out wrong. But if it's close it also means a war won't reverse the result: Too many additional people will get annoyed and oppose those who try the violent option. So the losers might exhaust the peaceable remedies: Recounts, courts, etc. Then they gripe about it non-stop until the next election. And EVERYBODY tries to fix the system to be more accurate and avoid this hassle next time. Repeat until the elections are believable and/or the margin is broad enough that there's no serious dispute.
But the easiest way for an election to be believably fair and honest is for it to be VISIBLY fair and honest. Count the votes behind locked doors or inside a software-driven black box and you substitute trust for visible honesty.
Once the people stop trusting the elections their stabilizing effect is gone. Then losers may think they are strong enough to reverse the result and (when the winners start doing things that hurt their interests) morally justified in making the attempt. Then you are just asking for civil "unrest", comities of vigilance, death squads, coups, and civil or revolutionary war.
So it's far more important that the election procedures be VISIBLY honest and their approximate accuracy known than that they be dead-on accurate.
Which is what we're seeing now. Computerized black-box voting killed the audit trail and enabled the possibility that a small number of people could introduce large and undetectable changes to the result. Then came a close election with important issues at stake. Regardless of whether the black boxes gave an accurate count or were corrupted, there was no way to SHOW they were right - or close enough not to matter. So the losers were unconvinced.
Repeat after four years, and again after eight, adding in a foreign war, massive government spending, "security" intrusions on civil rights, and attempts by media conglomerates to swing the election exposed by comparison to uncontrolled Internet communication. Now you're starting to approach a scenario where large groups of losers start thinking "Maybe the elections were stolen. Maybe we've been conquered. Maybe there are enough of us to reverse this. Maybe violence will work. Maybe the system is corrupted to the point that violence is the only answer. Maybe violence is PROPER."
This is WHY it is more important that the elections be VISIBLY, CONVINCINGLY accurate than that they just be accurate.
Even that article doesn't give the results - just a loose characterization of them.
But it DOES show that they've (so far) only discovered a couple ways that some parts of the behavior's laws are clearly different from what was previously assumed: That the spacing is non-isotropic in the short range and that the birds are interacting with particular individual neighbors, rather than interchangeably with whatever other birds are within a certain distance.
Still got a year to go on the three-year project. Maybe we'll get a mathematical/algorithmic description of what the swarming birds are up to once they file their final report.
It matters that all the procedures have a traceable documentation on how to do them - including how to find the rest of the documentation - and that the employees know how to find the documentation they need for their job and to know that it's current. But the documentation can be on dead trees, backed-up filesystems, or the upper left corner of the whiteboard in Joe's cube.
Having the ISO cert lets your customers know that you can be counted on to produce more stuff of the same standard in the future. Whether it's high or low quality is between you, your customers, and your competitors - as long as the stuff (or services) you produce next month is no worse than what you were producing when you got the cert.
(Or at least that's how I understand it... B-) )
"Google thinks it's a newspaper"? No, the article's discussing how the courts giving Google similar protections to newspapers ...
On the other hand, Yahoo's recent financial difficulties seem to stem from not understanding that they ARE primarily a virtual newspaper and taking that into account in their business model.
IMHO the most likely reason for the correlation is this:
- The non-engineer and non-ruling-class part of the population is socialized to believe that tampering with something will make it worse. (Keeps the sheep in the herd and passive.)
- Engineers are socialized to believe that, in the absence of human effort entropy will take over, and it is their job to redesign things to be better than they were. (Risky to the entrenched authority, but necessary. Somebody has to make the machinery work.)
(You see this in a lot of places - but especially in mainstream fiction ("Trying to improve things makes them worse, so suffer in silence.") versus science fiction ("Redesigning things well makes them better, so get cracking."), where the central messages of the two forms reflect exactly this pair of paradigms. Science fiction also contains the cautionary tale ("If you break it THIS way it will get so bad you CAN'T fix it again, so don't screw it up!") And science fiction deals with social as well as technical issues. (The social cautionary tales usually take the form of dystopias.)
So non-engineers, faced with a major system problem, are inclined to complain to authorities or demonstrate - petitioning rulers to change things in their favor. Meanwhile, engineers are inclined to take direct action to rehack the system and "solve the problem". When the system with a refractory problem is political, it is hardly surprising to find engineers over-represented in the direct-action organizations.
Thus the "do it yourself" mindset, alone, is enough to explain the effect, without postulating a higher-than-average susceptibility to "extremeist" ideologies.
So get your telescopes out; it's a 10th-magnitude object. Or just hold your breath as the time approaches
Don't bother holding your breath. At magnitude 10.3 it's too dim to see without a telescope to gather extra light. By a factor of 50 or so (even on a clear dark sky).
... absolute idiots who think that money grows on trees and don't know that when something seems to good to be true it usually is ...
Actually, (US) money DOES grow on trees - under the bark - and on cotton plants. But it has to be processed through the US mint and the Federal Reserve system.
It's not backed with anything (except the willingness of the government to accept it as tax payments and the force of government to invoke against US-based creditors who refuse to take it at face value to pay off debts). The government and (within certain rules) the Federal Reserve banks can print as much as they want - diluting the value of the existing cash, bank accounts, and other dollar-denominated assets and transferring this value to themselves.
And the whole house of cards can collapse very rapidly - "hyperinflation" - when people stop trusting it.
This is another failiure in the long history of trying to detect gravity waves.
And I see lots of replies pointing out that gravity waves apparently do exist (usually citing the rotating binary star pair that are spiraling in at the rate predicted by general relativity).
Of course if gravity waves as predicted do exist and behave according to the predicted mechanism, I expect the physicists who designed this detector would have done it right and that it would detect them.
But that raises a question I have NOT seen answered:
Has this particular detector ever given an indication of actually detecting a gravity wave?
The negative result would IMHO be more significant if we knew that the detector was operating and actually had detected waves - or something - from other events.
Ebola is NOT AIRBORNE. It is transmitted by direct contact and bodily fluids.
Unfortunately there is a variety of hemorrhagic fever that IS easily transmitted, probably airborne. It arrived in the east coast US with a shipment of primates and wiped them out in a lab. (Fortunately it was not transmissible to humans or we would have had quite the epidemic on our hands.)
Though ebola is not airborne (so far) it is very easily transmitted by contact - especially since it causes major fluid leakage.
If by taking out the VP30 gene they have reduced the pathogenicity of the virus enough to get the authorities to apply the more appropriate BSL3 tag to the mutant strain, they've succeeded in making an important stride towards expanding the field, while introducing a very minimal risk of an outbreak.
Taking out the VP30 gene is a moderate crock if they're going to culture it in cells that contain the transplanted gene. This is "safe" only until some gene crossover event restores the gene to a viral genome - after which the reconstituted virus not only is fully potent but has a slight advantage and takes over the culture.
Yes, giving the virus an extra hurdle to clear makes things safer, IF the handling restrictions aren't relaxed as a result. But just as "non-lethal" weapons (which are really just "less likely to be lethal or maiming") encourage more common usage by law enforcement and military rather than just switching, a "safe virus" is an invitation to lax handling.