You can still rejoice. One of the patients was Baron Werner Ünderbheit.

It sounds like this transformer had its center tap grounded and was the path to ground on one side of a ground loop as the geomagnetic field moved under pressure from a CME, inducing a common-mode current in the long-distance power line. A gas pipeline in an area of poor ground conductivity in Russia was also destroyed, it is said, resulting in 500 deaths.

One can protect against this phenomenon by use of common-mode breakers and perhaps even overheat breakers. The system will not stay up but nor will it be destroyed. This is a high-current rather than high-voltage phenomenon and thus the various methods used to dissipate lightning currents might not be effective.

Couldn't an already evolved planet be orbiting a star that is traveling, and is then captured by a multi-star system?

Assuming that evolution has produced other forms of life in many systems around the universe, it makes sense that it's done so on stars that have then had their travels altered. And yes, there are all kinds of problems. During the transition, would the evolved planet remain a safe distance from the other stars in the cluster? Would any of the life on it survive as it changes to the new orbit? I don't imagine much life would survive on Earth if we had to make a pass as close to the sun as Mercury, but it's possible a few microbes would make it and evolve again in another billion years.

It seems to me they're trying to offer a career path to a group of people who could use additional options.

If we assume that attributes that make for good programmers (design skills, intelligence, etc) are equally distributed, there are a lot of really smart people (that could become programmers) out there that have something blocking their opportunities.

Things like bias, culture, and upbringing play a huge role. Earlier this year my step-niece (age 21, working on her bachelor's degree) was told "you're far too pretty for all this school, you should just find a nice man and marry him." These exact words came out of her grandmother's mouth. That's what these kids grow up with.

I firmly believe that part of the reason my son has been so successful is that we never expected anything less from him. He knew from kindergarten onwards that college was simply the next school after high school. His decision was "where", not "if". That's far from true in a lot of families or for a lot of kids.

Part of what Gates and Zuckerberg are trying to do is get the message out to these kids. If they don't hear from someone who says "you can certainly do this", they might never try.

I thought it was a Nabaztag. Not much different, except no ears.

Monopolies are the free market in action.

There are "natural monopolies" in the real world. An example would be that "last mile" thing - it makes very little sense for seventeen competing companies to all run fibre to every house in a city.

"Natural monopolies" should be the province of government.

Other than the "natural monopolies", pretty much every monopoly exists as a result of government regulation imposing draconian startup penalties on newcomers. Frequently as a result of a business bribing government to impose those barriers, but when you have a government that can do anything you desire, it's going to be bribed to do what someone other than you desires also....

Don't worry, some jackass will find a way to screw it up. Look for a bought congressman to insert language that makes it illegal to change batteries, or to require the screen to be etched with the date of unlocking, something that will make it suck. Then look for gridlock to kill it anyway.

the potential dangers to both humans and humanities infrastructure

If the humanities infrastructure suffers, no doubt there'll be fewer English majors, and more CS majors, so it'll be a good thing, right?

Or did someone mean "humanity's infrastructure"? Yes, I know, "my people don't do editing"....

We'll get more results by using 20% of the money to expand SpaceX contracts, and applying the other 80% toward deficit reduction.

80% of SLS devoted to deficit reduction is a trivial change in the deficit (Better to split it between SpaceX and Orbital Sciences and mission development. Allowing $3B per year for mission development, that leaves enough to pay for development of Falcon9R, Falcon9 Heavy, and Orbital's equivalents.

Or just buy Dragon flights from SpaceX - $5B per year would pay for a Dragon launch every couple weeks.

Or an equivalent number of Falcon9R launches for unmanned missions. Or a Falcon9 Heavy every other month....

In March 1989 much of Quebec lost power for the same thing.

They lost power because the common-mode breakers tripped, not because their system was actually damaged.

I got the same error after a glitch. Turns out the redemption was successful the first time, but because the server was too slow responding to the redemption request, the App Store app timed out. For whatever bizarre reason, it appears that the app store server infrastructure doesn't treat redemption requests as idempotent (clearly a bug), so subsequent attempts to redeem the same code from the same account fail. Ideally, those subsequent attempts should do nothing, but should return whatever magic value tells the App Store app to update its list of purchased items and then do whatever other work it needs to do.

To make a long story short, if you quit the App Store app and relaunch it, the Yosemite beta should appear under the Purchases tab in the App Store. From there, you can start the download.

Or problem is we put people into positions of power who developed their sense of morality at a time when "The Nazis" were still a valid political party and we didn't generally allow African Americans into the military yet.

And in 50 years, we'll be putting people into positions of power who believe something that is a very fashionable idea in 2014. No idea what it will be, but since we pick our leadership from among the elderly, and develop our ideas of what's good, right and proper during our youth, it's inevitable.

Note also, for reference, the "Buffalo Soldiers". They were around from the end of the Civil War (formed in 1866). There were Negro regiments during the Civil War as well.

It should be noted also that the 9th and 10th Cavalry, as well as other Negro regiments existed through WW2 until the military was integrated during the Korean War (considerably before the rest of US society).

and we're not really an apex predator either.

Yes, actually we are.

A very efficient one, at that, being omnivorous and all. It lets us get past that boom/bust cycle that so many predatory species have to live with....

The vandalism in question is coming from someone who has access to a congressional staffer's computer, not necessarily a member of congress. This could be anyone from a member of congress to a teenage page to the 12-year-old nephew of a congressman's chief of staff to an intern to a night watchman. Apparently, there are about 9000 people with regular access to the machines in this address range. Given a sampling of 9000 people, how many are going to be as impolite as an internet troll? That there is at least one uncultured moron in the crowd is not particularly surprising.

Yes, it's sad that anyone would either sink to this level, or fail to grow beyond it. It's just not surprising.