I do believe it flew a lot closer than that in 2015.

Looks like the whole FA is just an ad for a wannabe data processing company.

That's your government's way of creating jobs. But like most trade deals, it creates the jobs and increases the GDP in other countries, and drives the trade deficit way up.

Better yet, some tech-savvy entrepreneur could use the data to make a tour guide, so you could go see people kill each other in quaint places. Kind of like eco-tourism... nature red in tooth, claw, switchblade, and machinegun.

The idea that everyone needs to be able to write code is nonsense. This is just propaganda to support the "need" for more visas.

It's a CRISIS, I tell you! But fortunately we can spend the next 20 years importing labor for the jobs we can't export, while you fix the school system and kids work their way through it.

When you combine time cube theory with electric universe theory you get a cubic universe plus an electric clock. The cubic universe is flat (in the cosmological sense), so if the two underlying theories are correct then the universe diverges from flatness by the amount of one electric clock.

However, pedantically speaking, that's "plus one electric clock per universe". So in the case of a multiverse, the theorem only indicates the average. But with judicious application of the Central Limit Theorem, the Pauli Exclusion Principle, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, and a line of reasoning left as an exercise for the reader, we can confidently conclude the universe is probably approximately flat, for definitions of "confidently", "conclude", "the universe", "is", "probably", "approximately", "flat", and "definitions" which remain to be derived from first principles.

Read more about it on my blog, Starts with a Bump on the Head, which, as you may have guessed from the title, is written in atrophic dactylic tetrameter, like all good cosmological monographs and comic books.

Your basic unit of flatness can't be zero or infinite, so Kansas will do just fine.

Hasn't "Don't roll your own crypto, dumbass" been one of the cardinal rules of security since sometime before WEP violated it?

The least you can do is implement a real algorithm; but screw it up somehow (key handling is always a good place for that); but just making it up? How did they sneak this past a standards body?

Probably because the authors of the study were researchers at the University of Toronto and had access to air sampling equipment set up in the area? Sometimes you have to do the research where you can, rather than where you might want to.

(Also, we only share the same atmosphere on average. For, say, an urban area with lots of vehicle traffic, the amount of soot people are inhaling is going to depend very substantially on the vehicles in local use, with much weaker effects from more distant sources.)

Aside from the overtly disconcerting possibilities of nanotechnology-augmented spiders; does it strike anyone else as a matter for some potential concern that at least some organisms are quite permeable indeed to novel carbon structures?

A 'sap' is a small blunt weapon, usually a leather sack of lead shot, used to incapacitate a target. A 'SAP system' is a gargantuan and expensive piece of ERP software used to incapacitate a corporation.

I never understand why people consider it news when someone takes a position that is 100% predictable given who they are.

The trouble is that a court is, effectively, a species of transaction cost in this situation(ie. if the transaction is '$X for potentially degrading use of my water supply'; but I have to sue you to obtain $X, that transaction is [i]painfully[/i] inefficient compared to just about any commercial payment processor in existence; and that's if I can afford to sue you at all.)

Plus, since pollution can be relatively tricky to detect and identify the source of, and can often be shunted off to shell entities with almost zero resources against which to make claims, any hope of legal redress is further dimmed. Never mind the fact that things like 'dying slowly of some nasty cancer' don't have an amount of money that is really compensatory.

perl is a write-only language. It's *supposed* to be incomprehensible gibberish.

I'd be curious to know if it actually is a bad thing to have... In the context of a rocket, there isn't exactly a lot of spare mass, spare volume, or engineers just sitting around and wallowing in boredom because the design is trivially simple and every niggling problem has been worked out.

If you skipped the launch escape system, you'd be able to transport more in the same number of launches(or the same amount in fewer) and your craft would be less complex, allowing you to focus on making the remaining systems less likely to need an escape.

Even if you don't fancy a look at our (honestly somewhat curious) level of risk aversion around space activity, it's not clear that adding an escape pod is a better investment, in terms of lives saved, than spending the resources on more extensive testing, improved reliability, and similar for the main systems. It's very much unlike the car scenario, where even 100% perfect engineering doesn't change the fact that other people are going to screw up and crash into you, and that a fair number of your drivers are going to be incompetent, drunk, or distracted; so you fairly quickly run out of improvements to the drive and steering system and have to achieve further survival gains by building in crash resistance. With a rocket, building a launch system that doesn't destroy itself and/or kill the passengers some of the time is quite challenging; but there isn't the same presence of ineradicable external danger, if your system doesn't kill the passengers, they'll survive.(Until you get them into orbit, where the micrometeorites can take them out...)