And it is a planet. It's a dwarf planet. Dwarf means small. Planet means planet. Dwarf planet means small planet. So what's the problem?

How many exoplanets pass the current IAU definition of 'planet'? I bet a bunch don't.

Of the ones identified thusfar? I'd wager "the vast majority if not literally 100%". We can't see little stuff. Everything we see is big, which means strong orbit-clearing power. And usually also close to its star, which also helps clear the orbit.

Exactly. There are many categories of planets, including but not limited to:

  * Terrestrial planets
  * Gas giants
  * Ice giants
  * Hot jupiters
  * Superearths

And so forth. Why does the concept of another category, dwarfs, enrage people?

Really, the only categorization issue that I'm adamant about is that Pluto-Charon is called a binary. The Pluto-Charon barycentre is not inside Pluto, therefore Charon is not rotating around Pluto, the two are corotating around a common point of space between them. That's a binary.

And you know what annoys them? Your insistence on harassing them about trying to use their computer more "optimally" when what they're doing works just fine. Moreover, you're actually wrong.

Frankly, I think it's probably better for most people to use search than typing urls anyhow. A search captures their intent better than an actual URL in most cases. Consider the case of a single mistyped letter. The actual search will likely correct this error automatically. A URL with a mistyped letter may well be a scam or malware site. In fact, the indirection of "search as address" is also a handy safety filter, as search providers like Google have the resources to scan and block sites with active malware being hosted on them.

Even if you discount all those factors, the point remains: Is it really worth bothering people about a few seconds of wasted time when they're still getting the same results? Save your battles for the important stuff.

I agree, a mouse is horrible to draw with. A few people have mentioned Wacom tables. There are even models available with a built-in screen, for example, which makes it pretty easy for anyone to draw right on it with little training. It's normally used mostly by digital artists, but I could see it being useful for digital whiteboard sessions as well. It's also superior to tablets in that it's optimized for pen use rather than finger touches, which makes it much more precise for actually drawing.

That was my first thought as well. "It uses Java (probably an older, unpatched version), so of course it's got massive security holes." But seriously, does anyone think there's even a remote chance that in 2015, malware is going to be transported by Blu-ray disc? This is an interesting tech demo, and it's always good to be aware of the potential of these things, but it doesn't seem to be a likely threat vector.

Technically, yes, with the caveat that you'd need regular floating reboost platforms with significant power generation scattered all throughout the Pacific, and of course maintaining the track perfectly straight while floating (one presumes at a fixed depth under the water) provides its own engineering challenges. But room-temperature rarified hydrogen instead of rarified air would allow one to make the journey at about Mach 4. Faster if it's hot hydrogen.

Are you under the misconception that hyperloop is a pneumatic tube system?

Hyperloop is a magnetically-accelerated a ground-effect aircraft operating in the sort of extremely rarified air normally only found at high altitudes. The tube's purpose is to provide such a rarified atmosphere near the ground. It's not a pneumatic train. It's not a vactrain. It's not maglev. It's a ground-effect aircraft.

Branching would be really tricky, but there's no physical barriers. Note that even Musk's proposal isn't as far as you can take the concept. If you fill the tube with very low pressure water vapor instead of very low pressure air (via more pumping to overwhelm leaks, plus water vapor injection), your top speed jumps 40%. Fill it with hydrogen and it jumps 300% (normally hydrogen is a real pain to work with due to flammability, embrittlement, etc, but the densities in question are so low that such issues are mostly avoided). So we're talking the potential for hyperloop "speedways" for long distance runs that could blow airplanes out of the water.

The low numbers of passengers per capsule is really key to making the concept economical. Compare, say, monorail track with a full sized rail bridge. The former is vastly cheaper per unit distance because the peak loadings are so much lower, because the mass of the monorail trains are so much lower. A computer-controlled high launch rate of small, high speed capsules means you're spreading the loading out greatly, which means greatly reduced loading and thus materials costs.

Still, while Musk has been thinking of Hyperloop stations in the "airport" concept, he really needs to get out of that mindset. His proposed plan had them on the outskirts of cities. Airports are only on the outskirts of cities because they *must* be. You greatly reduce your utility by doing that, by making people catch connecting trains. Hyperloop can extend just fine into towns; with his two proposed endpoints in particular there are excellent rail routes into town that are quite straight that it could be built over.

Proportional to the number of forum flooding (trolling and stupid questions) : relevant posts ratio (?)

Butttt... the water was nice and warm. Of course it was relatively non-toxic then - won't be next time.

In Eurasia rodents did well, while primate distribution declined. But wait... there's more! Fucking big lava lamps (it was cool kids. You call them volcanoes now).

And... where did the click-bait headline "we stopped at two bombs" come from!? Who's "we", and W(here)TF was it "stopped" at two bombs. Certainly not Alaska, Muaroa... Japan?

I'm guessing it's a missprint. Should of been "we (cant' handle our drugs/inner realities) stopped at two bongs . Which is where they stopped reading. What were they smoking? Not the kind herb.

Should of stopped about two metres from the keyboard. And had twenty bongs of the kind.

Based on my own experience, CS classrooms don't really need to be high tech. You can hold them anywhere, as long as you have a laptop computer with a projector attachment. The labs are where things always got crowded, and that may be what's currently limiting CS enrollment.

This would mean that the total number of enrolled students wouldn't increase, but the specific number of CS students from the population of the campus could increase as a percentage of all majors. This makes some sense, because to increase the total student population, you can't just add a CS building. You'd also need to add dorms, dining facilities, etc. So, even if the goal is to increase the number of CS students, they might not actually need any new classrooms if the total student population is staying relatively stable.

You could very well be right, of course, but I'm not sure you should necessarily assume the worst. I'm just tossing out a possible hypothesis.

The companies may dodge the taxes on their income, but it's pretty hard to dodge taxes on their employees. Granted, WA doesn't have income tax, but there are also property and sales taxes. It would actually be interesting to see just how much the employees of all the companies listed (specifically, their WA offices) generate.

And thank you for that. I found beta unusable (and unreadable unless I turned CSS off). I'da hated to give up on.... good gods, 17 years I've been here??! the site is older than some of its users!

One thing that comes to mind on this 'new' look is make sure you check how it behaves at very large font sizes (which a lot of low-vision folks do use) and not necessarily an ultra-wide screen. Right now the Search box winds up overlaying part of the top menu.

Yeah, I remember those days with Cavalier DSL here in Richmond, VA. There was a fault in my circuit (laid in the 1920's) and Cavalier placed a service request with Verizon, who sat on it for weeks before I finally had to get the State Corporation Commission involved. Wonderful times, indeed.