What part of "coming out of an ice age" does not include a bit of natural increase in temperature?

The aberration in temperature seems unusual, but it's nothing compared to the little ice age that froze Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries.

If temperatures are naturally rising (as all data seems to indicate), then I have no doubt that we'll see articles like this multiple times a year until the warming trend ends. I just checked and the record high for my area was set in 1954. If we have news stories every time a new record high is set for any area, then it will be quite annoying. That's probably why most voices of reason have stayed out of this discussion.

Time to play some disc golf.

Actually, that mystery was solved back in 1991 when the first one fell. Here's a really in-depth article about it:

http://fernlea.tripod.com/tank.html

Actually, it's not, because flavour has a very distinct and very different meaning in this context.

I wouldn't quite say that.

I don't really think that the estimates of how many planets there may be has increased. Instead, our technology has increased so that we can actually start finding the planets that we've always assumed were there.

The somewhat-dubious values that Drake used in 1961, according to Wikipedia, include:
fp = 0.5 (half of all stars formed will have planets)
ne = 2 (stars with planets will have 2 planets capable of developing life)

The value given for ne seems to be rather optimistic, but it's still too early to have reliable numbers. It will be a long time before we can take any arbitrary star, and see exactly how many planets it has.

I had suspected this from the beginning.

I really couldn't understand why Megaupload ever went to court over this. Youtube has the right to take down anything that they choose. They are a private corporation.

It seems naïve to think that they wouldn't make deals with big players for exclusive takedown rights. There would be big money in such a contract.

Megaupload would just be best served to just use this publicity as a platform. Give a link to the video on a different site, and hopefully it will hurt youtube's popularity also.

First, I don't think you understand the magnitude of the ocean. Even a hole 1 km in diameter is pretty small when you consider the area they have covered.

Second, there is no reason to believe that this phenomenon happens every year. Even if it happens only once every 50 years, that's still pretty high frequency when you look at the timescales we are working with here.

Does anyone else freak out like I do at the possibility of laws like this?

For example, let's imagine Stacy (fictional person) has a 30 minute commute to work. 5 days each week, she spends the time driving home from work on the phone, talking with friends.

After the NTSB recommendations are applied, she drives home in silence. Then when she gets home, she spends 30 minutes talking on the phone with friends. Everything else in her evening is pushed back 30 minutes, and now she goes to bed 30 minutes later each night.

Now, Stacy is missing out on 2.5 hours of sleep each week. After a couple weeks, this mounts up to a substantial amount, and it begins impairing her driving!

I honestly feel safer with Stacy being able to choose how she spends her time each day. She might not always make the right choices, but I trust her choices more than the ones the government would like to force on her.

FTFA:

TTY: 1-888-835-5322
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: NEWS MEDIA CONTACT:
December 13, 2011 Janice Wise (202) 418-8165
Email: janice.wise@fcc.gov
FCC QUIETS PERSISTENT PROBLEM OF TELEVISION AGE – LOUD COMMERCIALS – BY
ADOPTING RULES TO REDUCE VOLUME

Unfortunately, I cannot maintain the monospace font, due to slashfilters. View the original article for the full loudness effect.

Actually, "simple mechanical controls" is exactly what went wrong with Chernobyl.

If they would have just let the system go through it's normal shutdown procedure, then nothing would have happened, other than the town being without power for about a week.

Instead, the engineers at the plant were told "Don't question the orders, just do whatever it takes to keep the reaction from shutting down! We can't afford another week to wait for the reaction to start again."

The engineers couldn't have done anything, if it was in the US, because all those controls were automated. But, in Russia, they were still 10-20 years behind in design, so manual overrides allowed them to remove the control rods -- against all safety regulations -- which raised the temperature enough to cause all the water coolant to evaporate. That is what caused the fuel to meltdown.

The safety problem with nearly all fission designs is that there is no "unplug one machine, and everything stops gracefully" option. Since Chernobyl, all reactors are pretty close to being idiot proof. There is no way to override the systems in such a way to prevent a graceful shutdown. But, the shutdown still relies on the physical integrity of the reactor and the containment vessels. Unexpected events like Tsunamis or falling bombs can cause containment vessels to break, so essentially there is no way to make such a design 100% safe. I'm still for nuclear power, because the value far outweighs the risk, but when the opposing side says that they can't be 100% infallible, unfortunately they are correct.

Actually, that funny old law is essentially why the FRC (Federal Radio Commission) was formed in 1912, which eventually became the FCC.

See, for you to receive radio transmissions from a tower far away, you need cooperation from all your neighbors. They have to silence any machinery that would cause interference on channels designated for radio.

Cell phone jammers are illegal because they interfere with designated channels for radio transmission. If they were legal, then you would have no way to deal with a neighbor that runs one near your house. That neighbor would legally be able to interfere with your radio, television, wi-fi, cell phone, etc.

I'm not completely sure whether you were being sarcastic or not, but this regulation, honestly, is very important. Without it, we'd pretty much have to rely on wired communication.

I get routine calls from "Credit Card Services", letting me know "there is nothing currently wrong with your credit card", but I am eligible for a reduced rate because of my excellent credit score!

It turns out the culprit is JPM Accelerated Services, Inc.. The FTC convinced a Florida court to place a permanent injunction on them back in February 2011.

Still, I get calls. It's from a different phone number every time. I'm guessing that they are phone numbers from google phone, or some other service that is untraceable.

It's pretty hard to get a conversation with a human. If you press '1' to speak with a representative, it usually hangs up on you. Occasionally you get through, but as soon as they think you aren't interested, it's an instant hang-up.

Last week, I managed to convince them to give me the full credit card spiel. After a 60 second speech, finally I spoke and said I just wanted to hear the information so I could report it to the FTC. I'm hoping that scares them enough to take my number off the list. There's nothing else I can do.

Actually, there is one other thing that can be done. You can file a complaint about the offending number (well, assuming you are in the U.S). I do this for each call I get from them, so that they lose the number that they are using.

Everyone agrees that the headline is sensationalist and basically fiction. And, of course, the /. summary is based on the headline.

But the article actually makes some sense:

The committee's action is aimed more towards developers: as war games become more realistic, do they have a responsibility to add humanitarian elements to their games?

The Red Cross doesn't prosecute war criminals. They see war as an opportunity to do what they are trained to do -- provide medical help, and assist refugees.

They aren't against gaming. They see that gaming is becoming closer and closer to real life, yet the part that they play in war is not represented. Can "assisting refugees" ever be present in a way that would be fun? It seems like a hard sell, but possible.

If a game did focus on that part of the war, it could also focus on other war-related issues, such as determining what actions in the game could be considered violation of human rights. The Red Cross probably had someone write this up as an idea, and then the Dailymail got ahold of it, and wrote a sensationalist article.

They were 5 years away, one year ago.

So, it seems that after finding the "holy grail" of the missing genome, they have been set back by one year.

I did a lot of research about this back in January, when they first said that it was 5 years away. I heard a genome scientist interviewed on the radio, and he said that the resulting baby will be at most half Mammoth. It will have more elephant characteristics than mammoth, and will most likely be non-fertile, but it is still an important step to eventually having a fertile mammoth clone.

So, as much as I'd like to imagine mammoths in the zoo for my children to see, the truth is that we are still far from that point.

I just watched the Doctor Who 2009 Christmas special called The End of Time last night. There were probably at least 50 actors/actresses who all had their head replaced by that of The Master. Even Barack Obama (a semi-prominent character in this episode) had his head replaced by that of The Master.

If only the BBC team had had this technology available, those characters could have actually turned their heads, instead of staring directly at the camera during these scenes. Oh well, it is this cheesieness that make Doctor Who what it is!