I'm not aware of any physical protests. All that I recall were letter-writing campaigns about Cassini.

And none at all about Philiae. The ESA never uses them. I'd have been surprised if they'd included RTGs on Philiae, on which weight was already at a premium. A lot of things had to go wrong for the solar panels to be insufficient, and the space of things going wrong that don't also render the probe inoperable is fairly small. TFA makes its case only in one unsourced quote, and doesn't even begin to take any actual design considerations into account.

Space probes do get started on earth, and have to go through a somewhat unreliable launch process to get to space. There is a fear that if the rocket were to blow up, radioactive material released into the atmosphere would be dangerous.

It almost certainly wouldn't be. Even in the worst-case scenario, that the RTG vaporized on reentry, it would be heavily dispersed. Still, NASA calculated for a similar case, there could be several thousand deaths (page 66). (Not that you could peg any one death to it, but rather thousands of additional cancers compared to not having an accident with an RTG launch failure.) Plus some land contamination with radioactive dust.

So it's not completely insane to be concerned. They figure your personal odds of dying because of it to be one in a trillion, which most of us would say is too low to think about. But I can understand why a few people might say that even one-in-a-trillion (especially since it's repeated for everybody on the planet) is worth considering. It's not as simple as having it millions of miles away in space.

A lot of hate might be averted by making it clear that it's a review article rather than a news article. This is a news site, and its audience has a large numbers of experts and interested laymen. The assumption is that it's telling us something we don't already know, and the style of the summary is no different from any other Slashdot post. The effect sounds offensive and condescending: "Here's a thing you didn't know!" "Actually, I do, and better than the underlying article."

The article itself is (usually) fine in its original context. It's the appearance on Slashdot that aggravates the Slashdotters. Combined with the fact that people are rather sensitive to spam, and an out-of-place article looks like spam (even if it isn't), which ties into a whole separate set of aggravations.

If they were to present it with a different subtext: "Hey, we're nerds here. This is a topic that many of you know about, but many don't, and it would be interesting to discuss it amongst ourselves. This article is a good starting point." That would start with a different writing style, one that didn't imply that the information was brand new. It wouldn't hurt to add a visual differentiator as well: a different icon, maybe even a different color or shape. And perhaps a way for people to filter it from their streams.

I get that there isn't nearly as much interesting, discussable news as one might think, so Slashdot has to drag in some stuff from wider afield. If they acknowledged that, and adjusted for it, they could make it a positive experience for their audience, rather than a negative one.

Yeah, that was pretty much my response. I read the summary, and was trying to figure out what the actual news was. Then I hovered over the link, found it was medium, and clicked here to get a brief burst of schadenfreude from the people bashing medium. Achievement unlocked.

Has there ever been a country (or any political unit) that wasn't a plutocracy? Perhaps some are better than others, but I can't think of any government where the rich don't exercise a lot more control than the poor.

And in fact the Science article mentions that Schweitzer is skeptical of the new results. She's the expert in all the ways in which the conclusions could be wrong, since she's got one of those extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary proofs. She's sincere and not stupid, but the things that she's trying to detect are extremely tiny and subject to a lot of contamination, and she's well aware that it could be wrong.

This is a preliminary result and will require a lot of different approaches to give the kind of confirmation that will lend it credence. It would be great, but extremely puzzling, if it's true. (It doesn't help that it gives the creationists a chance to inject more of their idiocy into the conversation.)

It's true: every denier is a worthless idiot, and the vast majority of those who accept anthropogenic climate change has a poor understanding of how and why it works. That's perhaps 90-95% of everybody discussing the question.

But there are still perhaps 5-10% of people who have at least a rough grasp of what's going on, and they're capable of actually discussing the real questions. Not the stupid questions, which are a waste of everybody's time, but real ones, like "how can we refine the models?" and "what are we going to do about it?" The latter may seem irrelevant, since government action is stymied by denialists, and individual actions are largely unimportant. (I'm glad you bought a Prius, and it is helping a bit, but not nearly enough by several orders of magnitude.)

Still... as bad as it is, stuff does get done. If we're locked in by chemistry and the suicide pact that our Constitution has turned into, we can at least take mitigating actions. The earlier we know about how agriculture is going to change, the better. We can take at least minor defensive measures for our flooded coastal cities. The US military needs to prepare for the various wars that are driven, in part, by climate-change driven poverty. It's even worthwhile to consider the "winners", like those Canadian farmers who will be able to take land that hasn't been touched and which finally has a growing season long enough.

It's not optimal; it's not even as good as is pragmatically feasible. But it's the best we can do in that paradox of democracy, where somehow all of us collectively are supposed to be smarter than the average of us individually. The majority of deniers and the majority of well-meaning but clueless (albeit correct) believers roughly cancel out and hopefully, hopefully it leaves a tiny minority able to do something that's better than not knowing at all. Thin gruel, but it's the best we can get.

Oh, for the love of Pete... thanks for the headache. Now I know. (And wish I hadn't asked ;-)

I know I'm way behind the times when it comes to consumer electronics, but the last time I bought a TV I wanted a 1040p, and kind of assumed that 4k and 8k would have 4x and 8x the vertical density of that. Apparently not; Wikipedia sayeth that it switched from vertical to horizontal resolution.

Now that I know this, it's not difficult to understand. But I'm curious as to why they'd change naming conventions. Is there any particular reason?

Last year, at 3.7%. And the year before, and the year before, and the year before. The last time it was under 3% was 2010, when it was 2.1%. For the first quarter of 2015, it was an annualized growth of 3.6% (second estimate; the Q2 estimates aren't due until the end of next month).

The US did, indeed, decline during the recession: growth was flat or negative in 2008 and 2009. But GDP increase year on year has been pretty consistently in the 3.5-4.5% range since the close of the recession. Source.

Not that GDP is a great measure of economic success, but you were the one who brought it up. Practically all of that GDP increase goes to a tiny percentage of the population, and they fight hard to keep it that way. The rest is treading water or falling back. But as a whole, by the coarse measure of GDP, the US has been doing quite well ever since the end of the recession.

They'll be able to Bing it.

I believe there's a chicken-and-egg thing there. The cops are armed because the criminals are armed. Every time a civilian is shot, we're told that it's because the officers had reason to fear for their life. Even when the civilian is unarmed, the officer gets to use a weapon that can kill at a distance, and they have that weapon at their disposal.

And they actually ARE at risk: last year, 49 police officers died by firearm (two accidentally). (Another ten by vehicular assault, and two by the kinds of non-gun, non-car kinds of assaults that seem to make the headlines when civilians are killed.) In return, about a thousand people are killed by police. Many of whom, I suspect, were in fact dangerous... because they also have guns. Or at least, might.

I don't know how other countries avoided this chicken-and-egg problem. Mostly, I suspect, by limiting firearms before mass production made quality, portable, concealable firearms readily available. (I'd be perfectly content with an "originalist" reading of the Second Amendment. Go ahead and issue everybody a black-powder rifle, which is what "arms" meant in 1791.)

Regardless, I don't really know how to un-screw this pooch. And a thousand civilians will die this year, along with a few dozen police officers, because of it.

In a slightly different formulation, Shakespeare:

The Nurse, from Romeo and Juliet, and clearly citing it as an existing cliche.

Ironically, once we get past that point, we can actually do away with all of the stop signs. They exist only for humans, who have limited reaction times and can only see line-of-sight. The computers will be able to know where all of the other cars are (at least, the one with transponders). They'll signal, but they'll do it in a far more meaningful way than just a blinky-blinky light.

They can probably even go considerably faster than the current speed limits, safely. But they probably won't have to, since the those 5-10 mph are rarely big enough to make a significant difference in your arrival time. The only times when it would really matter is when you're making very long trips, and then we'd want to take into account the significant additional fuel costs of driving that much (compared to just leaving a little sooner).

Is it the customer who's causing the copyright violation? Or is it Netflix, for feeding the content to somebody not coming from the US?

I would assume that Netflix would be considered sufficiently diligent in having attempted to feed it only to US-based IP addresses, but perhaps they have a case against the VPN provider? Or against the customer themselves, not for the copyright per se but for violating the terms of use (which presumably say "You will only use this from America, and not attempt to fool us with a VPN")?

Perhaps that would be the ultimate way to put it, that the customer is attempting to defraud Netflix, putting Netflix at risk of violating their licensing terms. I'm not sure what the law has to say about such cases, where you've got a chain of causation. It would certainly be wildly inefficient for the providers (all of them) to sue Netflix for violating the terms, then have Netflix attempt to recover the money by suing those who broke their own terms. But that would be, as far as I can tell, the logical chain of events.