Oh, I dunno; I've seen any number of sites similar to this one, whose information is mirrored at zillions of locations on the web, including many outside the US. There are historical and cultural reasons for including the symbols at code points 534D and 5350 in Unicode, and I doubt that anyone has ever been prosecuted for installing full Unicode charsets or lookup software on their web sites.

I haven't looked for such pages on French sites, but I'd be surprised if they don't exist (with the text in French rather than English), and I'd also be surprised if the French government has tried to suppress such character codes in the Uncode lookups.

It's possible that such things has happened and I just haven't read about them. Does anyone know of cases of official harrassment for including pages like the above on a web site? For example, has any Islamic or other religious government ever harrassed people for allowing the U+271D char code on a web page?

(And yes, I do have a couple of experimental dictionaries on my own web sites, including one dealing with Chinese characters which includes an entry for the swastika characters. Nobody has even suggested that these glyphs shouldn't be there. Possibly it's because nobody has ever looked at my dictionaries, but still ... ;-)

As long as your Karma is "Excellent", you're ok.

I wonder if in some future code, those with >50 karma will have rollover errors. :)

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.

Hey, nobody told me this was a contest ...

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.

Hmmm ... This isn't really a case of scientists being wrong. The old images of dinosaurs have generally been "artists' interpretations" of the evidence, and scientists generally agreed that they had little evidence of the outer appearance of dinosaurs. Skin and other soft tissues don't fossilize too well, and we haven't had many samples until recently.

And the idea that birds are close relatives of or descended from dinosaurs isn't new. It was suggested by none other than Charles Darwin himself, based on similarities in the skeletons. Many of his colleagues agreed, but they even more agreed with the reply "Yeah, that's certainly interesting; can you find us some better evidence?" The situation stayed that way until the 1970s or so, because birds don't fossilize well. New fossil discoveries finally supplied enough evidence so that in the 1980s, the birds got officially reclassified as a branch of the dinosaurs.

But it was still well understood that there were a lot of loose ends, and Further Research Is Needed. Were feathers a development of the birds, for flight? Or had their non-flying ancestors had feathers, perhaps for insulation? The evidence wasn't nearly good enough, and it was left as an open question. Over the past decade or so, the evidence has trickled in, and this report seems to be filling in the gap. People who've followed the story aren't surprised; they're just happy to read about the evidence.

In any case, it never was a case of "Scientists thought that dinosaurs didn't have any sort of fur or feathers, but they've been proven wrong". It was more like "We didn't have the evidence, since feathers don't fossilize well, and now we've collected enough evidence that we can be pretty sure that those old artistic interpretations reptilian dinosaurs with bare skin were inaccurate; most of them (except the largest) probably did have feathers." This isn't considered a criticism of the artists, of course, since they didn't have evidence either, and many of them stated repeatedly that most of their drawings included a large shovel-full of conjecture. It was expected that, as evidence trickled in, they'd have to revise their drawings a lot.

But it likely is a good example of non-scientists saying "Scientists proved wrong" when the scientific data goes from "we don't really know ..." to "we've found the evidence ...". This is sorta the flip side of the constant "Those scientists just wasted time and money doing research to prove something that we knew all along" comments from people who have little understanding of what science is all about (and have always "known" things based on no evidence at all).

(Actually, since I first read about this topic back in the 1970s, I've been rooting for the tyrannosaurs having big, colorful cockatoo-like crowns of feathers. But that's just me, and I'm still waiting. But I won't be surprised either way. ;-)

Screens come in all sizes and aspect ratios

So do developer's brains. Perhaps even more so than the screens. :)

but there are all sorts of surprises

I think you just summed up all of life.