It doesn't make much of a difference to Kepler.

Kepler measures the light level over time, and uses the amount of obstructed time to make most of it's calculations. It does also use the total light output difference to determine the size of the planet (really the ratio of the size of the planet to the size of the star) - but the error bars are pretty big anyway, way more than the total light output of dark side of the Earth.

The only way that Kepler would miss the planet all together was if the alien civilization made their planet put out as much light as their star.... Not very likely. An advanced civilization might want to make their planet as bright as daylight all the time, but that would be much less bright than the star.

Use a web-based (GoToMyPc.com?) or pre-installed remote administration app (Windows Remote Desktop? maybe VNC?) - or install RealVNC and use it's web app. Then control your home PC and run whatever IDE and language you prefer. I'd recommend Visual Studio Express and C# or C/C++, but that's just personal preference.

You're not comparing apples to apples.

First of all, you're ignoring the amount of energy required to import and refine the gasoline. I've heard estimates as high as 8kWh per gallon for refining. Most of the power plants in the country use coal, which doesn't have an energy intensive refining process.

Secondly, you're ignoring the fact that 40% of electric vehicle owners have solar panels. This negates that pesky coal power plant and its transmission deficiencies.

If you compare the efficiency of the vehicle itself, when you put electricity into an EV, it is 85%+ efficient. If you put gasoline into a car, it is 25% efficient (max). With a gasoline car, no matter what technology comes out, that vehicle will never be more than 25% efficient. With an EV, if you want to have a green car, you can buy solar panels and charge your car that way. Or you can live in an area with wind, solar, geothermal, or nuclear sources (Southern California) and offset pollution that way. Or you can join a program with your electricity provider, and pay a little extra, and get a higher percentage of your electricity from renewable sources.

awwwww...

In California, you could buy this car and get $5,000 state and $7,500 federal tax credits - lowering the cost of the car by $12,500. The standard gas version of this car is looking to run ~$16,000... well equipped probably $20k. So long as this is in the same ballpark, you -could- be driving an EV for under $10k, and that is a steal for a brand new car.

http://public-blog.nrc-gateway.gov/2011/06/17/rumors-and-the-rising-river/

Local solar astronomer here - Current global warming trend is definitely not Sun driven. We went through a prolonged period of solar inactivity over the last 5 years and what do you know, temperatures kept going up. We also monitor the Sun in every conceivable wavelength and from multiple angles, so it would be pretty hard to have some significant amount of energy hitting us that we don't know about.

This guy should have let the "honeypot" article sit around and see what happens first, rather than having the explanation article AND have it be posted on slashdot. Doing this interferes with the experiment by making it less likely to be picked up - anyone who reads the slashdot article (or the article it links to) first will not believe and propagate the honeypot article.

There was not a single female ("Eve") alive at that time, there were at least thousands of females, and those females were all reproducing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve

This image explains it pretty well:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MatrilinealAncestor.PNG

go and just grab all the GPS transmitters and put them on city busses or something and then watch the church ppl looking stupid.

You don't need to help them out, they look stupid on their own just fine!

Timothy McVeigh was a white, middle aged, Christian, army veteran... And he killed 168 people. It is the second deadliest act of terrorism in the United States, behind 9/11.

Profiling someone based on their age, gender, religion, race, etc, is not only unconstitutional, it also doesn't work.

I was thinking the exact same thing!

Its not like they randomly selected this guy off the street, swabbed his johnson, and said "This might be the rapist!"

They must have already had pretty substantial evidence to be able to get him, so really the low probability doesn't matter, because 1/13 means that 12/13 chance it would have cleared him by finding someone else's spit on his stick. The DNA evidence still makes the case against him stronger.

GUILTY!

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I am so sick of news reports claiming that if you alter one entangled particle, that the other entangled particle is affected too - like if you push one, the other one moves. IT DOESN'T!

What happens is if you measure the state of one particle, and then you measure the state of the other particle, they are always equal (or opposites, depending on the entanglement type).

Think of it this way... You have a CD burner that burns two CDs at the same time and puts random data on both, but the random data is identical. Obviously, no matter how far away the CDs are, if you read them, they contain the same information. There is absolutely zero information transfer going on here!

Carbon-12 is stable. Carbon-14 is not stable, and has a half life of about 5700 years.

Carbon-14 is generated in the atmosphere by cosmic rays hitting a Nitrogen atom, and the atmospheric concentration of C14 to C12 is about one in a trillion.

Natural atmospheric CO2 can be created with any kind of Carbon atom, but fossil fuels will only create C02 with C-12 atoms (since the C-14 atoms would have long decayed). So if we find out that recently the atmospheric concentration of C(14)02 to C(12)O2 is different than the concentration of atmospheric C-14 to C-12, then we can determine the quantity of CO2 in the atmosphere that is created by burning fossil fuels.

Following along that same line of data, we can also take ice core samples and examine the atmospheric makeup in the past, so that we can verify to check natural levels of C(14)O2, and ensure that they are much lower than current levels.

I am not familiar with Thomas Friedman, but it seems to me like his explanation of the evidence is just a bit dumbed down so that he doesn't have to explain the periodic table, isotopes, stable and unstable atoms, decay rates, and the other sorts of things that average day-to-day people gloss over at. :)