Don't be that guy...

People who like treated water and politics should not see them being made.

In 1967 Parnelli Jones was on the verge of winning the Indianapolis 500 in Andy Granitelli's Pratt & Whitney gas turbine racer, when a transmission part broke too close to the end of the race to recover from. So impressive was his performance that rather than risk having the race taken over by non-piston machine, they re-regulated turbines requiring them to have no more than 14 square inches of air intake, effectively crippling their performance. Parnelli commented at the time that he thought they could adapt and win anyway.

The facts of history and of mechanics remain. Turbines are one of those things suppressed, whether purposefully or not, by a status quo threatened.

Rusty's answer is "gravity tractor", right? Same as last time this story ran. That one included the fact that he wanted to build and presumably sell said widgets. Since he hasn't, that's hardly today's technology.

Today's technology would be something already tested. Say, the cable and reel used on the shuttle's tethered power generation experiment. Land a large reel of cable, anchor the end, and let centripedal force throw the reel out. After it's tens of kilometers out, the center of gravity will have shifted and the rotation will have slowed. Figure the best direction to throw the rock, wait for the rotation to get it close to that, and blow explosive bolts on the anchor. It doesn't take much change in trajectory to turn a hit to a miss if it's done early enough.
   

In the absence of specifics, I can only wonder whether they used a flat bed or a hand held.

How they get from brain activity they know virtually nothing about to the abstraction of social value is beyond me. It's beyond them too, but they don't let that slow them down.

The brain responds to familiarity. The more prior associations that had been formed due to a particular stimulus, the more those associations are re-activated when presented with the same stimulus. The brain also responds to unfamiliarity, but in a different manner. The experimental design to test for these is called 'go/no-go'. AFAICT they just did a memory test here.
 

"Astronomers know of a number of other galaxies with straight arms, such as the pinwheel galaxy M101. So ours probably looks something like this."

Astronomers know of spirals and barred spirals. TFA says SOME of the arms are straight. There aren't many 'both' spirals. Most likely the different shapes of arms represent this galaxy's original arms and those of the galaxy it absorbed, in which our sun originated. Compared to the problems of evolving differently shaped arms, this is the simpler explanation, and testable by observation.

"I am looking for a virus with which I can infect the lab computers (only connected to local network, no outside network connection) that would be easy for the students to remove by hand. Can the Slashdot community point me in any directions?"

Yes. Teach them some useful Computer 101 stuff instead of wasting time on stuff that makes the computers useless. If you must cover the subject let them read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Tappan_Morris Before you infect any machines, you should too.

Will they be scraping even more mountains off the planet to get to it? Will they fill the remaining creek beds up with the effluvia from getting to it? Will they keep even more public roads under a permanent state of "repair" and detour to disguise the fact that they're simply ruining more tax funded roadway with heavy machinery? Will they drive residents out of even more entire towns due to blasting damages and constant noise from heavy machinery? Are they going to do anything with the energy rather than find cheaper ways to dig coal? WV has two industries, coal and railroad. If they replaced coal money with energy money the railroads would die. They won't let that happen. They've been fighting off a 3/4 MV high tension line for years, you think they're going to allow an energy exporting industry to pop up, string wire for multi MV lines and sell electricity to its neighbors now that they're got them hooked on WV coal? I lived there are loved it. But I realized the state is owned by stockholders for whom green is considered a place to dig. Even of they took advantage of a chance to do something good, they wouldn't do it right -- they'd do it cheaply to maximize profits and the population would suffer the effects. WV *was* green. It's owners don't give a shit about green.
   

"Of course, if you have multiple machines running behind a router or modem then you're going to have a difficult time pinning down which machine might have the infection."

If you call turning off your machines and running them one at a time to check each machine's response "difficult", then you can damn well pay the neighbor kid to come over and do it for you, just like you paid him to come over and get your Internet Explorer brand computers surfing on the infotube highway in the first place. While he's there, have him take out that "MOE - DEM" thingy. Those blinking lights are just slowing things down.

No, different motions help prevent it. Once inflamed, repetitive motion of any sort is more likely to aggravate it. If there's permanent damage, any repetitive motions will exacerbate it to the extent that motion uses the damaged parts, and trying to force use on other parts taking up the slack can irritate them. Changing positions between equally unsuitable orientations will in turn irritate the damaged part and stress the as yet undamaged. The position that uses the injured parts least and the uninjured maximally and proportional to their abilities will be least likely to cause strain, pain and more injury. Using that position with the mechanism requiring least effort is optimal.

I've got one very damaged wrist and one embedded titanium bar, both victim of several accidents and far too much surgery for body parts to endure without accumulating more damage in the repair process. I can't write with a pencil for more than two minutes due to the tendons being as much scar tissue as anything else.

But my thumbs work fine by themselves. Thus I use trackballs like the Logitech M570. Once learned and used at highest response speed, I can, for instance, play an entire game of solitaire in less than 100 seconds. The rest of the hand rests on the device with very little movement required to trigger the buttons, thus the least effort is required to support them. I tried many different methods before finding this. It's the least tiring, in fact not at all, nor do I end up hurting after. Since my arm rests on the table, I don't even use the braces anymore.

1. It is a balloon. Not even the people who fly these for a living call them spacecraft. Says WikiP: "A spacecraft is a craft or machine designed for spaceflight." This thing popped when it rose above too much atmosphere. It was not designed for space. It was still in the stratosphere when it failed according to design.

2. The Karman line is the generally accepted edge of space at 100 km (62.5 mi). This is where an aircraft would have to fly so fast to get lift from the thin air that it would achieve orbital velocity in the attempt and so wings would be superfluous. The US has awarded astronaut wings to pilots flying above 50 miles. This doesn't change the objective criteria of the Karman line.

3. The CSXT GoFast achieved space altitude (72 miles) on May 17 2004 and is the only unmanned civilian craft to do so to date. It was designed for a flight profile carrying it into space and so was a spacecraft. As was SpaceShip One, the only civilian manned spacecraft to date.

4. Reaction Research Society hit 50 miles in 1996. Hunstville L5 passed this 19 mile mark, but was ballooned launched and so not entirely spacecraft.

5. No amateur spacecraft made from off the shelf or home made components has achieved even a 50K ft altitude according to Tripoli records. With Tripoli and the National Association of Rocketry's recent facing down ATFE over the definition of 'explosives', the FAA et al. is redefining amateur rocketry to include power up to 200,000 lb-ft sec and a concominant (and easily achieved with this power) 93 mile altitude. Most motors in this range are "experimental" ie. home made, but there are a few commercially available motors that can be staged and/or clustered for this power, the 152mm dia + 96" Loki Research P motor at 80kN-sec each being the largest you can currently put on your credit card. 11 of these will put you just under the FAA's proposed limit. 12, and you have to apply to NASA's office of space transportation for a permit. Expect an amateur spacecraft to make the flight, because now it's a matter of qualifying for the license and buying the parts.
 

"From The Earth" is rather prosaic when you compare it to 3 dimensions. Look at any constellation from the side. The distances are usually much greater than the apparent angular separation as seen from Earth. It makes it quite obvious that 'constellation' is as synonymous with 'illusion' as it is with anything else. But from the side you can see that some groupings hold, such as the majority of Taurus. Most of it is an open cluster, so of course things won't change much in 50K years, the members are moving together through the sky on parallel paths. And it's the cluster that's moving more than the local stars, so the one "moving" in these pictures is really just getting passed by.

Earth's (Sol's) location as it moves affects these, but not as much as its position over a much longer time scale, like 250M years. In that time you can see the milky way wash up and down the sky a few times, like a huge wave. Seen from outside the galaxy, it's obvious why. The sun and the local group of stars in traveling around the galactic center, but the orbit swings back and forth through the galactic plane two and a half times as it oscillates it way around the center. We'll lose almost all the constellations at the peaks because we'll be outside the populated arms.

All this makes 50K years from one viewpoint rather humdrum. It also suggests an answer to one of the SETI questions, why aren't they here. If technical and traveling civilizations exist in the numbers supposed, and they wanted to go to other stars, they would probably want to go to those they know would be in the neighborhood for some time. Among the last they would consider visiting would be a small group of tiny stars, none greater than 8.5 absolute magnitude, that used to belong to another galaxy ripped to shreds by this one and on a trajectory taking them out of the plane of the majority of stars. For half the next 50 million years they'll be more isolated than the present 90% of the way out from the center position. And on each pass-through more and more of these interlopers will be captured by the galactic arms, so who can say where they'll end up, IF they slow down and hang around. They could get thrown out of their own grouping entirely and end up hovering around in the galactic halo too far from anyplace to be accessible (relatively). So why go to those, when there's thousands times more stable members of the galactic arms? All that disruption makes it unlikely there's any life on those tiny galactic fast-walkers anyway.

But if we did happen to get thrown out of the local group's obit and outside the galaxy, no more constellations then. Instead we'd have the entire galaxy all on one side, in one hemisphere of the sky. With a view like that, who needs constellations?
 

This is a very common topic in social psychology experiments. Many that are published fall prey to an error of calling the example selected most to be 'attractive'. It's more correct to say that the most common answer is the most common opinion of attractiveness. In the press to prove their point, they ignore the fact that a less common answer is also an opinion of attractiveness, just to fewer people. Just because more guys like the hard, bony ones with corners so sharp they bruise you and threaten to poke holes in the water bed doesn't mean some don't consider the softer, more squeezable ones to be attractive.

And while you're getting your 'fat chick' jokes ready to throw, keep in mind that the less likely a guy is to get a girl at all, the more likely he is to adopt an attractiveness standard in line with the majority (so he can lie as much as possible) but to an even greater degree (so he can better lies than the other guys do do). He might as well claim that's his preference since he's not likely to get any sort, and will take advantage of any chance to toss his artificial preference out for others to see, expecting them to take his preference as a history. Yes, there's an awful lot of this attractiveness research done, and only some of it tends to reach erroneous conclusions.