That's very interesting. I didn't know that. I admire them deeply, all of them. Emily Rosa was born in 1987, according to the Wikipedia article, which makes her 23 now. I don't think she reads Slashdot, though. I would be delightfully surprised if so.

Very nice to find that there are kids who are being taught about science. Before them, Emily Rosa was the youngest to publish a peer-reviewed paper. Her paper was an amazing experiment to refute terapeutic touch in a very well conducted study. Kudos to them

This reminds me of the luminiferous aether and the Michelson-Morley experiment. A lot of physicists at the time were certain that luminiferous aether existed, but no experiment was able to prove it -- even with the proposed adjustments that are also cited here. Then Einstein, from the work of others, came with relativity theory. I always thought that string theory was weird (not that the universe should care about what I think, anyway), but maybe scientists are looking in the wrong direction. It would be really exciting if a completely different theory appears.

Since they're broadcasting via electromagnetic waves, I suppose they are trying to install Linux in the Universe. It will take a little while for the changes to propagate, but maybe -- only maybe -- the Universe might make a little more sense from now on. I heard they were trying BSD instead, but the drivers weren't available...

Correct! After all, the words recited from the Linux kernel are not very different from the babbling and mumbling from the last Lady Gaga success!

When I started using computers, they used K7 tapes to store programs. You know, they were mostly used for audio, but since they were cheap, it was a perfect media for home computers of that time -- bits were converted to sound, mostly using some sort of frequency modulation. There was no Internet then (I know, how can one imagine a world without the Internet), so the only source of information about computers were magazines and an occasional TV or radio program. Well, there was a weekly radio program where I lived that broadcast computer programs -- the binary files themselves. You just pressed "record" in your tape recorder, hoping the transmission was good enough, and then you could load it in your computer. Sometimes, they broadcast ZX Spectrum, sometimes it was MSX programs. They usually worked well, but sometimes the noise in the transmission would cause a lot of errors. It was a very nice way to distribute the programs

Isn't it fitting that Eris is the goddess of chaos?

I think this is well explained in the books and in the movie, though somewhat in the subcontext: hobbits have so little power and are so devoid of ambitions (other than living a very simple life) that the Ring doesn't have a strong effect on them. It would corrupt a powerful being such as a Maia (such as Gandalf) or a great Eagle. Moreover, that might explain why the Ring has absolutely no effect on Tom Bombadil. But maybe I'm seeing too much.

Yu mispeld "evriun".

No, I think it's more like Episode VI, when Admiral Ackbar says "it's a trap!"

No. But they considered a sufficiently advanced technology.

I am not American, and it's been 15 years since I got out of college, so I don't know what happens, and this is a sincere question: what is the problem if you don't study in the last edition of the book? Won't the professor let you inside his/her class? I remember studying things like Physics and Calculus using very old books -- since everything you study on the first 4 semesters is theory stablished hundreds of years ago, a 5 years old book is as good as a new one. The only thing I can see is that some of the exercises will be different, but I really don't see how this can be a real problem.

It's not that. A C64 has less space than a Nomad and no wireless. Thus, lame.

And people never believed when I told them I was brilliant!

If it is so difficult to raise the computers to the level of human intelligence, it is probably impossible to reach the level of human stupidity.