It doesn't take much to run Angry Birds.

When I grew up in Sweden, tests were marked with "R" for correct and a checkmark for wrong. Then we moved to Canada, and one of my first quizzes was math. I took it up to the teacher, who checked off every question and handed the test back to me with a big smile and the exclamation "good!".

I was devastated. I sat at my desk completely baffled as to how I could have gotten every question wrong. I was thinking that maybe math is different in Canada. Eventually I went back to the teacher to complain, and after some confusion we were both sorted out.

So yeah, don't count on checkmark meaning what you think it does to everyone.

Well I certainly never saw a dime of that money.

Well it could, but it's overkill. The big deal about this thing is that it doesn't distort any magnetic field it's in, making it effectively "invisible" from the magnetic field

If you just want to protect something from a magnetic field and you don't care who knows it, just contain it in something like mu-metal

I'll just ignore that unnecessary insult.

As I said, I've done tons of undergrad labs and in most all cases of conflict the measuring was the problem. So your sentence "It could be measurement error, but it's more likely that your models are wrong" is completely at polar opposites with my experience doing science right in the lab.

Measuring tiny gravity variations while in orbit of a tiny planet in the vicinity of a huge sun with a vicious solar wind, wildly fluctuating magnetic fields and insane temperature variations is not easy. In fact, TFA itself admits that it was very difficult. It would be unprofessional for the modelling crew to not question unusual results. They did, they checked everything over, eventually concluded that the numbers must be good, therefore the model must be adjusted.

THAT'S what's called being scientists.

So, if you measure neutrinos travelling across Europe faster than the speed of light, then it's most likely that the model that says neutrinos cannot travel faster than the speed of light is wrong?

I did plenty of labs in Physics undergrad days. Almost every time things didn't make sense it turned out to be measurement problems.

There are gobs to choose from: See canadianisp.ca.

To be fair most all of them rent most of their infrastructure from Bell or Rogers, but their policies can be quite different. For example, my ISP permits me to run servers and is net neutral on their network. Once the packets hit someone else's fiber it's beyond their control of course.

It's not like they have little nanites with cameras crawling around there. Fine, the main thrusters aren't working, but how did they manage to specifically blame it on a piece of rag in a fuel line? Aren't there a lot of ways a thruster can fail to fire?

Ah, sounds like you've been working with lower level stuff then. Any consumer GPS module these days consists of a module smaller than one square cm with serial output that you simply have to parse (plus stuff like a 1 pulse-per-second output pin).

NMEA-0183 is the ASCII protocol used by most marine equipment. GPSes also have a binary protocol which is quite a bit richer. Anyway, among other things they barf out your lat/lon and the date/time in UTC once per second.

By "the GPS protocol" I meant what is sent OTA from the satellites, which does indeed include UTC correction. In other words, there is no excuse for a GPS module to not provide a means of giving UTC. And any GPS that produces NMEA-0183 output has no choice but give corrected UTC time.

The binary SiRF protocol also provides UTC.

And yes the time will be off until you get a fix, but of course you're not supposed to use the timing data until the unit does have a lock.