Of course, if the "sphere" is really a swarm of independently orbiting objects, that would be (very nearly) stable.

The same is true for a "ring-world" of independently orbiting objects.

No. Neither is stable.

It is pretty easy to see. Imagine the sphere moving a tiny amount so the star is no longer at the center of the sphere. Now the question is, do the resulting gravitational forces pull the sphere back towards the position where the star is at the center, or do they pull the sphere further off-center? Clearly, they are now unbalanced in favor of pulling the close side of the sphere even closer and, thus, sphere-world is also unstable.

Well, you don't know me personally. But you now know OF someone who doesn't bike because of helmets.

My whole family has bicycles and helmets. The bikes are right out on the patio ready to go. But whenever I suggest that we go for a ride, we realize that we have to dig out the helmets, adjust the straps and what-not, and by then it all seems like too much hassle. So the bikes have been out there on the patio all summer and we haven't ridden once. Last summer, same thing. Summer before, same thing.

Our kids never go out to ride them either because dealing with the helmet is a pain.

I've got a daughter who is eight years old and doesn't know how to ride a bike primarily because of the insane belief that it's dangerous to ride a bicycle around the park without a helmet.

There is nothing on the list that isn't one of the usual suspects.

I expect people in the UK will start to find that every chocolate bar in the store broken or smashed as people "look" for the winning bars by bending and squeezing them.

FTFY

I know a sales guy who's card reads "Executive Producer".

Is not dead yet!

Ummmm... Fire Hose? Yeah, that's the ticket!

Posted from my Raspberry Pi...

According to the article, some people cannot get vaccinations due to allergies or other medical conditions. Those people are put at risk.

Also, some vaccinations are not 100% effective, so anyone for whom the vaccination was not effective is put at risk.

I keep reading this, that Gnome 3 is for tablet computers. Where does this come from? I'll tell you where it doesn't come from: people using it on tablet computers! I tried to use it on a tablet computer. It does not work. If you ever used it on a tablet computer you would discover in the first two minute, as I have, that Gnome 3 IS UNUSEABLE ON A TABLET COMPUTER!

Gnome 2? Works fine. KDE? No problem, LXDE? Works great. Gnome 3? YOU HIT THE WALL IN TWO MINUTES! TWO MINUTES!

I actually like Gnome 3. I want to use it. I use it on my desktop and my laptop. But the Gnome developers won't fix bugs even when they are complete show-stoppers. Hey Gnome team! How about making a password dialog box that, I don't know, maybe actually allows a guy to bring up an onboard keyboard instead of taking over the desktop?

Cancer is caused by a small number of mutations and does not behave in a way that is healthy to the entire organism. These cottonwood trees, on the other hand have "variation within a tree... as great as the variation across unrelated trees" all within a healthy organism.

I was just going to say that they're only about 10 years too late!

This practice is, arguably, already illegal under the US Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

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

It all depends on whether your employer would be considered "authorized" to access the computer just because you coughed up your credentials.

If giving your credentials to other people is against the TOS of the site, one might argue that your employer is not authorized and, furthermore, that you might be guilty of "Knowingly and with the intent to defraud, trafficking in a password or similar information through which a computer may be accessed without authorization."