Growing food in space is a stepping stone to longer trips in space. If you can grow your own food, you can go further without packing as much stuff... less food supplies means more people or science can get sent to space ( or you can use a smaller rocket & less fuel. )

I live in upstate NY and would only need to dig 30ft down to heat and cool my house for free.

Is Facebook really saying they're evil or are they shutting them down & then going to them with "If you want that information, it's going to cost you"?

I'm going to assume that 1) since it's on the NOAA website and 2) there's a largeish NOAA logo in the Atlantic Ocean, that it is most likely using information from NOAA. I mhttp://science.slashdot.org/story/15/03/09/1643256/californias-hot-dry-winters-tied-to-climate-change#ay be wrong, however.

To show that you're a decent human being. If you know someone has a problem, "poking the bear" can cause that person to get worse or even snap. Someone with a behavioral problem has found an outlet that doesn't involve injuring themselves or other people (either intentionally or unintentionally). If you think this is a cool idea ( I think it's actually pretty awesome ), good for you. If you think it's stupid, just leave him alone.

It's not really a contradiction. Increasing the chance from .0000001% to .000002% is not just increasing, but DOUBLING the chance of something, but still means that there is very little chance of it occurring. (Numbers not related & for illustrative purposes only) They don't go into numbers, but it's basically along those lines. TLDR from the article: Quake swarms *can* mean that a larger quake is coming, but they do not believe that it is the case based that they have had several swarms in the area recently.

I'm a huge fan of Linux Mint. They release fairly regularly and have several "sub-flavors" as well. I'd try something like Maya(13). That's their Long-term support version. If you're concerned that she'll have issues, download it & run it as a LiveCD ( the default ). If she likes it, it is set up for easy installation right through the booted liveCD. It's very easy to use & my almost 10 year old laptop has no problems with it. It actually was a faster/easier install than any Windows version & updates are (mostly) seamless. http://www.linuxmint.com/relea...

I've had several iDevices and have to say that apple branded cables suck. I've had to replace every apple branded cable with a generic because the sheath is thin & there's no support near the connectors, so the sheath cracks and wires are exposed. ( I've had 2 iPods and currently have an iPad ) I had the apple branded cable for less than 6 months and wires were visible at the connector... I've had the same iPod and cheap chinese cable from a no-name chinese company for well over 3 years now. It gets the same abuse that it did before & isn't even starting to show age. The new "lightning" connector doesn't seem to be as bad, but only because of the design of the connector as a whole. I wouldn't be too surprised if it was an apple cable...

1) The article is from mid 2011. 2) There is nothing in the article that says that it's dead. I want a news article posted on Slashdot. Let me make stuff up about it and post links to a year old article that says nothing that's in my summary. This is why I have been frequenting slashdot less and less... ( It used to be multiple times daily & is now maybe twice a week ).

Exactly this. I have a relative that went there on vacation with 20 or so friends. They were walking around late in the evening & turned down a "wrong street" they were all arrested & held for no reason for several days. My relative & his friends think that the only reason they were released was because it was such a large group. When they were released, they were told to never travel without a guide again & make sure they didn't go down that road.

I'm not going to say that, but I could see it happening. All they'd have to do is tell people that it's to stop pedophiles & terrorists and far too many people would be perfectly OK with it. It's not that bad here, but give it a few years and it may get there... the only difference is that here we will vote for it.

Huge numbers of people pirated the movie before it was released. The movie broke the record for opening weekend sales. Therefore, using the same figuring style that the MPAA uses ( only in reverse ), piracy actually made the movie industry millions!

I really wish I had mod points for this...

"They intend to accomplish this by offering a configurable app that players download from the gaming site which would allow bitcoin mining jobs to run on these beefy GPU-outfitted client computers. Like DropBox, the CoinLab app will reside in the background so that the players are not even aware of the mining that occurs during the gaming session. To the gamer, certain virtual items or level upgrades would be obtained. " How is this putting a trojan on the computer? It seems that their business plan is to offer a separate download that will mine bitcoins automatically while they are playing. In return, the player will get bonus items for every X number of blocks processed/bitcoins mined.

Unfortunately, I think you're right. Either that or they're planning on recording all the IP's that connect to it for "tracking" purposes.