Nobody Cares! (Science & Tech Edition)

danielravennest

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Wired has a fascinating and lengthy article about a large meteor that fell into a small village in Peru in 2007 and the meteor hunters who traveled there to see it.
Turns out a great place to hunt for meteorites is Antarctica. However, your average meteorite hunter isn't equipped to look there, so it is left to scientists. They also recently discovered a big-ass crater in Greenland, so where the glaciers meet the coast would be a promising place to look.
 

Govi

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I keep thinking that the uneven distribution of the increase in sea water (due to ice melting everywhere and that the Pacific Ocean is almost half of the globe) will cause increased stress at all the current geological stress points: more earthquakes, more volcanism.
 
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danielravennest

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A 110 year-old ad for Popular Mechanics gets 3 out of 4 predictions right. Not bad:

* Talk to Mars? The Deep Space Network does it every day.
* Food from the Air? It is called aeroponics, growing plants without soil or ponds.
* Power from the Sun? We all know about solar panels.

* Heat from Melting Icebergs - seems to violate the laws of thermodynamics.

 

Dakota Tebaldi

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NASA's public coverage, including on NASA TV and NASA's social media accounts, of New Horizons's flyby of Ultima Thule on January 1st has been cancelled due to the government shutdown.

However, you will be able to watch some coverage streamed on Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab's Youtube channel during the flyby.
 

Noodles

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As for why websites store entire cc numbers, it is so you don't have to type it in again on your next order. That should be opt in though. Putting the number in a cookie is inexcusable.
Wouldn't there be better tools to accomplish this though with modern tech? Like the way you can do a little web handshake and set up a payment agreement through PayPal, only on your CC. Instead of Amazon ever seeing your credit card info, you log into Visa or whatever and say "yes, let this account on Amazon use my money".

Actually I think Visa Pay is a thing. Also Amazon is a bad example because frankly, I trust them to have my info and use them as a 3rd party pay a lot.

You get the idea though.
 
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Wouldn't there be better tools to accomplish this though with modern tech? Like the way you can do a little web handshake and set up a payment agreement through PayPal, only on your CC. Instead of Amazon ever seeing your credit card info, you log into Visa or whatever and say "yes, let this account on Amazon use my money".

Actually I think Visa Pay is a thing. Also Amazon is a bad example because frankly, I trust them to have my info and use them as a 3rd party pay a lot.

You get the idea though.
A lot of small businesses use Stripe. They never see the credit card number. For any business to accept credit card numbers themselves over the web they have to be "PCI compliant" which from all accounts is a major pain.
 
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Dakota Tebaldi

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I was thinking more of a fearsome and unstoppable corpse-army; but I suppose dancing at their funerals would be entertaining.
 
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danielravennest

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I was thinking more of a fearsome and unstoppable corpse-army; but I suppose dancing at their funerals would be entertaining.
Why bother with the rotting meat. These flexi-sleeves can work around anything - wood, metal tubing, etc.
 

Khamon

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because rotting meat is an effective weapon and robozombs truly are awesomely more worser
 
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Dakota Tebaldi

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Kind of curious - this was a really good tornado year. Good for people I mean; assuming nothing changes over the weekend, 2018 will be the first year since record-keeping began (in the 1950's) that the US has had NO EF-4 or -5 tornadoes all year, anywhere in the country. Also on track to be a new record for the lowest number of EF-3 tornadoes - there's been 12 nationwide this year, with the previous record being 15, in 1987.
 
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