It looks, and I could easily be wrong here, like they got the list of infected targets from the malware side, not as reported by the victims. So they wouldn't need China (or any other country) to report anything.

People have been getting around air gaps since the day they were invented. Like any security measure, it may work perfectly in theory, but humans are far from perfect, and can always be exploited.

Why do you assume commercial activities are the only thing that makes sense to do from the station? As a massive object in a fixed orbit, it's terribly, terribly designed to interact with other satellites. On the other hand, NASA already does a significant amount of research on the station, and has been ever since…

They're taking a cue from aircraft companies, where this has been standard for decades. And in those cases, the test pilots almost always ex-military test pilots as well. As long as they're trying to move to private development of spacecraft, it does make sense to look at private development of aircraft as a model.…

So, to summarize: you don't understand how snow clearing works, and so instead of trying to learn more, and perhaps pass on some useful knowledge, you're going to proudly display your ignorance by trying to make fun of professionals doing their jobs.

Makes sense to me. I pretty regularly check out ebooks from the Boston Public library, but haven't stepped in there (except to study, it has some really nice study spaces) in years. Heck, if this sort of thing convinces more publishers to allow libraries access to their ebook collections that'd be even better.

Hoovering seems to work for them. There are a number of clips and photos out there of astronauts with giant long hoses, doing exactly that. And while it does take a while, remember that without gravity, dust doesn't settle anywhere, so the constant airflow they maintain in the station gets most of it to the air…

How sweet would it be if, instead of being convex (stupid curvature of the Earth) it was concave? 10,000 sq km of parabolic concentration! You could scorch the moon if the focal point was right.

I would laugh, and laugh, and laugh if GoT really did take a hard left turn from the books and everyone lived happily ever after. In between storming the HBO offices with torches and pitchforks, but still, laughter!

They're (a) comparing them to each other, and (b) actually watching this gunk accumulate on the surface of the weights. When they were made, they were machined to within parts per million of each other, and then those known differences were measured even finer. But yes, even then, there are differences. Which is why…

Nope. This is the one SI unit that doesn't have an arbitrary definition (yet). That chunk of metal is the definition of the kilo. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilogram

Not in this case. The kilogram is pretty much the exception to all other SI units. That chunk of metal really is the kilo. You can get very, very close by saying its so-and-so many atoms of such-and-such, but the actual, honest to god definition is whatever's sitting in that basement in France.…

Various standards organizations have been trying exactly that for decades. So far, no one has been able to get something that matches the accuracy and repeatability of the IPK. (There's also been a bit of an argument over what technique to use.) So until they do, we're stuck with the best we have.

The juxtaposition of the headline with the YouTube preview frame in the sidebar had me asking a very different question for a few seconds.

Do limos weigh 500 tons where you're from? That should be enough to test technologies for 98% of mining and in-situ resource utilization. Anything up to needing to break 500-ton chunks off of even larger asteroids, if that would even be required.

Difficult to practice zero-G mining on an orbiter...

It's not. With a 100mW laser or more (which is about what it takes to pop balloons), it would take less time than you can blink in to cause at least temporary damage. And not much more, or much more powerful, to cause permanent damage.

"I still doubt they can do much unless they're held right on the eye for a long period of time".

Gizmodo, where "like magic" apparently means "in accordance with a theory that's been around for years"...

NK, Israel, England... If you set the limit at just getting an object 100 km high, there are a huge number of countries that have. Heck, there are small rocket clubs that do it all the time. The whole "human into space" part is a bit more challenging, though.