Will Galileo Make Jupiter a Star?:
In October of 1989, NASA launched the Galileo spacecraft toward the planet Jupiter. Its mission was manyfold: to explore the moons of the giant planet, to investigate the environment of Jupiter’s neighborhood, and to drop a probe into Jupiter’s atmosphere to measure its physical characteristics.
After nearly eight years, Galileo’s mission is over. It is out of fuel, and has been hammered by Jupiter’s radioactive magnetic field for so long that its hardware is dying. NASA decided that the best thing to do is use the remaining fuel to drop the spacecraft into Jupiter, where it will burn up harmlessly. They feel this is better than letting it continue to orbit the planet, because it might eventually crash into one of the moons. One such moon, Europa, may just possibly have the right conditions for life to evolve, and they don’t want Galileo to contaminate the moon, even given the extremely long odds of it happening. Galileo will plunge into Jupiter on September 21, 2003, around 20:00 hours Greenwich time.
But some people think that NASA had more plans for Galileo. They claim that NASA’s nefarious scheme was to drop Galileo into Jupiter and use it to ignite Jupiter like a fusion bomb, either turning it into a star like the Sun, or simply blowing it to smithereens.
That’s right my Terran amigos, Jupiter is going to finish what Zeus started… or something to that effect.
Anyways, as Mr. Plait states, the eggheads at NASA are going to do a controlled crash of the Gailileo probe into Jupiter’s atmosphere, rather than risk taunting the cellestial gods of the Galilean moons — especially the ones sanctioned by Clarke.
So, just like Planet X, this entire situation has conspiracy written all over it — I’m sure both Oswald and the masons have something to do with it.
Giant star caught swallowing three planets:
A giant star has been caught in the act of swallowing three planets, one after the other, with each “meal” accompanied by a massive eruption.
“It has been suggested in the past that stars might engulf planets in this way, but we believe we have actually caught this action for the first time,” says Alon Retter of the University of Sydney, Australia.
The star, known as V838 Monocerotis, is about 20,000 light years from Earth. In January 2002, it temporarily became the brightest star in the Milky Way, 600,000 times more luminous than the Sun. At the time, astronomers struggled to explain the spectacular explosion.
Just so I’d let you know - for the record - I voted against any planet consumption back in 2000, so I’m not responsible for any such stellar cannibalism.
This Gaulic barbarism will surely lead to the decline of civilization as we know it — free V838 Monocerotis!
SBC Won’t Name Names in File-Sharing Cases:
As the recording industry pursues its lawsuits against those it says are digital music pirates, SBC Communications has emerged as the only major Internet service provider that has so far refused to identify computer users whom the industry suspects of copyright infringement.
[...]
SBC, the No. 2 regional phone company and a major local telecommunications service provider in the Midwest and West, has received about 300 such subpoenas and has refused to answer any of them. It has stuck to that position even though Verizon, the biggest local phone company — which has most of its customers along the East Coast — lost a major lawsuit this year against the recording industry.
Yup, guess who my neighbor’s ISP is? That’s right, SBC. And guess who repeatedly told them not to blow the lid on a certain secret operation involving electrons, a stick of Juicy Fruit and the angle of the Sun at noon yesterday? That’s right, MacGyver. And guess who Homer voted for? That’s right, Kodos.
While I’m sure you’d like to know more of the plot, what this Slashdot story basically boils down to is: I was under medication when I made the decision to burn the tapes and by resigning, I impeached myself.
K, now it’s your turn to play Nixon.
I mentioned that Intel unveiled a ultra version of the Pentium 4 (it’s actually a Xeon MP repackaged) yesterday, knighting it with Sir Extreme status.
AcesHardware linked to some benchmarks that I found interesting because it shows off a 3.06 ghz Xeon MP 1 MB L3 cache (which is a 533 mhz FSB part, the ‘Extreme’ uses an 800 mhz FSB and 2 MB L3 cache). It compares the Xeon MP with a slew of other chips, including two Opteron’s, with the benchmark results showing that the new chip from Intel will most probably rank high in most real-world benchmarks (some synthetic too).
Anyways, expect to see this new Marketecture® in a store near you, sometime in the following month or so.
