Try playing with this. If the values are precise, then yes, the sun will be stationary. But, give the sun just a slight initial velocity and the system goes quite funky. Any tiny change will upset this system.

Here's the values I used:
Body 1: 200 0 0 0 -1 (or 0 for stable system)
Body 2: 10 142 0 0 140
Body 3: 10 -142 0 0 -140

Although this might be one application, it's more likely that the military would want to use it for intelligence gathering: imagine how much information is out there, if only we could separate it out from the noise?

Reading the article, however, I'm not sure that this by itself would serve much purpose even then, though, given digital communications. Someone feel free to correct me if I'm wrong on that point.

Translation: If you're a member of the church, go see your bishop.

Translation: If you're not a member, go find any one of those three people to get an endorsement.

That person will hold a short interview and basically ask if you will live by the school's honor code. Say yes, and you have your endorsement.

Here's the specific form: Ecclesiastical Endorsement. Please feel free to ignore the parts specific to LDS applicants.

As I said, there's no requirement to be religious (only a statement "encouraging" non-LDS students to attend their respective religious services). Think of it like marriage: you don't have to go do a church to get married (although that's what religious people do), just go to the county building and sign a form or two.

But I don't think your problem is with the application process or with religion in itself: it's with the rules and regulations that go with being a BYU student.

You know what? That's fine: not even all "Mormons" want (or have to) live by those rules: I even know some that have a (gasp!) beard! They just go elsewhere for school, and nobody thinks the lesser of them.

Oh, if only they believe what you imagine they do ... the world would be a much simpler place.

I won't bother going into too much detail here, but your comment started with a common misconception (that the followers of Christ in the Book of Mormon all had white skin, with dark skin being a curse for wickedness), ventured into the strange (using "Elohim," a name Mormons use for God, to make their beliefs all the more strange), and ended with complete nonsense (and designed to be flamebait, to boot!).

Yes, their beliefs can be strange when exaggerated and misunderstood, but please don't try to purposefully misrepresent them like that.

Oh, noes! A fear of the female body!!! Fear of homosexuals!!! A fear of beards!!!

Oh, wait. No, it's not fear -- a term you clearly picked to deprave those you obviously don't understand.

I find this in connection with "Forced religion" bit to be quite amusing. BYU requires that its students be upstanding, moral people (using an "Ecclesiastical Endorsement" to do this). Never do they force others to be their religion, or to be a member of any other. All the school asks is that the students take some religion classes -- no more than you'd get from a catholic school (and some would say much less).

And they certainly don't advocate killing others to enforce what they believe. Feel free to compare them to Islam if you like (and there's some interesting comparisons there) ... but drawing on the Taliban? Come on!

Strange, nothing I read from here, here, or here say anything about these "core priniciples."

It's quite interesting to see how many times scientific discoveries from BYU are discussed here on slashdot. Even more amazing is how ignorant slashdot readers are of the school and its students.

This is what annoys me most about modeling hardware in VHDL, verilog, etc. versus programming software.

With software, the goal is to fix any warning messages (even with -Wall), to the point that many programming standards require -Werror as well. The warnings are generally important to follow and are generally heeded.

With hardware, synthesizing a design produces hundreds of warnings even with simple designs -- many of which warn about common, intended behavior. Maybe I just used crappy tools? Either way, the warnings were ignored simply because they didn't seem to be important.

The lesson: don't overload the user with warnings, but use them selectively and usefully.

Oh, please no! Flashing is annoying and will only make them close the window faster, if anything. If it's that important that the user remember something, it should be written to some log (hmmm ... are there any OS's anymore that don't have a logging capability?)

Oh, but I see all sorts of potential abuse here. Why does every program think that they're the most important application running on your computer? Do I really want every notification message to require such specific acknowledgment?

Imagine Clippy talking out loud. /me shudders

Let's work on getting rid of modal message boxes completely instead: make them unnecessary when possible. Then we can talk about making sure the user reads the few truly important ones that are left.

Well, that certainly explains the malware the school installed on the laptops. Infected, indeed!

And yet, you (and every homeopathist out there) don't seem to understand how homeopathy works either ... because it simply doesn't.

Yes, I am aware that a small portion of the homeopathic community favor low-level dilutions for (possibly) valid medical reasons. But nearly all homeopathy is not what you're claiming.

Please return when you've found it. I know people with MS and other diseases "curable" by homeopathy.

On a side note, my brother-in-law (a doctor) told me once that every study has to take into account a 30% placebo effect. Can anyone confirm this?

Exactly -- that would be worthless. Rather, they need an advisory panel that can examine the QA practices and such.

I'm used to examining million LOC codebases -- give me or anyone else here on ./ a few days to look at their procedures, bug database, unit tests, etc., and we'll be able to tell whether this sort of problem could occur again and what was done to solve it. But I wouldn't/couldn't do the testing myself, ever.

I'd even be happy with a lone consultant, just to advise them. It's a start, at least.

Finally, a way for Obama to actually create jobs!

I disagree -- paying attention to your health is one thing, but any time you take a placebo (and sometimes potentially dangerous) cure instead of a real, effective treatment, you're losing out on all counts.