i sometimes wonder
If this is all a super scary story so that the boffins can get extra funding?
Sol is having a bit of fusion indigestion again and has belched forth one of the largest solar flares to come hurtling towards Earth in the past five years, according to NASA. NASA said in a statement that the solar flare on March 6 at 7 PM Eastern time weighed in at X5.4 on the solar flare scale. The flare came from an area …
Different AC here. Prior AC is correct, the story has been, what's the term you Brits seem to like... oh yeah, 'sexed up' to generate more money for the groups that are involved in this sort of monitoring. As part of my tech support job, I come into contact with some of the folks who run these things, and they aren't the types to engage in the sort of end of the worldisms that every article I've seen about this have invoked.
Yeah, look at all those over-paid scientists wearing bling and driving pimped-up mercs. Seriously, if you were money-grubbing, the last job you'd go for would be as a scientist. Most are poorly paid, work long hours and have to deal with conspiracy nuts and ill-educated morons like you.
Perhaps if UK boffins published the information instead of our cousins across the pond, then the times would be in GMT. Why should hard working journalists have to translate times for us when they can just cut and paste the article and let all of us scratch our collective noggins to work out what the time is in real units.
OK, OK, I'm leaving, I know should bite the hand that feeds that bites the hand that feeds IT.
5,125-year Mayan Long Count calendar just hits reset on December 21, 2012.
Well that's probably an indication as to what happened to the Mayan civilisation then, their programmers only allocated 3 bytes for the year and the entire IT infrastructure collapsed after 999 years leading to a collapse of their civilisation.
Ok, Ok, I’m going…
Not getting it.
It's the worst one in five years and they are talking about it taking out power grids, GPS, aircraft falling out of the sky and all the usual scaremongering BS. So presumably there was a worse one five years ago and I don't recall any of those things happening then. Can we assume therefore that they are exaggerating a tad?
With any significant solar flare, there is ALWAYS a chance that some part of the power grid will go down. I don't actually have a problem with them mentioning that as it is better to be prepared and not need it, than unprepared and need it. What bothers me is that instead of reporting it as 5%, 1%, or 0.1%, the articles read like it is a 50% chance of mass blackouts across the [insert your locality here].
Perhaps I'm missing something but
"one of the largest solar flares to come hurtling towards Earth in the past five years"
doesn't seem like a significant event to me. Five years is not a long period of time - surely the normal variation of solar flare size means that such a flare is to be expected. And this is just 'one of the largest' - not *the* largest, so it is presumably even less significant for that reason.