So, it's 1800 light years away, not exactly a close neighbor, but it will be an extraordinarily energetic event, no? So how bright is it expected to be -- just another dot in the sky, or are we talking Biblical night-into-day territory? Thanks.

Or so you were led to think. As the article points out, when officials visited this recycling center, they put up a Potemkin Village of a recycling setup so it all looked right. And assholes like this are too cowardly to come up with something like this: he got the idea from somewhere, and odds are good its actually standard industry practice, just kept quiet to ensure maximum profits at the public tit.

Ah, but if it runs on a "chartered" model, you don't have to wait in line and go through the security check & etc. Smaller airlines running small airplanes do this; the one time I used it I was surprised at the "Oh, you're here early, go ahead and board and we'll tell the tower we're ready once everyone is here."

My high school didn't have robots, but certain students had to carry around bags of flour that were supposed to be their "babies" to take care of. I remember both sexes being quite proud of having to take care of their sacks of flour, and dressing them up/showing them off.

Nope, the corporations and state own the ammo box as well. Time to think outside the boxes they've convinced you you're stuck with.

$70k gets the legislation into the system -- all that takes is one congresscritter, and yes they're that cheap. Then you have to lobby every committee member on every committee that reviews your legislation, to keep them from re-writing your bill into something you don't want, then you have to lobby enough to make it pass the first vote, then enough for the other half of Congress, including keeping any other committee from sabotaging your bill and enough votes to get passed and made into a law. Then you have to lobby the relevant enforcement agency, as well as possible state-level efforts depending on the bill and its arena of impact. The $70k is just the entry fee to the party, if you want to drink, that's extra.

I have to admit, I misread the title as "Habits" instead of "Habitats," which immediately made me wonder what those habits would be. Close the airlock behind you so the next person can get through seems obvious, as does being aware of the location of the nearest radiation shelters in the habitat in case of solar storms, and getting enough exercise to to avoid the dreaded bone and muscle loss. But habitats are cool too.

Seriously. The other day a limited access highway I use for my commute here in Virginia was shut down entirely in one direction, traffic sent on a detour through the local streets and traffic backed up for miles in both directions, due to someone's bike having fallen off a vehicle and landed in the road. There was a cop taking pictures, with dozens of those little evidence markers, a children's bike in the middle of the road, and several other cops blocking the road and redirecting traffic, for what should have been a "pick it up and let traffic move on" situation. During the evening rush hour, I should add.

Heck, I do blacksmithing and knifemaking for a hobby, and even that was impacted by the space program. My propane forge has insulation based on the space shuttle heat protection; the grinding belts I use were developed for making rocket and jet turbine blades, some of the steel I use came out of those programs, and the titanium I sometimes play with is only affordable because the aerospace industry uses enough that there's an economy of scale for production of Ti now.

Nope. If handed that ruling, the owners will declare bankruptcy, re-incorporate, sell their companies back to each other, and then claim that this new fictitious corporate person they've transferred the profits to has nothing to do with the company that has the liability and responsibility to repair stuff. It's how all the major corporations divested themselves of their pension obligations, and how corporations in general treat any toxic "asset" that costs them more than they want to pay out on. The only just solution is to make them open up the codes and repair processes.

Also, the Asimov stories were, at their heart, about smart people doing clever things to prevent disaster before it happens. Hollywood doesn't like thinking, hates smart people, and is all about the disasters actually happening so they can get butts in seats to sell tickets. The average movie goer likes explosions, mass casualties, and easy explanations. People being clever just pisses them off by reminding them how stupid they are. Now, you could take the Asimov three-laws stories, twist them a bit, and make them all explody and flashy, but they would still fail at the box office because the audience can't relate to the protagonists. It's why I despair of a decent adaption of many of the great books out there: the great stories just aren't emotional enough to get made into a movie, let alone have a decent budget. Producers will grab a title, maybe some plot elements, and then force it into a mold and squeeze until everything that made the story great is gone, leaving something that to them, who have never read the original and who wouldn't understand it if they did, looks like something that will put butts in seats to sell tickets. And then they wonder why it bombed, and vow to never try again.

"You can't melt iron with wood fires." Actually, the first fuels used to smelt iron and other metals was wood -- charcoal to be precise. Still used by hobbyists and re-enactors who want to recreate the iron available to the earliest smiths. A lot of forests have been chopped down over the centuries to make iron.

I believe there was an issue with laser-based weapons back when a tank-based laser targeting system was determined to be in violation of certain warfighting conventions in regards to blinding weapons. I supposed on the proposed air-to-air platforms it isn't much of an issue, but there would seem to be an issue with air-to-ground use, as it would be trivial to use a 1-megajoule laser to blind anyone in a large area who was looking in the wrong direction at the wrong time. Probably moot as the platform is air-to-air from the description, and probably less effective in real life than chemical explosion propelled metal, but it wouldn't surprise me if the technology got shelved over such concerns.

They do, Landrover and some other off-road systems do exactly that -- switch from one mode to another until they find one that works. Costly, though, and often invisible to the end user, as it should be.

As a blacksmith, I will point out that I have had many a hammer break on me: not just Chinese recast engine blocks on whatever scrapwood they could handle it with, but name-brand hammers that should have had better quality control. I'm not even particularly strong, but for heavy forging work or repetitive striking of hardened steel tools will take a toll eventually, and some are flawed right out of the box with hidden cracks in the handle or an improper heat-treatiment of the head, or once a beautiful handmade hammer had an issue with the wedge, also handmade, not being properly applied, allowing the head to go flying off after a few uses. Engineering a hammer isn't hard, but don't assume that because it's just a lump of metal on a stick that it's impossible to mess up.