See? Useful research! Humans are still very much needed up there to come up with ideas that yield tangible rewards. No one can claim that it isn't valuable to learn something new about something as essential to space exploration as thrust.

Your argument goes astray when you say that it makes no difference to the producer whether you watch something without ads through TiVo and the like, or by torrenting something. It makes a difference in the sense that built into the price of broadcast tv (i.e.: free) is the assumption that a certain portion of viewers will find the ads so annoying that they'll get it on DVD. From a producer's point of view, the choice isn't between watching it on TV (while skipping the ads) and watching a torrented episode (without ads); the choice is between watching it on TV and buying it on DVD. An often heard counterargument to the above is that the people who download wouldn't have bought in the first place. I can at least anecdotally disprove that by saying that since I got a media box with Sickbeard I haven't bought any series on DVD, which previously I did (albeit incidentally). And even though downloading (without uploading) is legal in my country, it's not something I feel particularly good about.

I guess that these days it's mostly out of a habit created back when iOS was, in fact, amazing when compared to other phone OSes at the time. These days, I think that anyone neutral will have to agree that it definitely can be improved upon. And I'm saying this as a iPhone user who has only briefly used Android phones.

How would that make it less mind-boggling? It just relocates the problem. Does it somehow make more sense to think that life had a few billion more years to evolve on some other planet than just 1.5 billion years here on earth? I'm not trying to be pedantic here, I'm genuinely curious as to how you'd think "space" is a better explanation...

Well, it's not as if spelling it with an 'h' is Ukrainian....

You are not a.... scholar of English grammar?

woosh...

Sorry, but... You can't checkmate with only a king and a bishop.

RE:myself: .. than the 1:300,000 times the probability of a Jupiter impact, of course.

See, and that's where I think you're wrong. The chance an object is going to hit a target isn't determined by its acceleration like you describe it is. You could say that its trajectory will be more affected by Jupiter than by Earth, which will mean that it'll probably pass by Jupiter closer (only a little, mind you) than by Earth, and will move away from Jupiter at a greater angle with the original trajectory than from Earth, all other circumstances being equal. But an object would have to be moving very slowly, or have a trajectory *very* close to it for the gravitational force to actually make it collide with the planet at all. Again, without doing the calculations (which I'd be hard-pressd to do correctly, by the way, although I do have a BSc in physics) I'd say the cross section is the major factor here, which would make an impact on Earth much more likely than the 1:300,000 you project.

I understand all that, but I don't see how these arguments warrant a *linear* relationship between the relative masses and the probability of impact. This is why I used the word "overwhelmingly" in my post, which I admit isn't backed up by calculations.

How do you figure the mass has anything to do with the probability of impact? The cross section, yes, that's obvious, but the mass? The trajectories of the colliding objects are overwhelmingly determined by the gravitational interaction between those objects and the sun, not between those objects.

How, in this context, is a bigger number not better?

Damn liberal commies, opposing flying cars....

A double-entendre involving the '$' sign. Nicely done!