One of the tricks in production of litigation documents is to produce them in the least convenient form that conforms to the rules. So if the opposing side requests a bunch of e-mails and Word documents, and they don't have the foresight to request them in native format with metadata intact (or the rules don't require you to send them that way), you send them a stack of CDs full of TIFFs. There are even programs that will load up all the documents for review by the baby attorneys* and then convert them all to TIFFs for production. And when the other side sends you a bunch of TIFFs on CDs, it will load those all up, OCR them, and tag them with keywords. This is in part why production is so ridiculously expensive. (The other reason is that the attorneys will spend half a million dollars filing motions and counter-motions fighting over the search terms to use on document and e-mail searches.) (This is why attorneys always win lawsuits, as long as the client is solvent. Occasionally, one of the clients wins too.)

*If you retain a big law firm, they will still bill you $300/hr. for the baby attorney to sit in front of his computer all day, flipping through documents looking for stuff that should be tagged as "hot" or "damaging" or whatever before they go out. Then when the opposing side sends their production, baby attorney sits and reviews all of those too. The whole time, baby attorney is thinking, "I got seven years of post-secondary education for THIS?" But he'll do it, because the partner told him to, and they're paying him a salary of $160,000 plus bonuses that depend on billable hours, and as mind-numbingly boring as it is, it is the easiest way on earth to rack up billable hours, and he still has $200,000 in student loans to pay off.

Plutonium dioxide has an 88 year half life, and is water insoluble. When RTGs are used, they're heavily encased and designed to survive catastrophic launch failures, and have done so, only to be collected and reused on later launches. If they had put an RTG on Philae, your chances of being harmed by it would have been approximately equal to your chances of being devoured by an Indomitus Rex. Unless you're planning to break into the sealed casing, slice off a chunk PuO2, and put in in a sandwich, you'll probably be okay.

These guys would like to have a word with you.

Besides I'm unclear if the RTG was justified for this mission mass or duration wise.

It would have massed about 1/10th the solar panels and lasted longer. "Justified" doesn't enter the equation.

While I don't remotely agree with the NSA's bulk surveillance program, what you describe is called a "circuit split," and it happens all the time. In fact, it's one of the best indicators that the Supreme Court will take up a case.

Yeah, I saw those once. They weren't that bad for cheap fan fiction, and they even had a couple of good ideas, like that the clones were originally fighting for the Republic and then turned on the Jedi. Maybe Disney could use some of those ideas when they make the actual Eps. I -- III (presumably some time after they finish VII -- IX).

What is this Star Trek IV you speak of? On a related note, isn't it weird how they skipped straight from ST II to ST VI, and Spock was suddenly back with no explanation?

I gooigled "SLUG." Are you referring to the unit of mass, or the shell-less terrestrial gastropod mollusk? And what does it have to do with traffic?

I've never used sling. Does it have a DVR function?

I have to pay for a monthly subscription to DirecTV because my wife wants HGTV. I would gladly pay for the "Binge Watch House Hunters and Fixer Upper Online On Demand" subscription if it existed.

Also, liposuction and velcro.

True, but Hamilton was an outlier.

The whole military system is so turned on its head now that it has become a distinction without a difference. But it didn't start out that way. The the Framers were very leary of standing armies, and so restricted military appropriations to two years, assuming that major military appropriations would happen only in times of declared war. In the meantime, states could keep militias that could be called up in times of war. That's not how it has worked out, though. We now have a huge standing army, and while we technically follow the rule that military appropriations have a two-year life, we renew them like clockwork every two years. So in effect, we have become exactly what the Framers hated (and had just overthrown).

I'm in favor of this, mainly because "privateer" is a cool word, and it would be all swagger and swashbuckling to have them. Also, it would probably be an excellent way to stop African piracy. And paying bounties for capturing/killing terrorists would probably be cheaper than our current war effort.

Antonin Scalia basically single-handedly saved the Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment. And as MorphOSX noted below, he (along with Roberts) voted with the majority on this one. Thomas, Kennedy, and Alito dissented.

It's not as easy as you think to divide the justices up into "liberal" and "conservative," and those two "groups" certainly do not always vote as a block. You may not agree with Scalia's judicial philosophy of constructionism, but he is usually very disciplined and consistent in applying it.