Are not public schools subsidized by the childless?

Severely. And some of us are fighting back to move the tax burden back to the profligates where it should fall.

The policeman camera is the best reign of all,

From a country (most likely, this being Slashdot) where the reign of monarchs was overthrown by terrorists over two centuries ago, and where the national self-image is as a cowboy clutching the reins of his horse and riding off into the sunset ... I find the inability to distinguish the two homophones particularly hilarious.

And it seems to rapidly be becoming a more common misspelling.

When replying to a post I barely notice who wrote it. A reply post is not just a message for the author it's a statement for all of slashdot to consider. In other words it's about the content of the comment, not the identity of the poster.

I'm a prolific poster (5000+ last time I looked), I was a subscriber until dice took over. My Karma has been stuck on excellent for a decade and I get mod points every few weeks, yet haven't meta-moderated in years. I'm also modded troll quite frequently but it's never heartbreaking since I don't post to be popular. I normally blow my mod points on a single story that I don't want to comment on.

Like most people, I get modded up when commenting on something I actually know about and modded down for ignorant comments about things I don't know much about.

To be honest, I was thinking of a second laptop on a cart, with a bunch of cables hanging out of the back end of it. Possibly four laptops (TFS mentions VMs running XP so any brain-dead 32nd-hand laptop should have the necessary grunt) on a cart so you can do an entire island at a time.

- set out the cones to stop new cars arriving at the target island then hook up the cables as existing drivers finish and leave.

- set upgrade running on first system to be ready. When you're blocking on that pump, swap to starting the process on the next available pump ; lather, rinse, repeat until all 4 are running away.

- meanwhile, start moving the cones so the first machine to be finished will be the first available to the next customer, and you're ready to start isolating the first pump of the next 'island'

If you can spread things out evenly, then your maximum hanging around time has dropped to 7 and a half minutes, and if there is any significant amount of user input, your idle times are going to be shorter than that.

Though it is a networking problem, it's really an optimisation issue.

You can get a much, much larger effect by attaching a much larger, more easily manufactured and testable actual solar sail.

How are you going to do that attachment again? The attachment mechanisms for Philae worked spectacularly well given the amount of information that was available about the comet's surface structure ten years before contact. So we can realistically anticipate a similarly accurate degree of knowledge about the surface properties of the asteroid we need to manage in two years time.

Next suggestion?

I notice she skipped addressing the questions dealing with the EV1.

Probably necessary, since there is not going to be much more she's likely to be able to add to the subject, but it would be worth hearing anything she did have to say.

If you drop the (US), then quite often. In Canada the maximum punishment for a provincial crime is two years less a day. Anything more serious than that is federal.

It's true in that those universal statements aren't universally true. Grass isn't green in the winter here, it's brown. The sky is blue outside my window currently, but yesterday it was gray. There's an awful lot of water around here that isn't wet during the winter.

The Hycopter uses its frame to store energy in the form of hydrogen instead of air

This makes it sound like there are all kinds of quadcopters out there that are using air to store energy. This is news to me, although given the low density of compressed-air storage I'd be pretty surprised if it's true.

Anyone have any idea why anyone would say this, as opposed to "instead of batteries"?

Can you imagine the dystopian dictatorship where trekkies come to power? All of the halls of power full of people walking around in spandex and fake ears and brow ridges, the fed directed to work toward the absolution of currency, the military directed to accelerate development of phasers and for all recruits to undergo "Kobayashi Maru" training.... NASA would finally get their proposed $18,5 billion dollar annual budget passed - except that the bill would have the word "annual" crossed out and the word "monthly" written in its place. National anti-bullying legislation would be passed, probably with a name like Spock's Law. And of course they'd insist on referring to the UN as the United Federation of Planets.

The Russians tried to send a sample return mission to Phobos. It failed to get out of Earth orbit. Eventually we'll probably do that though.

The impact hypothesis nicely explains why the moon is less dense than Earth: the impact preferentially threw up light elements from the crust and upper mantle, not heavy elements that would have sunk to the core. The densities of Phobos and Deimos are also less than that of Mars, but because they're so small, and are probably more like orbiting gravel piles, their densities are also consistent with small asteroids.

"many of the planets have orbits that are very near circular, but we do not interpret their existence in a similar fashion."

We do actually. It's pretty well accepted that the planets around the sun coalesced from a protoplanetary disc surrounding the young sun. The impact hypothesis for moon formation is similar: a big impact causes debris to be thrown into an orbiting disc around the planet and one or more moons then coalesce out of it. The alternative, capture of a separately orbiting body, isn't seriously considered for the origin of the planets.

Old fart Aussie software dev here, as recently as the early 90's Australia (and the US/UK) considered encryption techniques to be a "munition" for export purposes, it was illegal to export anything stronger than 48bit. Then some bloke put out some OSS called PGP (Pretty Good Privacy), he had stayed within the regulations by using something like #define BITLEN 48, but also given the world an algorithm that could be trivially changed to any arbitrary length and re-compiled. This created a legal paradox that drove the customs people nuts, there was a huge fuss about it at the time but eventually the various governments realised the regulations were unenforceable and dropped/ignored them.

Aussies made a huge mistake at the last election. This mob have managed to politically unite Aussies (against them) in a way I haven't witnessed since the downfall of Gough Whitlam (IMO - due to GW's "sore loser" re-election campaign). Trust us, we have mandatory voting and will boot this embarrassing mob out the first chance we get. There isn't a sector of Aussie society they haven't upset in the past year alone, the only chance the conservatives have of winning is if they put Turnbull back in charge and allow him to purge the "tea party" types from the current cabinet, they have way to much power for the tiny slice of Aussie society that they represent.

That's an excellent point, under the current rules in Oz, Uber and it's drivers should be classified and regulated the same as any other limousine service. All dispatcher services (including Uber) should be treated like the current taxi dispatchers, that is have their feet held to the fire if they fail to ensure they are supplying a licensed and insured driver whose vehicle meets mandated standards.