From the sound of it, it'll almost inevitably end up costing money. With that in mind and by the powers vested in me by absolutely nobody in particular, I hereby dub it "feemail".

(One *could* say that it is supposed to be a kinder, more respectable alternative to the rough-and-tumble wild west of existing (e)mail, but then there are those who think it's just a prettier version that will inevitably cost a bunch of money.)

I would *love* it if I had a viable alternative for my primary printing purpose, but alas, there is none. You see, I am now a scuba instructor (in addition to my real job), and there's really no way to carry and use a netbook, tablet, or such underwater (and I don't mean just in the shallow end of a pool).

I picked up a small black and white laser printer (as toner is *absolutely* impervious to running), a pack of very heavy high-quality paper, another pack of card stock, and plenty of hot lamination supplies. When I need something like a class roster, rental equipment assignment sheet, or the like, I print it on both sides of heavy paper and laminate it. (The same thing is on both sides, so no matter where it ends up at the pools, springs, or boats, it's always visible and convenient.) If it's something like a "lesson plan" pick-sheet, I'll print it on card stock, nip a corner, laminate it with thicker plastic, and punch the nipped corner for attachment to a trigger snap. Doesn't last forever, but it'll certainly last more than a few classes, and I'm always optimizing anyway (which would require a revision regardless).

Now, this isn't to say that I'm paper-centric. The class rosters and gear sizes and assignments get typed into an online form, and at a click, they are sorted and arranged into three tables (by student name, by wetsuit number, and by scuba gear number), and a PDF is dynamically generated with maximized text size given the class size. I can login and change anything at any time, and I can always reprint. The paper is only a necessary convenience (and will not cause me to cry if a wayward student sets a scuba cylinder down on top of it, hehe).

Of course, things like student exams are required on paper for record-keeping purposes, but I count those as the students printing-by-proxy. (I *did* completely redesign the multiple choice answer sheet to be *much* more user-friendly. The existing one distributed with the instructor materials is, get this, type-written with single-spaced rows of capital letter O for the answers. I get much lower missed-response averages with an alternating-row shaded, letter-containing oval, sets-of-five answer sheet.)

I remapped the non-NumLock keypad to the various keys to control my TiVo in SlingPlayer. Zero is the 30-second skip button, the decimal point is back-skip, nine and six page up and down, five and two play and pause, eight is the TiVo button, and SlingPlayer mute and system mute round out the rest.

It's actually quite a nice system (much nicer than Control-F, Control-B, and other seemingly randomly-chosen keys). I use AutoHotKey to set focus to the SlingPlayer window and send the key or keys, so they work regardless of which window had focus. Makes it trivial to skip commercials, but I retain the use of the numeric keypad.

I hate to point you out in Hollywood physics, but I believe you have caught yourself one Newton short of a fig idea there. ;) (Everyone misspeaks once in a while, so I do not begrudge you the error.)

The friendly name you give the force is irrelevant. Calling it "lift", "thrust", or "general uppityness" makes no difference to the physics. There is the force due to the acceleration of gravity on the mass of the aircraft, and there must be an equal and opposite force acting on it in order for there to be no net acceleration. This upward force can only come from an equal and opposite force acting on the air in which the aircraft is hovering.

Obviously, with force being the product of mass and acceleration, you can trade off between those. You can have a relatively small mass of air greatly accelerated in a downward direction, or you could have a relatively large mass of air accelerated less.

For a helicopter, the longer the blades, the more air on which they act, and the less acceleration is therefore necessary in order to yield the same force. To go even more extreme, consider a Harrier. The Harrier has a very narrow column of air *greatly* accelerated to yield the required lift, while a helicopter has a much larger column of air and needs not accelerate it nearly so drastically.

Being impinged upon by the jet blast of a hovering Harrier is certainly going to be more "windy" than being in the rotor wash of an equivalently massive hovering helicopter, but it has nothing to do with "lift" versus "thrust". It has solely to do with the mass of air acted upon and the acceleration thereof.

Actually, you hit the nail on the head (or is it nailed the drive on the head?). Everyone's seen those little air holes with the "do not cover" notices, right? Those are, of course, to provide for pressure equalization. So, how does that impact durability?

While the drive is spun up and in use, the heads in your drive do not touch the platters. They float just above the surface on a minuscule layer of air. As ambient pressure is lower the higher your elevation, the number of air molecules available to provide lift to float the heads is reduced. If your elevation is sufficiently high, I can certainly see the potential to impact drive durability.

(Actually, I knew someone who years ago had an IBM Microdrive, i.e. the CompactFlash-sized drives from before flash density was what it later became. He went to use it while up in the mountains one day, well above 10,000 feet, and it quite died. He found out (too late) that it used an air bearing, which truly does not work without sufficient air.)

Hehe, of course, if your elevation were sufficiently high, you could also encounter heat transfer issues (convection is unavailable in a vacuum, after all), but I don't believe that should be most significant for drive durability at elevations at which people generally live.

Although it is not quite as colorful, I personally loved the closing: "With all appropriate respect,"

Now that, dear friends, is irony.

Actually, no. As far as telescopes are concerned, focal length is analogous to digital zoom, and aperture is analogous to the camera's sensor resolution. (Telescope resolving capability is a lesson in diffraction-limited optics, which makes an interesting lesson that may be slightly beyond school kids' level.)

You're not interested in how much you can magnify the blurry splotch. You're interested in the details you can or cannot resolve. It's much better to have a small image of the cloud bands on Jupiter than to have a great big image of an out-of-focus tribble.

Much the same as a Beethoven symphony is just a collection of notes and rests, American football is a collection of plays and time between plays. You could, of course, play all the notes in a symphony in one unfettered cacophony, but you would be rather missing the music.

The time between the tackle on one play and the snap which begins the subsequent play is anything but empty. For one obvious example, there are substitutions to attempt to take advantage of the particular circumstances of each play. Other times, the team on offense chooses not to substitute in order to take advantage of the particular defense on the field, and they may even forgo the huddle (in which the plan for the next snap is customarily presented), trading what may have been a better plan for a better opportunity to catch the defense unprepared. The formations used on offense and defense are elaborate set pieces, full of point and counterpoint. Explaining everything that happens between plays would take far more time than we have here, but if you happen to be in Baton Rouge next Sunday, I would be honored to have you over for my small football-viewing event.

A forest is mostly empty space. The trees define it, but that which is between the trees is not insignificant.

It strikes me that the same mentality that drives the "football is boring" whine is just as prevalent in many other situations. I cannot tell you how many times I've heard scuba divers complaining there was "nothing to see" on the very same dive where I found myself utterly fascinated by the quantity and variety of marine life. Unfortunately for this discussion, it is somewhat easier to convince a diver they have overlooked something when you pull up photos of arrow crabs and nudibranchs and so on than it will probably be to convince a "football is boring" person of their misbelief -- for one thing, there are no big fluffy gills sticking out of offensive alignments, even in the red zone.

"[I]t is a violation of the Agreement and this AUP to[...] (b) transmit uninvited communications, data or information"

They don't even say "unwanted" or some such term. According to the letter of their AUP, discovering an old friend's email address (or Facebook page... whatever people use these days) and sending the friend a message "may lead to termination of your Service". They could replace their entire AUP with an at-will statement and it would be no less unconscionable.

Of course, cutting off anyone who sends yet another "e-card" might actually be justified, and according to AUP 2.b, they could do it. :)

Obviously, it's not likely they will enforce the AUP in an egregiously Draconian manner, but I for one would prefer having the outlandish bits *implied* rather than expressly stated. It just looks cleaner. On the other hand, they didn't quite go completely Pythonesque on us:

Prohibited:
1. Users named other than "Thomas".
2. Users named "Thomas".

So, if I follow what you're saying, securing windows is much easier when it freezes?

My very first computer was a TRS-80 Color Computer 2. It was basically a computer in a keyboard that I connected to the TV. Now, decades later, I will soon be able to buy a computer built into a keyboard that will display on my TV.

"What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun." Ecclesiastes 1:9 (NIV)

Of course, if this can handle "HD" YouTube, Netflix streaming, and other online sources, it might actually be worth looking into as an alternative to building my own low-power box for the TV. At least worth keeping an eye open, I suppose.

So, you're saying that fairings are, to use the phrase, "not rocket science"? It's certainly true that a fairing design and implementation is not nearly as difficult a nut to crack as designing a new liquid-fueled engine completely from scratch, but fairings and fairing separations aren't something so inherently mundane that they can be ignored.

The aerodynamics are not so trivial you can just say, "Eh, that looks about right..." and be at an energy-optimal solution. Additionally, while it's trivial to overbuild a solution that will protect the payload during ascent, reducing the mass of the fairing system is not so easy. (Like most things in engineering, the first bits are easy, with additional improvements coming with greater and greater effort.) Having additional time to shave off a few more kilograms from the fairing is certainly a net positive.

Now, as for fairing separation incidents, there have not been many, but a quick check does turn up three of note in the last decade or so:

• KSLV-1 (South Korea): Faulty fairing separation identified as main cause in failure of Narohoâ(TM)s satellite launch
• Taurus/OCO (Orbital Science): The Case Of The Fairing That Would Not
• Athena 2: Futron Design Reliability study (See table on page 4)

I cannot speak to the failure potential of a new fairing design on a new launch vehicle as compared to existing fairings on well-traveled vehicles, but if I were to go with a "feeling", I would certainly doubt that it is less.

(By the way, your ad hominem song and dance routine was hardly mature. Will you be coming to Geowoodstock next year up in your area? I'm thinking of possibly heading up for the event and some cold water diving next year, and I wouldn't mind betting a batch of my homemade chocolate chip cookies on SpaceX -- perhaps you can bet a family-restaurant-level dinner? I don't drink, so it shouldn't be expensive.)