Oh, yes, no argument there. If I caught a glimpse of those aircraft flying way too low, with no other information, I'd, ahem, become somewhat perturbed myself.

Ah, crap, I was thinking F-14 while I was reading F-16. Good catch.

Except that F-16s have a pretty short operational range, so unless New Jersey has seceded from the Union and declared war on New York, or Al Qaeda has hijacked an aircraft carrier and stationed it off Long Island, they're probably ours.

Perhaps we should extend the robots.txt format to support a price-to-index attribute.

I'm as wildly supportive of space exploration and colonization as anyone, but it's quite true that both economics and logistics argue against offworld human activities as a solution for any of Earth's major problems. Beamed power from extremely large solar power satellites is one possible exception; building these would almost certainly require a human-supported infrastructure for lunar or asteroid mining and orbital construction.

As someone rather depressingly pointed out, until we're building cities in Antarctica, cities on the Moon or Mars will not make economic sense. Antarctica is orders of magnitude easier to reach and to live in.

So, if we end up with significant offworld colonies in the foreseeable future, it will be for reasons which are not purely economic. Many have speculated on what might provide the motivation to make this happen. So far, nothing in the real world has come close to providing such motivation.

I hate this situation as much as anyone, but please understand that the school administrators aren't doing this maliciously, or "refusing to think". Rather, our insanely litigious society has made it impossible to give bureaucrats any freedom to exercise judgment; every time they do so, they create an opportunity for a lawsuit. The only safe course is to exercise all rules with absolute, robotic consistency, compassion or rationality be damned.

378,683,112 second old Glenfiddich for me.

That's Greg Bear's solution to the Fermi Paradox in The Forge of God and Anvil of Stars. Turns out the galaxy is filled with intelligent species engaged in a ruthless Darwinian struggle for survival. New intelligent species are seen as potential rivals and destroyed. And we're naively announcing ourselves to an ever-widening sphere of space. Not smart.

Cosmic rays more energetic than anything the LHC will produce have been hitting Earth every day for four billion years. We have not collapsed into a black hole. QED.