With luck, they'll start incorporating our radio transceivers. I hear that SpaceX flies with several USRPs now, so that's not completely unrealistic. That might be as close as I can get. Anyone who can get me a base invitation, though, would be greatly appreciated and I'd be happy to do some entertaining speeches while there. I need a base invite for Vandenberg, too. I got in to the official viewing site for the first try of the last launch (and that scrubbed too), but this next one is on Pad 6.

The rule of "dominates its orbit" or whatever it is isn't arbitrary in the sense that "big enough" is. Earth has cleared its orbit. Anything that stays around Earth's orbit is constrained by Earth's position. The same is true of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. It is not true of Pluto or Ceres.

No, we don't know what needs to be done. We know several things that would help, and which we should do, but any attempt to get off fossil fuels entirely in the foreseeable future will cause a lot of problems. We want to move towards renewable and atomic energy and biofuels (good ideas in any case, since the cost of oil is going to continue to go up). We want to develop the science to the point where we actually know what we're doing, and can evaluate costs for various courses of actions (including geoengineering). We know that AGW, if we do nothing, is almost certainly going to have great economic costs, and we need to balance that against other economic costs.

Why do you think people redo their infrastructure multiple times over an 85-year period? I live in a house built in 1892, and there's lots of buildings and stuff around here that was built before 1930.

Admiral Nagumo had no plans to attack fuel storage tanks or ship repair shops, primarily due to the current Japanese attitude on war, which was about offensive action, rather disdaining logistics and defense. Had he done so, I think we would have found the effects less than expected.

I've seen claims that bombing the fuel tanks would have had a tremendous effect, but not ones clearly backed by facts and reasoning. The immediate reaction of US admirals seems to me to ignore what the US could have done about it.

For the most part, bombing is terrible at damaging machine shops, as shown by the later bombing of Germany. What would have done a great deal of damage is firing a torpedo at the dry dock one battleship (Pennsylvania?) and two destroyers were in, rather than just bombing the ships in the dry dock.

I was in Florida to speak at Orlando Hamcation and went to see the DISCOVR launch at Kennedy Space Center. I paid $50 to be at LC-39 for the launch, an observation tower made from a disused gantry on the Nasa Causeway between the pads and the Vehicle Assembly Building. A crawler was parked next door! A hot sandwich buffet, chips, and sodas were served. It was cold and windy! I watched for a few hours and unfortunately the launch scrubbed due to high stratospheric winds.

The next day, Delaware North Corporation, which operates tourism at KSC, decided not to open LC-39 or the Saturn 5 center for the launch. This was the third launch attempt and I guess they decided most people had left. I was annoyed.

The closest beach was going to be closed in the evening, it's a sensitive ecological area. I ended up seeing the launch from Jetty Park. This turned out not to be such a great location, the tower wasn't visible at all and the first 10 seconds of the rocket in flight were obscured before we saw it over a hill.

What's a better viewing location?

Amusing. Where have we heard the "it's a great OS, you just have to know how to use it" line before? (And how many Microsoft OSes have had to come with a built-in tutorial before?)

So, my suggestion is Linux Mint for those who can't handle the complexities of Windows 8 and 8.1.

Yeah, last week I pointed out the same wrt the Yellowstone dome. How much of what they're measuring is actually tectonic movement?

From the Wiki article someone linked on sea level change:
Global warming, a few mm per year.
All other causes, about 10 meters per year.
Draw your own conclusions.

How much of that 27% was claimed from the sea in the first place?

nope. They can block IR thermal cameras, but 99.987641% of all security cameras are not the multi thousand dollar FLIR type camera.

a $1.00 pair of mirrored lense sunglasses will also do this. Sorry AVG, your best and brightest are way behind the curve.

If you want to make their version, buy retroreflective tape and apply to your face or a set of cheap sunglasses.

that doesn't mean it's lacking in good plot and characters

You've got to be joking. Abrams' Kirk is criminally incompetent (even in the first movie, before your "Khan wanted him to screw up" rationalization could apply). The plots of both movies have holes big enough to drive a planet through, let alone a starship. (For example, WTF is the point of starships anymore, since they can apparently just beam across the galaxy now?!)

DS9 got pretty dark (e.g. Homefront/Paradise Lost, In the Pale Moonlight), but it was good. Abrams alleged-'trek' sucked for (many, many) other reasons.

Yep, That is why anyone that is not aggressively paying off all the debt they have right now is a complete and utter fool.
I have friends that are buying new cars, etc... They are morons, raging morons... "but it's 1.2% ITS FREE MONEY!" they forget the loan origination fees they pay or are tacked on the loan... Oh that $35,000 car loan has a $1900 set of "fees" on it.... But we dont count that as part of the interest rate...

If you are having a time of prosperity, PAY DOWN ALL YOUR FUCKING DEBT! Because the next crash will come around sooner than you think because the banks are doing the same shit again.

Banks need heavy regulation put back on them. I also suggest we have a Bank police that goes around tazing executives at random if we even think they are thinking of anything "clever"