So, looking for stars in a light-polluted sky is easier with a telescope, because it makes the stars appear brighter relative to their background.

Is this a joke? Light pollution turns the sky an awful pink-ish gray from what would otherwise be black, zodiacal light notwithstanding. That being the case, how exactly would it be easier to see a point source of light against a lighter background versus a darker background? (The answer? It's not. In fact, astronomers often use the limiting magnitude of stars visible with the naked eye as a measure of light pollution. The more LP there is, the smaller number of stars you will be able to discern with the naked eye, even if you are dark adapted and standing at the bottom of a well.)

With nebulae, comets, or other extended objects, especially where the object's apparent brightness doesn't exceed the sky's apparent brightness, the telescope doesn't help much at all.

Ludicrous! This is clearly being spoken by a person who has never looked through a telescope in their entire life. The apparently brightness of *any* astronomical object, be it a galaxy such as M31, or a globular cluster like M13, is entirely a function of aperture when magnification is held constant. The views of the Orion Nebula through a 4 inch reflector at 100x will be eviscerated by the same 100x view through a 20 inch reflector. (And yes, I have looked through instruments of both size, though I own a 12 inch reflector personally.) For views of the planets we have enough brightness to work with that light pollution makes little difference, but for just about everything else, it can ruin the view. You can barely make out M81 and M82 here in suburbia, but 2 hours a way they jump out of the sky at you.

Something like this may eventually make video conferencing useful. Anyone who has actually video conferenced with someone can attest to the lack of eye contact associated with both parties looking at their screen to see each other, rather than looking at the camera sitting atop their monitor. This lack of eye contact is very annoying, and I'd go so far as to say that it defeats the entire purpose of video conferencing in the first place. A camera positioned directly behind the video conference window fixes this issue entirely.

Once that is resolved, all we have to contend with is the severe bandwidth and latency issues that make most video conferences today an exercise in low quality, laggy futility.

All this talk of crimping versus buying premade is a false dichotomy. Ever hear of a punch down jack? Easy to do, vastly less prone to error then crimping an actual connector, and really what you ought to be doing anyway instead of having a hole in the wall with an ethernet cable coming through it.

So, nice, pretty punch down jacks on both sides, then premade patch cables between both sides and whatever they are connecting to. Reliable, quick, and easy.

I was actually using regular Adblock until a week or so ago when Google ads started showing up on Slashdot and other sites. Try as I might, I was unable to create a filter to get rid of them.

Adblock Plus took care of them instantly with the default list.

It's certainly a good image, but not the best. This image of Ralf's, for instance, is noticeably more clear. He has many more amazing images though on his site here.

The planets, including Venus, are easily visible in the cities and are essentially unaffected by light pollution. Not that I'm suggesting that light pollution not be dealt with, just that not all hope is lost.

As for the ISS, with a magnitude of -2 or brighter, it is definitely visible anywhere. Check Heaven's Above for the transit times. Iridium flares are fun too!

Anyone have a link to an HD copy? Not that I don't enjoy the utter lack of quality that comprises your typical YouTube video....

Like a lot of my colleagues and all of my three children, I have several white, black, and blue pairs of socks for various purposes: school, work, dress, etc. These things are handy to have around, offer easy and significant comfort, but are very easily lost. We have also have run into some instances where it wasn't clear whose socks were whose, and have also started to see a need for a storage mechanism. I have seen sock 'drawers' and such, but have never seen anyone actually use one. So: How do you manage and keep track of your socks?