Also a Congressman who worried that stationing more US forces on Guam would flip the island over.

Absolutely. The US Congress contains the best and the brightest graduates of law school that we currently...

WE ARE SO HOSED.

She "also discussed whether her colleagues in Congress know enough about technology to make informed decisions on tech policy".

This is one of those trick questions, right? I mean, "No, next question." is too easy, right?

The article claims it's the world's greenest building, but from the pictures it looks kinda blue, steely and clear for the most part.

Did you read the article? The amendment was defeated because it decreased transparency and oversight at the FCC under the guise of "privacy". The GOP is open to considering this sort of legislation in a separate bill.

Once again: rockets aren't standard kinetics. Think: bullets, railguns, etc. That which delivers its destructive power based upon mass, rather than energy, explosives, etc.

But that's my point: standard kinetics wouldn't be feasible without some sort of physics-negating "inertial dampeners" ala Star Trek.

There are two great perils to ship-based weapons that I could foresee, regardless of ship size: heat dissipation and conservation of momentum. Any energy-based weapons would need to dump a tremendous amount of thermal energy off rather short-order, so your ships might have to drag some sort of radiator array behind them, leaving a sweet juicy target.

If you committed to projectile weapons, you would need to have some sort of recoil dampening mechanism/thrust compensator every time you fired the weapon.

So, ideally, you would have semi-autonomous self-propelled munitions that could be dumped, ala chaff or depth charges, and then directed towards their targets at the appropriate time.

The last time /. discussed this, it was pointed out that the spectrum L^2 was aiming for was intended for low-power satellite signals and was never intended to be used for (relatively) powerful ground stations. They were essentially trying to buy spectrum on-the-cheap and then repurpose it in a way that was virtually guaranteed to interfere with adjacent spectrum. So, while GPS devices could certainly be better-designed, this was more an incident of L^2 trying to abuse the system.

Physics, alas, makes for a harsh mistress.

The claim was that he "wasn't detained, just prevented from accessing a 'secure area'". And I'm saying that's a load of crap -- he was prevented from going to the gate area from whence he could board his plane. The definition of "secure area" matters greatly. He wasn't trying to pull rank and view some behind-the-scenes operations of the TSA (as the TSA's phrasing is obviously trying to imply) but rather "gain access" to the "secure area" otherwise known as the airport terminal.

Semantics matter, particularly when the petty bureaucrats use them to try to oppress us all via judicious use of same. That's what I was saying crap, and it's to my discredit that I didn't make that clear.

The TSA defines "anything past the screening area" as "secure areas", IIRC, so that's a load of crap.

They refer to themselves as "officers", not "agents". The STRIP Act seeks to smack those petty tyrants down a few pegs. Tell your Congresscritter to support it.

They're desperate and in spaghetti-against-the-wall territory, to be honest.

Cave Johnson doesn't concern himself with orange anything. It's lemons, or nothing!

Came for the Portal 2 reference. Didn't leave disappointed.