The main point of a railgun is that you don't have to launch the payload with gunpowder, but with electricity. There are more safe and battle-field redundant means for electrical generation than the existing storage and transit requirements for gun-powder.

Even if they had the same mussel velocity.

Since evidence suggests that "cliques" and "bullying" continues through university and into business** being exposed to it and learning to deal with it is likely an important life skill to be learned (similar to EQ, and perhaps arguably more important than academics). I'm not saying home schoolers (of which I know a few) can't learn these skills, but depending on your career aspirations, growing up in "tougher" environments can often be a formative learning experience for young folks.

You say that like it's good to be professional all the time and bad to ever be crass and boorish. I guess to each his own, but personally, I would find a such a permanent professional veneer existence rather sterile and boring (even in the office)...

FWIW, confidence is a two edged sword. The risk with confidence, is over-confidence, and not knowing yourself. This in itself can benign in the form a comparative-optimism which can contribute to delusion that they are more likely (than average) to have good things happen to them and less likely (than average) to have bad things happen to them which often leads to a happier life. Or in the other extreme a Dunning-Kruger handicap throughout life. More confidence is not always better, but more self awareness generally doesn't hurt (too much, although can be depressing at times).

Sometimes it's hard to find out who you are and develop self-awareness when constantly in an environment created by your parents. I've seen that happen many times in my university (with both home schooled and highly sheltered children), since they weren't exposed to a more free-wheeling environment before, they we just discovering who they were when the consequences were much higher (if you want an analogy, not unlike getting the chicken pox early in life vs when you are an adult, or learning to drive for the first time on your playstation vs with a 1/2 ton steel box with seatbelts and airbags).

There is also some evidence that artificial confidence can be crippling for some children (e.g., forced to show artificial confidence, but knowing they are untested, some children are extra fragile when confronted with failure and develop coping strategies than can be self-defeating or even anti-social).

**They range from the more benign "lunch-invite-crowd", cafeteria table, smoke-break crew, to the more malignant country club good-old-boy variety and everything in between. Some folks just call this office politics to make it somehow sound more mature, but it's really just the same thing...

One of my good friends is a junior high math teacher, and although this is somewhat true, it is a bit misleading.

One thing that I have found is that for a subject say like algebra or elementary set theory, there is a level of understanding you need to pass a class and another level of understanding to teach it to someone else that has a lower level of understanding than you do. Taking linear algebra and group theory classes letting algebra rust isn't then same as learning basic algebra and geometry more in depth augmented with a survey of linear algebra, statistics and leaving the group theory on the table.

As a personal anecdote, when I was in high school, I was pretty advanced in math so my math teach made me "help" teach math to some of the other students in the class. At the time, I somewhat resented this imposition, but when I got to university (and did some tutoring and TA work), I found that these exercises helped me learn this basic material much better than I would have just to get an 'A+' in the class (and forced me to develop more than one strategy to get people to understand these topics).

Of course on the orange hand, Kyocera has low volume phones and their ceramics group makes their own sapphire, where Apple currently needs to contract to get access to sapphire manufacturing.

I suspect that won't change in the near future, but perhaps, eventually, Apple will attempt to get their sapphire coated glass idea manufactured at some point. I'm guessing that although they would undoubtedly like exclusivity, I don't think that will be in the cards following that whole GTAT fiasco, so they might have to suck it up and invest in their own production if they insist on that...

In TOS that would be red (engineering) to gold (command)...

Please refer to the Kepler FAQ

Also concerning stellar variablity...

One would hope that we can have enough faith in our friends at Nasa that they would do their homework (rather than just surf a few sites on the internet before launching a 1/2 billion dollar mission)...

Or maybe the 700yo inhabitants just go around saying "Nyah na nyah, bonk bonk on the head, you mean old grups"...

AFAIK, these things don't happen too often. The next big asteroid viewing opportunity is likely to be in 2027 when 1999-AN10 makes a near pass (and should be brighter than 2004-BL86). Although asteroid 2004-BL86 will revisit our neighborhood in 2050, it won't be as close as it will be tonight for another 200 years...

... Voyager > Enterprise

FTFY... Wouldn't be the first time a movie was inspired by a cheezy advert...

Observation: if you have a big enough ego to think you can create such a questionable site and get away with it, you have probably can't stop yourself from feeling invincible in whatever you do and dismiss any possibility that your logs will get compromised *ever*. Conversely, if have enough doubt about the eventual security of your logs in the event you might eventually get caught, you probably don't have the balls to go through with it in the first place...

(Federal) Patent law does not address the ownership question, it simply grants patent rights to who the owner is. The actual ownership is an issue of contract law (or more specifically the imputed contract of employment between employer and employee). Although there are some federal legal issues in employment contracting (e.g., EEOC, minimum wage, working conditions, etc), most of the legal aspects of employment contract law is set by the states (e.g,. right to work, living wage, etc) and local rules which further restrict the federal rules. AFAIK, when patent ownership issues arise in federal courts, they are obliged to look at the applicable state statutes to make the ownership determination.

For example, in California (where silicon valley is), California Labor Code Section 2870 specifically prohibits employers from co-opting inventions made by employees except those made for hire.

Other states (e.g., Texas) have different laws that favor the employer. This is likely one of the many reasons a large amount of entrepreneurial economic activity has continued to exist around Silicon valley and not elsewhere in the USA despite the high cost of doing business in the state. Another provision that helps Californai is the prohibition of generic non-compete clauses (which sadly is a real problem in other potential hi-tech areas such as Canada).

Okaaaay... Now, what planet did you say you were from again? ;^)

On the odd chance you were attempting to be serious, you probably are thinking about electronic transactions through FedWire or CHIPS (the industrial strength versions of ACH and EFT). The US Treasury doesn't move any money around for anyone but itself, nor does any bank actually reprint money that is transferred...

However, it is unlikely that these would be used for a simple equity transaction like this. More likely you would see such a transaction clear through DTCC, although with a private company like SpaceX, there may be other simpler arrangements...

Or maybe say this radio signal was bait/chum and we (or perhaps our planet) are the game in someone else's sport.

Apparently nobody has a clue about these so called FRBs, so nobody can prove us wrong ;^)

On the other hand it appears that these signals are pulse compressed a bit by some kind of intergalactic dispersive media (electron gas?) so if someone was actually looking for some thing in the intergalactic void, this is a pretty plausible analogy to deep seismic sounding the cosmos...

Actually, it may be like that... tuberculosis and pneumonia are quite capable in ravaging through our population if unchecked.

In the years right before the wide availability of antibiotics in the US (1930's), just these two bacterial infections were responsible about 20% of all deaths in the US (not including other bacterial infections). If you've seen someone suffering TB, perhaps it might be considered your weird snotty epidemic...

Also, those mushroom-based antibiotics aren't the ones of last resort. The nasty antibiotics with all the nasty side-effects are the modern ones (that are basically injectable pesticides that doctors often hold back as last resort). If we don't clean up our act we might be going back to something more akin to a pre-anti-biotic Victorian era with people dying of consumption (not some quaint 60's ampicillin pill-poping rehash).