Jasper Maskelyne (of the stage-magician family) did something similar with searchlights and mirrors during WWII (North African campaign, if I recall) - sending flashes of light into the sky to disorient (or "disorientate" as the Brits would say) German pilots. So it was hardly a new idea, just a different light source that's worse for the eyes.

There are SDXC cards with lifetime warranties, advertised as shockproof, X-ray-proof and waterproof. Although I find most SD cards a little flimsy for heavy use (when I'm working, mine are swapped between my camera and my laptop dozens of times in a day) I'd expect them to work reasonably well for archival. And the SDXC spec scales to 2TB... but as with optical, the real problem is being able to keep track of where you put a particular file, on which card or disc.

Microsoft has offered pen/touch/tablet features in Windows since 1991, when Windows for Pen Computing 1.0 was released as an add-on to Win3.1x. Between WfPC, XP "Tablet PC Edition," and gradually including the features outright in the OS, it really seems like they've had "a few rounds" already.

You might be happy somewhere like http://crd.lbl.gov/

Really? This is an app that, at least on iOS, refuses to run if you turn off notifications. I tried it a month or so ago, and if I recall, had to agree to have my phone make noise when messages arrived them and display the full text of them, even when locked. If I tried tot turn off any of those features, it refused to work until I turned them all back on. Anybody around me could "monitor" that easily. It's about the most indiscrete, "hey look I'm getting a message!" attention-whoring app of its sort.

I'm unsure what would constitute a "big" trip. A round-trip to my folks is almost 10,000 miles, and one to my in-laws is 24,900 miles. The first four months of the year I went to Turkey, Spain, Taiwan and Indonesia, along with a little domestic travel. In a week I'll be checking my family in for a 2-week trip to the East Coast, and I'm waiting to hear whether I'm confirmed for Fiji next month, and to see whether anything interesting comes up in August and September before Japan in October. This is a "small" planet.

Whoa, we're up to 7-digit IDs now? Damn, I'm old.

If you can eliminate all the waste that occurs before the food is served, that's okay.

But invent something that'll get my toddler to finish her scrambled egg without losing interest, and you've really got something.

Do you mean "college is about weeding out people?" Or are you talking about stoners? ...either way, you're probably right.

This could give me a very good reason to stop deleting all the stuff I get on one of my dot-edu accounts.
If there's anything that can incapacitate a Mossad agent, it's reading a few years of mail-to-all from vice-chancellors of whatever.

If they insisted on accessing the address that's on my business cards, that might be almost as good, since my email at the dot-org that gives me business cards is full of nearly a decade worth of stuff about international policy on environment and development.

I don't think I'd give them the other dot-edu, the dot-gov, or my personal account.

Oh, there'll definitely be jobs. Some UH-Hilo physics, astronomy or natural science majors will almost certainly wind up there. They'll probably be outnumbered by the Hawaii Community College grads, first in construction trades, then in electronic tech, admin, et cetera.

The control building will be at the summit. If you mean the base facility/office, I've heard it'll be on the corner of Nowelo and A'ohoku, next to Gemini, below CalTech, and across A'ohoku from 'Imiloa.

The right way to go about this is:
ex-Ambassador pings current Minister of Foreign Affairs OR current Ambassador to the US.
They, in turn, ping John Kerry.
He's a big enough fish that Zuckerberg will take the call.

Adobe, too. As a Creative Suite Master Collection user, I have two rules: never be the first to install anything from Adobe, and never be the first to install a new major release of OS X. Better to wait a few weeks first and read up on exactly which piece of Creative Suite is totally going to fall over if I so much think about upgrading.

This is actually the second TMT that U.Cal and CalTech have been involved in. Before they got the money from the Keck Foundation, what we now know as Keck was the Ten Meter Telescope. ...but they designed new stationery anyway. ;)