Great. But good luck trying to get 2 particles crashing into each other at/near the speed of light at a moment where you can monitor the results.

Ignoring the physics aspect of it... since I'm not qualified to even "guess" if there would be issues

I imagine the major issues would be:
- Price of construction
- Price of delivering construction pieces: it's like thousands and thousands of dollars to send up 1lb of stuff into orbit
- Space junk and asteroids - something the size of an eye-glass screw could pretty much ruin the whole thing. And there's a lot of crud in orbit
- You'd need people to maintain it, run it, etc. That's a large expense right there unless they no longer use the ISS for anything except OrbitalHC employees.
- etc

I don't think that's fair. Money Pit implies that we're throwing money in and getting nothing out.

They are using it and getting some research done. Just because the CNN isn't commenting on results every week and Slashdot isn't posting something here-and-there doesn't mean that nothing's getting done.

I should emphasize the *by me* portion of my post.

It could just be that the B&N's in my area were poorly managed for a while and not really "the norm" when compared to B&N's nation-wide.

I liked the Borders store *by me* more than the Barnes and Noble stores *by me*

They were better lit, organized better, and the shelves were maybe 1-row shorter so it didn't feel as claustrophobic in there. The layout was also a little nicer and more casual than the B&N near me. They usually had what I was looking for: tech books, books to help out in college courses, classic lit, sci-fi, fantasy, new, old. My tastes aren't that obscure.

That being said, at some point the B&N near me remodeled and looks / feels a lot nicer than it used; I actually enjoy sitting in there and flipping through some books. So I don't miss Borders much anymore.

But for a while there I preferred to do my browsing and shopping at either online at Amazon or in person at Borders.

Probably as opposed to the old NASA Space Shuttles which, at least I'd heard, really really old 70s/80s tech instead of modern computer systems.

Yeh, that's true. I forgot to mention that... 2011 was a bad year. Fortunately my town (and the surrounding towns) weren't too bad... only out of power for 2 days. But maybe 10 miles West got slammed pretty hard somehow; some friends and co-workers were without for a week during that one too.

LOL, yeh. A bunch of canned food will last a while, and some other dried food, and you're good for a while.

The week before Halloween on 2011 we had a freak snow storm on the East Coast. It came in the middle of a MILD Fall so the leaves were still green-ish. It was a a lot of heavy snow... so trees and branches went down all over the north-East. New Jersey was without power for a while... my town was without for a week, many longer. No power meant no heat for many, so it was a cold week.

A year later, almost to the week, was Sandy... just before Halloween 2012. Obviously Sandy was a lot worse for the coastal cities because the water crept in and the wind tore up the boardwalk... but further inland it was the same s**t different year. No power or heat for a over a week, loss of many services, etc. This one was a big more wide-spread though, and getting gasoline was a BIG PitA. But otherwise it was the same pain for those more inland.

As an ex-boyscout I try to be ready for these things anyway... I have plenty of flashlights and batteries, canned food, a couple gallons of drinking water, a lighter to start the stove, warm clothes on-hand, etc. I was able to deal with mostly everything fine except the gasoline situation. After a week most of us were running low.

Including on a freeway?

I used a local term, we call freeway highways in NJ.

So 4 lanes each way, no cross-overs, speed limit is 65mph. A cyclist should be in a regular lane?

Considering CARS are ticketed for going too low of a speed and causing a danger... wouldn't a bike (which goes around 15-20 mph) be a major hazard on such a road?

It's a regional thing... my definition of "highway" is probably the same as other definitions of "freeway"

In our case in NJ, we call it a highway even though it's 4 lanes each way, median down the middle, no cross-traffic, and speed limit varying from 65-55 mph.

By highway I mean the 65 mph multi-lane highway. Riding down the middle of that in a bike that's probably only doing 15-20 mph is "unwise" to say the least.

I don't know for sure whether that scenario is illegal. But considering it's a fine-able offense to go too low under the speed limit for safety concerns, I'd IMAGINE that a bike doing 15-20 mph on a 65 mph highway is subject to the same scrutiny.

Then you at least stop at the light.

I'm talking about idiots that don't stop or even slow down, and blast through the stop sign and cross that perpendicular 40mph road praying nobody hits them.

If at a light, then you should at least stop and hit the pedestrian cross button.

Admittedly, many car drivers are idiots... DANGEROUS idiots.

But on the other side of that spectrum, SOME cyclists are idiots as well. I'm NOT talking about the ones that know what they're doing, signal, ride in the bike lane, etc.

I'm talking about people that fly through red lights and stop signs because they think the lights/signs don't concern the cyclists. I'm talking about the idiots that ride on the highway without helmets and don't stay in the shoulder.

The annoying stuff such as riding side-by-side and blocking off a lane of a 40mph road instead of using the shoulder is just annoying.

By me we have a lot of the idiots, and it's annoying. And a synic can say "Well then they'll get hurt or die, Darwin in action." The problem with that is, then some driver who WAS paying attention and WAS following the rules has to live with the guilt at hurting or killing someone. And of course deal with the inevitable law-suits that follow.

If you want to go there...

Then when she came out of the fire you also have to wonder why his sports bra and such were intact after stepping out of an inferno.