The only time they were not able to hit what they were shooting at was when herding prisoners that were tricked into thinking they were escaping to a spaceship that had a transmitter installed on it to lead the Empire to the rebel base.

How about a Republican sore about the last election and claiming the Republicans are done?

There is almost limited energy. once fossil fuels run out, we will be left with essentially the energy that hits us coming from the sun (plus fission and fusion but... *waves hand*). There is a lot more of that out is space and we will probably want to tap into it. My bet is that eventually, the energy infrastructure in space will grow to the point that we'll both develop manufacturing in space and have people in space as that will be the least work intensive method to get that energy. From there, the infrastructure to support those people will grow until space itself can support itself. From there, we'll move out through the solar system and possibly the nearby systems harvesting materials as we go.

The ISS is not a deep space craft. It and the crew is still protected by the Van Allen belt from radiation, and is not mean to handle the thrust of moving it. The boosting just to keep it in orbit is already taking a toll on the structure and it is very much still in the grip of Earth's gravity and probably could not handle the thrust needed to get it out into deep space. A ion thruster would not do will still in orbit. As far as a car analogy goes, what you are suggesting is like saying somebody should use a short ranged electric car meant for short city trips to do multi ton interstate shipping.

I understand you are making a funny, but I see people saying this in seriousness. The matter of the fact is that if we were serious about going to Mars or a moon base, we would not abandon the ISS but fund it even more and probably need to build a second one, just to do the research to get the knowledge to make such things possible. Complaining about spending funds on the ISS instead of a moon base is like complaining about all the money spend on fusion research instead of just building the final working product right now.

No trip to Mars is going to be one way. We could probably send a one way trip if we really wanted to, but we will never do it. We will want a good chance of success and by time we do go through the trouble of figuring out the issues like "space scurvy", long term deep space habitats, and making sure that the trip actually has a desired chance of success to justify even making a trip to Mars, the return trip will be trivial.

Yes. Bush was a very liberal president, in the classical sense, probably the most in a long time. He created an entire new branch of government and increased its powers.

Because they did not sit there and say that the risk had not changed and there was no way to know if there would be an earthquake or not. If they had kept saying that or just never had their press conference to begin with, they would have been fine. In previous /. stories on there, there were the transcripts of the public meeting. They started off by saying that there was no way to tell if there was any way to tell if there would be an earthquake or not, but under the pressure of public questioning to answer yes or no to something they don't know, they finally caved and gave an answer that seemed to the listeners to be a "no". In the end they said something along the lines of "Don't worry about it. Go home and have a glass of wine."

And that start is the ISS. They are doing the beginnings of the work and research that will be needed to get to Mars. Later will probably come a larger ISS type station because there is a lot of work that needs to be done before we venture into space. Later, we'll need a deep space version to test living outside of the protective magnetic shield of the Earth. Then probably some trips to the moon and even a moon base. Then, we can realistically look at some sort of fly by and landing on Mars.

So long as it's not the same uniform as their parents, they're probably fine with that.

Nope. Hipster hate has been around since at least the 40's when it was associated with jazz. Hipster is a pretty much generic term for whatever twenty somethings are doing currently. It was used in the 40's and 50's became hippies in the 60's and 70's. The 80's seemed filled with a variety of alternative subcultures so they all got their own names, but it has returned for at least twenty years where I have heard the hipster hate in my trendy section of Seattle. The twenty somethings in the neighborhood are always called hipsters and have had variety of looks in the last two decades from white belted rockers to the current lumbersexuals. The up and coming youth always want to do their own thing which somehow seems to involved dressing in their grandparent's clothes, listening to new music, and generally trying not to be their parents. The parents always hate this.

OK, but could a false vacuum universe spawn a lower energy false vacuum universe filled with energy, that could spawn a true false vacuum universe?

In that case wouldn't we see a varying degree of dark/strange/missing versus normal matter over time and thus have more missing matter in older galaxies that were farther away and be able to test for that?

They probably don't want to see all those minor drug arrests end up in Federal courts. I'm sure that if the Fed came down on the states, then local cops would be more than happy to call the FBI and request assistance and to turn over the perpetrators to them (or whatever the actual process would be). The end result would be that those arresting officers time, trials, and prosecutor hours would all end up on the Fed's budget and not the state's, not to mention prison costs. The Fed doesn't want that any more than the state.

Nobody claimed that Hearst and the rest actually knew what they were talking about, merely that they feared something and sought to criminalize it via dubious methods by lying to the public and invoking 'the children'.