FIX FIX:

Congress has been granted zero authority to forbid [intra-state] travel. Interstate, on the other hand, is most assuredly commercial and, therefore, under their jurisdiction. However, the health, wellbeing, and security of the people is the authority of the Feds and, whether or not patdowns work, this is an attempt to fulfill those mandates.

"Often" was definitely a poor choice of words. The question, then, is what's the delta-v required to move a craft from LEO to an interplanetary trajectory, and is it cheaper to ship the requisite fuel to space than to do everything in a single go, ground to interplanetary.

Well I like the concepts in this thread: build a ship that stays in-orbit. Ship up fuel but not the beast itself. I can see problems, though: 1) Huge rockets yield huge thrust that grants the craft escape velocity; any spacecraft that remains on-orbit would need to perform sufficient thrust to push it out of our gravity well. 2) It would need to be cheaper to launch the fuel for the aforementioned thrust than just doing it all in one go with a capsule. Often, it's the fuel and not the spacecraft that makes up the bulk of the launch mass. Solar sailing or ion thrust, although obviating the need for much of the fuel shipments, adds significant cost in terms of time spent en route to a given destination. Gotta circle the globe for a month or so before you can go anywhere. 3) Maintenance would be a pain in the ass. The ISS functions reasonably well, but it isn't shuddering to life and blasting off to deep space every few months. Making a ship that's servicable on-orbit by a nonspecialized crew of 6 instead of thousands of techs could be exceedingly difficult.

I'll definitely need this at some point - my XP box is sitting in my closet, waiting for its day, but eventually it'll die along with a whole lot else. Mind passing along the secrets here, too?

Our job is to get the word out about corruption here at home while supporting those that are taking on the blatant corruption elsewhere. Our corporate greed feeds their dictatorship, and their dictatorship gives good cover for our corporate greed. We're all in this fight together.

[citation needed]

Never says anything about "directly", nor does it say you can't have someone help you through the process, which is what the sacrament is.

At long last the Vatican actually says something with clarity and timeliness. Maybe they finally hired a communications director. So I'm quite glad they came out and made sure that this was clarified. The whole thing about contraceptives for medical purposes wasn't new but the Vatican had never been explicit about clarifying things, so we all went apeshit at the announcement. Good of them to get in front of the curve on something for once.

I believe it's because Klingon uses a lot of glottal stops, (the blank spot, for example, in "uh oh!") and represents those by apostrophes. Many languages that have very new and contrived writing systems (like St'at'imcets) use Latin characters in different ways than we might normally be used to.

I'm unsure if "skeptic" is the right term, but a quick jaunt to Wikipedia ought to help. To summarize: it's a large area of the ocean where the concentration of plastic particles is significantly higher than normal. Most of the particles are too small to see and are essentially dissolved into the ocean. There are some bits of visible garbage floating along, but the patch still looks and acts very much like normal ocean.

Oh but it's not happening now in most parts of the US: witness the proliferation of a third rush hour around lunchtime in many parts of the country. Typically, those lunch jaunts are to destinations less than a mile away from the workplace.

I saw a girl on the metro once with the symbol of the Sun tatooed at the bottom of the back of her neck. When I asked her about it, she said it was a project: to get all the symbols of the planets tatooed down her back. I asked whether she'd include Ceres or Pluto (it was during the debate on dwarf planets) and she didn't know yet. Still, were I female and if I wanted a tatoo, it would be that. Therefore, my good anonymous, that is my suggestion.

Maybe I'm just an idealistic capitalist, but having informed consumers is the (ostensible) basis upon which our economic system is built. If companies cannot be expected to provide the information required to make capitalism work properly, we have a much larger problem that cries for a regulatory intervention, much as I hate to say it.

Bush had his moments. Not many, but they were there.

And to us fans of "classic" metrics, we have:

5.34 x 10^14 olympic sized swimming pools (534 trillion)

1.24 x 10^13 Libraries of Congress (12 trillion)

4.475 x 10^19 firkins (45 quintillion)

And the depth is equivalent to 18.32 furlongs or 8.2 Empire State Buildings. You're welcome.

There's always been feel-good news. And plane crashes certainly sell. My god man, just look at the Fox News website and count how many tragedies they can line up next to sexy photos.