No it's not. You can photograph military property in the United States.

You can't photograph certain objects or certain areas, but in general you wouldn't be allowed inside those areas or near those objects to begin with unless you had clearance to do so.

I've got a photograph of what was the Network Control Center at Kadena Air Base hanging on the wall (it's a group shot of my coworkers when I was stationed there, presented to me by our shop superintendant, a Senior Master Sergeant). I've got several more I took around the base in a scrapbook somewhere. Just outside the base there are small platforms that camera crews can climb to film jets taking off.

I find it funny someone from the party that voted Dan Quale as vice president makes a big deal about an obvious verbal slip.

Windows isn't like Linux in that respect, since the Linux kernel is developed seperately from the rest of the system. A Windows release is worked on and tested as one object (not counting media center, premium, etc.).

There's advantages and disadvantages to both methodologies. The BSDs are similar to Windows in this reguard; OpenBSD 5.1 refers to the entire system, not just the kernel.

The Linux distributions use their own version numbers that are independent of the kernel, but since the utilities in the distributions are generally not distribution specific, not to mention the fact that a single distro version can use more than one kernel, the kernel version becomes more important than it would be otherwise. In Windows, you'd never run a Vista kernel with a 7 userland, so the point is moot.

Methinks the problem with Windows is the complete lack of coherency within versions. Think a bit:

DOS codebase: Windows 1.x, 2.x, 3.x, 3.11 for Workgroups, 95, 98, 98SE, ME
NT codebase: OS/2 1.x*, NT 3.x, NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Vista, 7 (with server versions sprinkled in somewhat randomly)

If that's not a sure sign of corporate lack of attention span, I don't know what is.

MacOS X is kind of like X11 - it's been X11 for ages, but the R version keeps going up.

*OS/2 1.x is not Windows, but there was a lot of shared code before Microsoft pulled out and created NT 3.x.

True, but they're the most obvious. It might take quite a bit of study to identify signs of an ancient civilization based on land shaping and rock distribution. The pyramids are obviously artificial.

Those types of organisms wouldn't support a civilization, either. Mars has obviously never had a diverse biosphere that could support advanced forms of life (at least as we understand it), so there's little point to searching for Martian artifacts. I'm all for searching for the Martian equivalent of bacteria and archea.

I'm not sure we know enough about Venus to say one way or the other, but I'll readily admit my ignorance on the subject. I've always found Venus to be dull and haven't spent much time reading about it.

That's a "turtles all the way down" argument. Do you know how an abacus works? Down to the quark level?

A CPU chip does the math and logic. No one outside of electrical engineering really needs to understand how it works, but any tech needs to know what it does, how to install one, and how to evaluate which chip is appropriate for a particular use.

He's wanting something where he can point at a component and say, "that's the memory," or "that's the soundcard." If the kid wants to break out the oscilloscope when he's older, more power to him.

You don't have any high voltage available outside the power supply, which is self-contained. Most power supplies are difficult to open while they're installed, and you usually unplug them to uninstall them. Computers are probably the safest electric appliances you could tinker with while they're plugged in.

The most you have to worry about is the 12V lines. I've worked on more open machines than I can remember and I've never had a shock (not counting static). There's a lot more danger of the kid frying components with static electricity than shocking himself with 120V (or whatever you use where you are).

I doubt that's necessary.

I hunt-and-pecked from the age of 7 on a Commodore 64 and an Atari 800 (I loved the 800's keyboard). I took a typing class in high school (using actual typewriters) and had no trouble picking up touch-typing.

Besides, look at piano lessons - they don't put 7-year-olds on Schroeder-sized pianos. The kids adjust as their hands grow.

The same reason the news doesn't announce that the sun comes up. Everyone knows about the evidence for water on Mars. This is interesting because someone came up with an alternate source for the clay formation that doesn't require water.

Well, yes, there's a lot of evidence to support that, but this paper says the presence of clay soil doesn't necessarily count as evidence of water. No one's saying that there wasn't water on Mars - they're just saying you can't count the clay as evidence for a wet Mars.

Any civilization that old would have left nothing to show its existance. Even the pyramids won't last that long.

A biosphere, however, leaves its mark on a world. You'd be able to tell easily if Mars or Venus was habitable by humans duing the time homo sapiens has existed.

There's tons of energy on the moon, if you're using solar and temperature differential sources.

As far as getting your spaceship off the moon, you throw it, although you'd probably throw individual modules and assemble them in orbit. Fueling the spacecraft would be more complicated, but hey, it's a lot cheaper to launch a few tanks of rocket fuel into space from Earth than a whole spaceship.

I did read the whole section. He said a whole lot of words and zero substance, other than that Obama's tactics were ineffective.

He gives the same old, "get rid of the regulators, invest in research" stuff we always hear. And that's fine, but that's pretty much what's been going on already, and it's not enough.

As far as the argument about China goes, it doesn't apply to energy policy (at least with reguards to electricity generation). You aren't going to run power lines from China. I get my electricity from coal. OG&E isn't going to stop generating my electricity with coal unless they have a very good reason to do so - and really, they shouldn't have to. Stopping them from building new coal plants is the ideal solution, but Romney doesn't seem willing and Obama doesn't seem able to stop that.

Has anybody told Sen. Inhofe that?

That fucker's my senator. Sometimes I wish there was a hell, just so that elitist holier-than-thou asshole could go there.

A good chunk of the Okies ended up in California doing migrant labor (both sides of my family were involved in that, so no, I'm not just basing it off of The Grapes of Wrath). If they hadn't been there, then they probably would have just had Mexican migrant labor doing it, so there wasn't really any advantage from the Okie influx.

There was a major disadvantage - Oklahoma had just acheived statehood some 30-40 years before the dust bowl. Towns were growing, and new businesses were being built up. A lot of that went away when farms failed, and there's a lot of ghost towns out that way. I've noticed a marked difference in western Oklahoma in my lifetime - it's still recovering. Had the dust bowl not happened, Oklahoma would have probably fared the depression fairly well.

The line isn't at rest - it's orbiting the earth.

The part of the line on the earth is essentially orbiting geosynchronously at sea level, so it tries to fall to the ground. The other end of the line is way out past geosynchronous orbit, so it's trying to escape Earth's gravity. The two balance each other out, but there's a lot of tension in the middle.

How, exactly?

Woodie wagons cost more than other cars of the time, and most people who know of them today associate them with the '60s surfer craze. They were never associated with any particular race, other than Frankie Avalon-type surfer dudes.