Actually, a gibifactory would be ~1073.74 megafactories; you are mixing scales :) </pendantry>

As Jim Lovell put it:

From now on we'll live in a world where man has walked on the Moon. It's not a miracle, we just decided to go.

There seems to be this perception that space travel is this incredible thing. It is awesome for sure, but it is fully within our grasp to do with as we please. One of my favourite arguments against the conspiracy theorists goes: if NASA were willing to fake the Moon landing, they would have done something else by now.

Let's reach for the stars again!

I would have modded you "+1 Insightful" instead of funny. As I mentioned above, this is a high-technology field that brings national prestige, fosters education, and can bring in foreign money. You are spot on.

Further, this is a high-technology field in which India can excel and become a prominent provider. This brings national prestige, foreign investment and support, provides (some) high-value jobs, and fosters better education. No, it's not going to solve India's problems over night, but it can help.

It really depends what your target inclination is. In general for a non-polar orbit, you want a launch complex with a latitude close to that inclination to minimize plane changes. This is why the ISS is at 51.65 degrees, to make it "easily" accessible from Baikonur. So yes, Sriharikota's proximity to the equator will be beneficial for low-inclination (near-equatorial) launches.

This particular launch, however, was to a sun-synchronous polar orbit. Your launch complex's latitude is much less important when launching to a polar orbit.

Unfortunately, since fusion would be an incredibly revolutionary technology, there is a tremendous amount of money to be gained by being "first to the post". Any investor with money already in one technology will push hard for only that technology to be funded, at the expense of all other lines of research. Fusion research is sadly driven by economic politics.

Cables are also rated for maximum voltage, as it drives insulation thickness. This, combined with the current rating, is a maximum power rating. In the race for cheaper cables, don't be surprised if they are only just barely good enough for the existing specifications.

Perfect! Since they are playing on their phone, even if their mirrors were intact, they would not be looking at them. Since your assumption of the driver's habits is the conservative one, it doesn't matter whether their mirror is a mirror, a camera, or a shattered piece of useless plastic.

How can you spot cars that are long-overdue on having their brakes serviced so that you can be careful around them as well? This is a terrible reason for requiring mirrors on a car. As when driving a car, one riding a bike should always be careful and never rely on other drivers being 100% responsible, regardless of the condition of a vehicle.

When will people finally realize that anthropogenic solar cooling is a real issue that affects all of us?

The ISS's inclination is actually as high as it is to allow the Russian launch vehicles to be able to make the trip; the use of the STS merely capped how polar they could go.

You can turn on Wi-Fi and Bluetooth while in airplane mode if you so choose (possibly NFC as well, but I haven't tried).

There's a typo in the summary, the correct spelling is "Accurate Fasciculus".

FLAC is asymmetric; lots of computrons to encode, but not very much to decode. I had an old iPod Video, and the battery lasted longer playing FLAC in Rockbox than it did playing MP3s in the native Apple software (or in Rockbox, for that matter). Despite being done in software, FLAC is just so stupidly easy to decode that it's nearly a moot point.

He knows.. which is why he corrected himself...