Experiment on Venus first. I'd rather not suffer through yet more perturbations on Earth thankyouverymuch.

Venus has a serious greenhouse problem. Fix that, then we'll talk.

But they soon will be doing something illegal! I mean look at them. They're obvious criminal types. Her clothes and his hat offend the sensibilities of all decent right-thinking people. Obviously they should be locked up.

</sarcasm>

That was brutal. Worthy of Jon Stewart, except he was the guy standing next to the generator, thinking he was making the jerky taste better.

My mod points expired a couple of hours ago, but I'd have commented anyway. I am in awe.

The Chicago Manual of Style has detailed explanations of correct comma usage. So does Strunk and White's Elements of Style. You can also look up individual recommendations. Things like the Serial Comma have Wikipedia articles that quote both of those sources as well as half a dozen more.

Commas to delimit prepositional phrases have only recently been deprecated. I was taught to use them as well.

And in any case, the US government isn't paying a nickel for Falcon Heavy design or manufacturing or that test launch.[1] So they have absolutely nothing to complain about.

Has since the very beginning. Elon Musk is no Tony Stark. He doesn't design it all himself. He pays people who know what they're doing to design things, and he decides which option to take if there are several choices, and he uses criteria like reliability, manufacturability, and cost to make his choices, instead of "which lobbyist will give me the best vacation package to Aruba this year."

Anonymous Coward, just makin' shit up.

I haven't seen nearly as much out of those people in the last several threads about SpaceX. Now that Falcon 9 is one of only four rocket families ever developed that have had 11/11 successful launches, the ULA partisans have very little to talk about.

By design. Spending more is very much the point of the exercise.

Or does somebody really think we're going to fight in WWIII with these planes?

You're talking about people who think flying a plane full of people into a target is a good idea. They're not playing with a full deck. In this case, Osama Bin Laden had a particular beef with US banks in general and those housed in the Trade Center in particular. He'd already made one attempt on those towers, with a bomb in the basement. I find the choice of the Towers makes it more credible Osama Bin Laden paid for it, not less. He didn't give a rat's ass about a statue. He hated US banks, who have been using the US federal government to project power worldwide for over a century.

Maybe they weren't crazy. Maybe they correctly identified their true enemy.

And solar panels are covered in tempered glass that can stand up to hailstones the size of golf balls, driven by wind themselves.

Sorry, Virginia. Got distracted by the California vs Florida argument further down the page.

I would bet any amount you care to name that you can rent a gasoline generator in Florida. And those rental companies are not treated as public utilities, no matter how long you use it.

That's an interesting theory. At the moment, we don't really have means to extract additional energy from waste heat, so it ultimately radiates off as infrared. But if we're seriously considering building a Dyson sphere, one supposes we've already exhausted every possible efficiency we can come up with, including reducing infrared wavelength all the way down to microwave wavelength, squeezing every last possible watt out of it.

It doesn't seem likely. Black body radiation at room temperature and cooler is almost entirely in the infrared. It's the part of the spectrum to which heat converts most readily at lower temperatures. Efforts to convert that infrared back into something useful have been covered on Slashdot. It's apparently possible. But the result is still infrared, coming off the back of the converter. Just less of it. One supposes it has something to do with the fundamental nature of macroscopic matter.

Is there a physicist in the house?

It's fine if they don't, and can't. They still need to try to learn, for several reasons.

The most important reason the masses should take at least one programming class is to learn what a computer is capable of. Most people wouldn't know a for loop if it bit them. If they took a programming class, they would at least learn that computers are good at doing repetitious things, and this is how it's done. They may not ever be able to write a coherent program, but at least they can see what's possible. Most people view computers as the magic talking box with a screen you can touch to make it do stuff. (As opposed to the past several generations who viewed televisions as the magic talking box with knobs you could touch to make it do stuff.) A programming class, even a bonehead programming class, would give people an inkling of what's happening inside the magic box, and maybe, just maybe, get them to ask a programmer for help with automating tasks.

The second reason is to make people find out, by experience, that programming is hard. Right now there's a pervasive belief that programming must be easy. After all, my cousin's sister's kid does it. How hard can it be? That boy used to shove peas up his nose. Unless people actually try to write a program, they haven't the faintest inkling how difficult it is. Maybe if they try, they'll finally figure out why programmers cost more than MBAs. Or should.

I wish they had sued. They would have lost as a matter of law, without risk of a jury trial.

I can just see the hearing now.

"Your honor, I'd like to enter into evidence Exhibit A: a solar powered calculator from Dollar General.
"Your honor, I'd like to enter into evidence Exhibit B: a solar powered yard light from Home Depot.
"Your honor, I'd like to enter into evidence Exhibit C: a gasoline generator from Harbor Freight.
"These products are legal in the state of Virginia, are they not? And they all generate electricity? So we're agreed that my client purchased equipment, and not electricity?"

"Yeah, case dismissed, with prejudice. Plaintiff to pay defendant's court costs and attorneys fees."