Photons need to have gamma-ray energies before they can create virtual electro-positron pairs. Visible light simply does not have enough energy to do this.

I wish that I had mod points to mod your post as funny. It was a good laugh to start my day.

Wrong. Do you know who were the first to push for paved roads? Hint. It was not motorists.

You mean like motorists do?

People in many parts of the world already pay the equivalent of US$7 for petrol, so the projected cost is quite viable for automobile use. However, it is likely that efficiencies of scale will bring down the price of seawater fuel if a mass production system is developed. If that is the case then this fuel could easily compete with conventional petrol at the pump.

Um... Where do you think I work?

> I wouldn't trust your average yahoo who has a plane and license.

Fortunately your average yahoo does not have a plane and a license. In Canada and the US (I can't speak for anywhere else) getting a pilot's license is not easy. It requires significant training, studying, and testing. Your average yahoo simply would not be able to cut it.

The original cost for JWST was capped at $700 million in the late 1990s. The cost is currently about 20 times that. There are people on the project who are confident that the final cost will be much higher.

That is not the reason. The reason that there has not been a dedicated Europa mission is because it will be a very expensive mission and the money is not available. The reason that the money is not available is because the US government does not want to give NASA the required funding. If the US congress offered to give NASA the money, and kept the funding going for the 15-20 years that would be required to do a long-term exploration of Europa, then NASA would jump at the opportunity. There is also a matter of rivalries between JPL and various NASA centers, but a reliable funding stream would go a long way towards resolving those.

The plumes are probably from short-lived pockets of recently melted water near the surface. It is very unlikely that they are directly connected to the underlying ocean, which may be 100 km or more beneath the ice surface.

That is not the case in Canada or in the US. In fact, in most jurisdictions in these two countries it completely legal to record anything that occurs in a place. There are some exceptions, but for the most part it is legal for you to record anything that you want.

It is a module for perl -- www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/papers/HTML/Perligata.html

CVDazzle is an interesting idea, but one would need to change their hair and face style randomly, and fairly frequently, to defeat algorithms that try to match the dazzle style. Razzle-dazzle worked well for military camouflage because it takes advantage of problems with the human brain's pattern matching abilities. However, it does not work as well against neural net algorithms that know that they are looking for objects that are camouflaged this way. Still, this could make for an interesting fashion fad.

Look up The Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum_on_Security_Assurances). Technically it is not a treaty, but that is splitting hairs.

This is why our children are not being eaten by giant eagles.