Ahem.

Firstly, when the enemy knows that you're watching, he can attempt to deceive you.

Secondly, if the enemy can reliably know when he is being watched, then he can also reliably know when he is not being watched and is thus free to do whatever he wants.

Why do you say "allegedly"? The Strategic Petroleum Reserve is not a secret.

The US stockpiles a significant quantity of oil in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. However, it is nowhere near a trillion barrels (a trillion barrels is something like 120 years of US oil consumption).

And it amounts to about 8% of all the gold ever mined worldwide.

'I got $25 from Reader's Digest last week for something I never said. I get credit all the time for things I never said. You know that line in You Bet Your Life? The guy says he has seventeen kids and I say: "I smoke a cigar, but I take it out of my mouth occasionally"? I never said that.' -- Interview with Roger Ebert in Esquire magazine (7 March 1972)

That politics quote is frequently attributed to Groucho Marx, but I don't see any reliable source for when and where he said it, and doubt he did.

I hate to interrupt your self-righteous ranting, but that Lexus didn't have a key to turn. It was push-button. Many owners don't know how to disable the engine while driving, and this guy was driving a loaner he was unfamiliar with.

Now, if you had said he should have put it into neutral, you'd have a point. But as it is, you're the idiot.

You know that the "massive new launcher" is the Ares series listed on the page you linked to, right?

DDG-51 destroyers are Arleigh Burke class. There's 55 of them so far; none are nuclear powered.

Rep. Gene Taylor made some noise about canceling the Zumwalt/DDG-1000 class (gas turbine-powered) in favor of a nuclear Burke variant, but it hasn't happened.

What you are referring to is 1964's Operation Sea Orbit. You need more than a carrier and two missile cruisers to make up a carrier strike group. Nuclear-powered destroyers and supply ships were not built, and the all-nuclear Navy never materialized.

Since the last nuclear cruiser was decommissioned in 1999, the only nuclear vessels in the US Navy are aircraft carriers and submarines.

Collin County, Texas is not in a desert. It averages 41 inches of rain per year, more than supposedly wet Seattle (37").

Of course that's true, but that wasn't the point. The post I replied to said "I don't recall any of the other 43 presidents ever being referred to with anything other than an initial for their middle name." John Quincy Adams is a counter-example. FDR often gets the full Delano as well.

Of course they do, and I'm not arguing against that. I'm just saying that referring to a president's middle name is not a unique occurrence.

Bob Jacobs, the deputy assistant administrator for public affairs at NASA, says the story's fiction.

(via Phil Plait)

John Quincy Adams?

I got in an argument once with someone who thought the clacks system was completely implausible. While the mechanical devices inside are pure Pratchett, optical telegraphs really existed.