I hate how much I like Visual Studio and C# in general.

That's what SHE said.

Suborbital flights only last for minutes, not days. It's a roller coaster, not a cruise ship.

They're not trying to be 1960s NASA. They're trying to be 2015's Star Trek.

The same thing they do with other impactors - a flash of light. Then they can do a spectral analysis from which they derive the chemical composition.

The frightening part is when one of these unreproducible studies is used to formulate government social services policies. Then we have people imprisoned, or their children taken from them, based on bad science.

Only because all their greenhouses fled here.

I'd rather have a radar tracking system tell me where the other planes are than to rely on a fragile human pilot looking out the window.

Now fully out of fuel, the spacecraft smashed into a region near Mercury's north pole, out of sight from Earth, at about 20:00 GMT on Thursday.

That, to me, is the really sad part. They should have reserved enough fuel to deliberately crash it so that the impact could be seen and analyzed.

Save it for what? So it could spend three or four years STUDYING NOTHING before running out of fuel?

Blast it away from Mercury for what purpose? What else are you going to study out there? Mercury doesn't have any moons. There's nothing Sunward, and not enough thrust do climb away from the Sun to anywhere else - even if you could break out of Mercury's gravitational pull. The instruments were purpose built to study the surface of Mercury, so they're not going to register anything meaningful if you do break out of orbit.

So I ask you, why blast away from Mercury? What are you going to accomplish?

I believe the conversation goes more like:

"Honey, should we have another kid?"
"No."
"But..."
"No! No! No"
[dejected] "Alright".
"Oh! Come on Ref! That was blatant interference. How could you not call that?... Um... Did you say something Sweetie?"

No. Having families is what happens when there's nothing better to do. That's why the population booms whenever there is a power outage. You want to reduce the population growth? Give everyone a TV, and internet access.

Yeah, but the request for bids specifically required the organization have 8 years of experience with Microsoft Office 2010, and they couldn't find any American companies that did.

I hear they switched IT providers to the "Permanent Assurance Company." AHOY!