>>>Also it's "dradis". Which isn't explained, but does appear to be effectively instantaneous.

I figured Dradis was the name of the guy who invented the scanner, and it appears to be similar to our passive RADAR (shows blips of whatever EM targets it receives).

>>>Any spacecraft gives off heat, and infrared radiation is easy to spot in clumps

Not when it's 3 light-minutes away. You're talking about finding a tiny carrier-sized object at the distance of Mars, and it could be anywhere. On the same plane as you, or above you, or below you, or even behind you.

I wouldn't call that incest. Besides studies have shown that closely-related cousins have a better propagation rate than strangers. Closer chemistry leads to less stillbirths.

>>> "Yeah, we put noise in space, because ... um ... there's pressure on the sides of the spacecraft, yeah, that's it. That's my story and I'm sticking to it."

JMS never said anything like that. (If you think he did, then I want to see a linked source.) You make it sound like he's some kind of idiot.

Why are so many B5 Actors dying so young? The Star Trek crew lived on-and-on-and-on. Nobody dies until the around 2000..... 30 years after the show. Meanwhile B5 has lost several actors in just the first 12 years.

It appears you have this backwards.
According to JMS it was the *B5 crew* that contacted NASA and asked for technical assistance to portray accurate ship maneuvering. The fact Starfury acts like a real space vessel is probably because the NASA advisor was rejecting early designs & offering advice on how to make it better.

>>>Yes, because there is a world of difference between fictional violence and real violence.

Studies have shown the human brain does not distinguish the difference. It has the same chemical reactions to whatever it sees, regardless if it's real or on TV.

>>>vinyl, because it captures more sound from thestudio recording

Not hardly. When a record is *brand new* it has some high frequency harmonics (upto 25,000 hertz), but those quickly get rubbed-off the record by the needle. Of course being analog it will never be a perfect amplification of the little record ridges into audible sound. There's always distortion. PLUS vinyl adds *extra* sounds to a recording, like the hiss of the needle rubbing the record and the humm of the motor. It also suffers wow and flutter since it doesn't spin at a constant rate. (And of course no record can touch Super Audio CD or DVD-audio with approximately 0 to 96000 Hz range.)

>>>the actual crime he did commit.

He said he would be willing to kill to get some shoes. That's not a crime. That's a joke. Like if I said, "I could kill for some ice cream."

>>> gun proliferation is great (despite murder rates two orders of magnitude higher than civilised countries)

The USA rather stupidly classifies self-defense as "murder". Other countries do not. I don't know why the U.S. government does that but it taints the statistics. For example an old WW2 vet recently heard a guy break into his basement, grabbed a gun, and waited to see if the guy would be stupid enough to attack. Well he did, so the WW2 vet shot him. It was ruled "justifiable homicide". And hence adds to the USA murder/homicide statistic.

>>>All it takes is one mistake and you have a loose cannon and a front page news article like this one.

This is why my virus update is off. I update about once a month, and I only accept OLD updates not newer ones. So if I had Sophos on my computer I would be having zero problems right now.

I never could figure-out what that 486 Turbo button was for. I didn't notice any difference in speed.

>>>I have no idea who those guys are, and have no interest to know.

You have no idea who Jerry Sandusky is? The guy who was just convicted of child molestation & brought down the Penn State football team (they are suspended for ~5 years and must pay a huge fine, as well as having all their scores for the last ten years erased). A major news story that was at the top-of-the-hour for weeks. Don't you watch TV? Or read the news? Like... ever??? Wow.

As for your claim "Communications are private, and should be private," that is not true for emails that are owned by your employer. Your emails that you post from your work account are Not private. Neither are the emails that Mann posted from his work account, which are owned by His employer: the government.

YOU HAVE NO EXPECTATION OF PRIVACY when posting emails from a work-owned computer. In the case of academics it's even worse: Their computers are paid-for and owned by the government. There is no reason why their emails should be protected from view by the Attorney General who has reason to believe a crime was committed. *We* would not be able to claim a right to privacy over our work emails.

>>>If someone is accused a specific wrongdoing which falls under the law

You mean like child molestation? No more protection for the PSU academics. Okay. Well PSU employee Mann is *also* accused of wrongdoing.

>>>well, tough shit, you don't get to annoy people just because you don't like them or their ideas.

It's been well-known for decades that you don't have privacy over Emails which belong to your *employer* not you. State college academics' emails belong to the employer, which is the government, which is subject to the Freedom of Information Act.