In one of the more active areas. So I'm prepared for Mag 2-ish, which means a walk around the house to check for tumbled tchotchkes and tremor-induced feline fecal eruptions. I am however prepared for our natural disaster of choice, the hurricane. Generator, water casks, camp stove, decent pantry - as Garrison Keillor mentions, when I break open the long-forgotten can of water chestnuts, I'll need to turn-to...

John once fixed one of our balky home-built donated units with a disassembled 8" floppy. The disk itself and one side of the felt-lined carrier were perfect AZ bearing materials.

when the orbiter phones home, but I'm too tired at the moment to suss it out.

A plossl or super plossl (dont spend too much). Adding a barlow to the mix helps.

I think you mean John Dobson

said Ballmer "how much skull-peeling screaming can I do?"

he knows what to do with stuff that hitchhikes on spacecraft.

"Kids get in the car. We're goin' to Ikea!" Fixed that for ya.

... speeds without hilarity ensuing. They already have gravity HELPING them stick to the ground, with giant bright lines and concrete barriers and street lights and signs everywhere reminding them not to be jackasses. And still 30,000 people die this way in the US alone every year. What on earth makes anyone think millions of people will be better trying to do this in mid-air at twice the speed with no barriers, lines, lights or sticky-safe gravity? "But air travel is much safer" - sure, with two highly-trained professionals at the yoke, with miles of horizontal separation and thousands of feet of vertical separation with dozens of highly-trained professionals advising them on how to avoid the next perfectly natural thing that might drop them and their hundred+ passengers out of the sky. There are 600K +/- private pilots in the US. There are 200M +/- licensed drivers. I love bopping around in a Skylane as much as the next person, but do I want even 10x more private pilots / planes in the skies? Heck no!

wheat, soybeans, milk or eggs and eating same with your "bare hands and mouth". You think the line is drawn at fish?

as right now most doctors won't communicate by any means but an office visit - no fax, no email, no direct phone calls, everything else goes through an assistant. Puzzling seeing how personal medicine is.

sign up with a solar lease for my house, flatten my mains bill for 20 years and THEN go buy a volt / leaf / pip / tesla? Or is this subject to the dreaded fine print?

(as I was going to say of course /. is immune from such pettiness...)

you get an iPad mini. Even Amazon figured this angle out. So this is not really surprising.

gets the cheese.