Pictures tend to work better. Find Pluto and Charon in these:

http://i.imgur.com/5Vzof1w.png
http://kokogiak.com/solarsyste...

Apple has thousands of developers, artists and other experts that get paid to work on OSX.

When do you think a Linux desktop company will be come close to matching that?

Granted, most of the work that they do at Apple is thrown away before it reaches the consumer, but that is often the nature of product development, when you don't know which features the users will need or want. The same would be true for a Linux desktop OS company.

Don't worry. If you're not doing anything wrong you have nothing to worry about, until the government decides to ban whatever it is you're doing.

How do you expect to sell a spam can that has never been used to transport spam before? Someone has to be first.

They'll obviously fly these capsules with test dummies or other test equipment first, but again, someone has to be the first actual human to fly.

Yeah, the more different one is, the more potential partners one has to sift through to find a match. I imagine transsexual women have to use online dating services to have a chance at sifting through enough profiles to have a decent chance at finding someone.

Lowering your standards works great up until the point where you end up with someone who simply isn't right for you. If you're even considering going out with someone who is "really creepy" you need to seriously unlower your standards.

Might also help if the rest of us make fewer jokes about transsexual people and other people who are different.

Tomato farmers claim that Bumblebees are superior to regular bees when it comes to pollinating tomatoes, so that's wy there is a market for them.

Actual quick fix: breed regular non-modified bumblebees in captivity and sell hives to farmers.

Yeah, it is fairly fast, but as your calculations show, a 500 kg orbiter traveling to Pluto in 10 years is not unthikable using chemical rockets and the current budget levels of NASA. The only parameter that makes it impossible is the cost of launching and assembling stuff in orbit.

You would be able to do a mission like that within the current budgets if there was a 20x drop in cost per unit of weight to orbit. That is assuming that you can build a rocket stage that can start (and/or restart) after 10 years and can function in a cluster with other rocket stages. Also, you'd need to figure out a cheap and reliable way for those rocket stages to dock in low Earth orbit. But it's not unthinkable.

If the delta v for a 10-year flight to Pluto was 100 km/s it would be unthinkable.

The delta v relative to Pluto is 11 km/s, which is not a whole lot in and of itself. My understanding is that fuel boil-off during the 10 years of transit to Pluto makes it very difficult and expensive to bring along enough fuel for a retro burn to put a spacecraft into orbit around Pluto.

It would have been pretty awesome to have an obiter that could zip around Pluto and Charon and do observations. Maybe next time.

It is just a person using the most convenient terminology.

I think we all understand perfectly well that a planet is, by established tradition, a very large object (by human measures) that orbits one or several stars, that has been shaped into a ball by its own gravity and that is ot a star itself. The use of the word "planet" in "dwarf planet" supports this point.

It is probably fine if different people use different lower size limits for what qualifies as large enough to be a proper planet. All that amounts to is a value in the condition of a database search in a database of all the objects orbiting a star, and I think it's perfectly fine that different scientists would want to make different searches in such a database depending on what they are interested in.

The canonical way of solving that would be to have a unique code, an "international standard artist number", for each artist and a tag that can hold multiple artist codes.

This might be useful: http://www.isni.org/

Yeah, I'm sure there are plenty of people who do like to control their tags themselves.

The tried and tested way to solve this sort of conflict would be for tags to have namespaces. That way your music files could have multiple sets of tags. Your music player could then be configured to either look for a single namespace, or to use some algorithm to merge multiple namespaces.

Wow, I guess that means that more than half of all advanced computer users that I encounter in my day to day life must have machined their own custom laptops to look just like Macbooks!

No, but seriously, many advance users do not care to have advanced control over their music library.

Many advanced users unwittingly had Itunes destroy their music organization about a decade ago when they switched from Winamp to Itunes. They swore about it for a while, then accepted that Apple controls their music folder now and that having advanced control over your music organization is nice, but not essential. If we turn off our RDF deflectors temporarily we might even think of it as a feature. Remember what a time sink music file organization used to be.

It sure doesn't look anything like the concept art that Nintento released back in those days. I'm pretty sure the SNES had an expansion port on its bottom. The idea was that you would mount your SNES on top of the SNES-CD / Play Station unit.

Console ad-ons have rarely had much success, which makes me doubt that that either company was ever very serious about launching the product. If they were serious about it they would probably ultimately have launched a standalone console that could play both CD and cartridges instead of a CD ad-on for the SNES.

The next major US coal disaster is just coal plants operating as designed on July 2.