You might get a couple of freebies with his contact info but I suspect it'd be better policy for an installation this size to set up a paid arrangement with the outgoing sysadmin. I'm not in IT so I don't know what precedents there are around this, but relying on him to reply for free just seems against human nature.

There is 100 percent auditability on what we do.

How does that jibe with the recent story NSA Can't Search Its Own Email

s/idiots/people/
s/intellect/knowledge/
FTFY.

Allow users to specify tags for a story and display the most commonly entered tags. It then becomes a form of commenting, in a way. "upvote" could be just another tag.

Imagine using data analytics to predict what comedy bits might do better. Would it be comedy along the lines of which people have already seen? I don't think so - jokes don't get funnier the more you tell them. Perhaps the same goes for movies? We need more novel story lines.

Kind of scary how shallow they could go. With a sub height of about 21 feet, that's about 15 feet of water above and below which doesn't leave a lot of margin for error.

"The barchan will probably continue on its journey past the city site, which in due course will re-emerge from the sand, but it is anticipated that it will not remain unscathed." Another interesting tidbit: "persons ~ 1.6 m tall atop the dune (~ 35 pixels) act as a scale bar to estimate the dune height (135 pixels) as ~ 6.5 m high". That's a lot of sand.

Given that US politics is controlled by corporations to a large degree, I'd be asking what corporations have a vested interest in making sure they^Wthe USA retains control of the Internet.

It sounds ridiculous, but answering this question, or confirming or denying the very existence of a vacuum cleaner design, a Swiffer design, or even a design for a better hand towel would apparently expose the U.S. government and its citizens to exceptionally grave danger

This kind of hyperbole is what makes people ignore warnings.

Taking that to its logical conclusion, you could assemble the entire rocket upside down. At some point there has to be a base to reference everything else from.

How do novels do it? There must be plenty of Star Wars novels out there.

From http://science.howstuffworks.com/life/human-biology/two-lungs-one-heart1.htm:

Interestingly, when we are in the embryonic stage of development, we actually do have two hearts. The heart primordia (which describes the stage of the heart's development) in the embryonic stage is actually two hearts, which eventually fuse together into one heart with four chambers. Embryologists in the 1920s and '30s kept the heart primordia from fusing in embryonic frogs, and the frogs that grew up developed two hearts. The same also goes for our eyes. We begin with one primordia of the eye, which eventually separates to form two. If the primordia is kept from splitting, one central eye develops, like a cyclops, says Dr. Neff.

A quick web search reveals people who actually do (or did) have two hearts. Here's one about a guy who was born with 3 legs and two hearts!

In the summer of 1906 George Lippert died of tuberculosis at the age 62. The autopsy revealed his two hearts and also showed that one heart died two to three weeks before his eventual death. Doctors declared that if Lippert had not had tuberculosis he could have easy lived on for many years. He would have been sustained by his secondary heart.

An alternative to a super reliable pump is an array of less reliable pumps (like a RAID in hard disk terminology). If one pump fails, you can switch it out while the other pumps keep the blood flowing. Might want to have them mounted outside the body to make replacement easy.

Results are just as good, and they respect your privacy.