Ozzy never did say that. The man can hardly speak! Sure, he's alive but his brain has been seriously fried.

The "Neanderthal" stuff is just another cheap attempt to get publicity. Most Caucasians have those genes.

Yeah, because you might threaten yourself and hijack your own plane. Right?

"Deemed to be a hazard" TO WHOM? Like he's going to hijack his own private jet?

Like a religion, "security" or "anti-terrorist measures" don't have to make sense nor be based on anything anyone can see or prove. It's all based on scary fiction, like Hell.

It doesn't make sense to debate about possible causes for an effect that no one else has observed. Is there any confirmation that decay rates show any significant variation?

I can't find anything which says how much variation they claim to have seen. Usually when the word "significant" is missing, it means that the variation can't be reliably distinguished from measurement error.

I don't give a rip what they think might be causing variation in decay rates. Not yet.

I want to see some verification that decay rates actually vary at all, first. Last I heard, they don't

The whole thing is a misunderstanding of operator precedence, that's all.

Ask the same people about "8+3*4" and they'll probably get that wrong too.

Escaping from the oppressive influence of religious tradition is not a bad thing.

People no longer feel threatened enough by the dirty old men in robes to suffer through boring church services and unhappy marriages. Good on them.

That's, "La angla estas tro malfacila! Parolu esperante."

Come on over to Lernu.net and learn Esperanto for real.

65 feet is only a couple of boat-lengths. That's pretty close. If I was working those booms, I'd be worried about any boat that close running over or afoul of the boom.

So photographers are limited to 65ft. How close can other people get? Is that still 300ft? My guess is that reporters are belly-aching because they can't get close enough to dip a gloved hand into the oil and show it to the camera.

Can we please, please get over the archaic notion? A "nation" does not act as though it were one person.

If you want to know what people in Iraq are like, get to know some of them! Oh, what's that? You can't? Well DUH! Maybe that's the problem.

So this is what one of the nation's highest tax rates goes to pay for.
:(

This doesn't make sense for a "meteor". The atmosphere is less than 200 miles thick, and the chance that a meteorite will skim across that relatively thin layer of atmosphere long enough to be sited along a 700-mile path over multiple states is infinitesimal. Multiply that by the tiny fractional probability that it would have enough mass to burn that long and the odds look impossible.

More likely, this was a massive satellite in near earth orbit. That's really the only reasonable thing which would match the observations.

So, since it's not being reported as a satellite it's probably a secret satellite. We already know that NASA launches classified payloads. It's safe to assume that other countries do too. Stealth technology would be simple, just build it with flat metal sides painted black and power it with a self-contained reactor (and there's your mass).

Location data could be difficult. There's no GPS on Mars. The cheapest solution would be to give the Tumbleweeds an omnidirectional beacon strobe. Then it could be spotted from orbit when it's on the night side. Accurate location info would be easiest to get just after dusk and before dawn because landmarks on the day side would be visible to the satellite.