Thank you. I've only been to Belfast so far, which was great fun, and I hope to spend more time in both Irelands.

I think you have to look at where the funding comes from for Republican and conservative causes. Don't just look at candidate funding, even election advertising has a lot of funding that isn't straight to the candidate.

Although there might be no shortage of self-employed Republicans, they don't really call the shots for the party. It's the very deep pockets who do.

The UK is Great Britain, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, some other pieces, and some of those are partially self-governing (I don't know much about how the Irish Free State works, etc). And then we have the ex-colonies and client states which still consider the Queen their head of state.

if that were true you'd have been able to get a cool name on slashdot. And "were" would actually be spelled the way you spelled it.

You are ignoring the fact that it seems like one highly intelligent and technology-developing species could probably not evolve in coexistence with another one on the same planet, at some point one would win and kill off the other one.

I'm sure it's been proposed/discussed many times before, but I don't know if this concept has an "official" name or not.

They would laugh when they learned that our supposed evidence of the big bang was actually just us picking up their interstellar music streaming service.

Directionality is a mostly irrelevant consideration.

The fact that an antenna is 9db or 30db higher in one direction quickly becomes irrelevant with the vast distances of space. Antennas don't work like flashlights. They are more like a light bulb with a two-way mirror on one side that reflects 50% of the light and lets 50% of it through out the back. At VHF and above, things like mountains act like mirrors that reflect signals straight up (among other directions), as well.

You are somewhat wrong about AM... at least broadcast band AM is mostly only directional in the sense that there's dead zones straight off the ends of the dipole. They are shooting quite a bit of signal upward. Our ionosphere does strongly reflect and attenuate what would make it out to space in those bands though.

This goes toward your comment about the 50s and 60s... we have far more powerful transmitters in operation now (some VHF TV the better part of 1 megawatt!), and in bands that aren't reflected by the ionosphere. If anything we are getting louder and louder.

Unfortunately the first thing they might see of humanity is free-to-air broadcast TV, and just assume that we are all complete idiots.

have a great deal of respect for you

Sorry, I should have made it more obvious that I was writing tongue in cheek about the monarchy. Not about SpaceX though. I'm pretty impressed.

It doesn't work to do this with a democratic government. We need a monarchy :-(

It seems to me that SpaceX is on the path to a solution that might be affordable by a single administration, though.

Any company that bans gun related stuff does have a political agenda.

Agreed. It's incredibly stupid and shortsighted for kickstarter to ban "weapons and weapons accessories".

These are the kind of posts that make me still visit Slashdot regularly, you just don't get this most other sites. Thank you, that was very informative and well written.

If Boeing was interested in getting people into space, more than a handful of them would be there. The fact is that it has taken a company that was outside of the system, with a tiny fraction of Boeing's funding, to make more progress than Boeing has.

And of course it's in the U.S. interest to make sure the Russians have an active and completely up-to-date source of rocket engines for their nuclear missles.

In this vein, I wonder what it is we are paying the Chinese to do?

I think we need to take a serious look at the "many eyes" theory because of this. Apparently, there were no eyes on the part of parties that did not wish to exploit the bug for close to two years. And wasn't there just a professional audit by Red Hat that caught another bug, but not this one?