Ahh, in true AC style, you get pretty much everything wrong...

ESA launches their satellites from Kourou, in French Guiana, South America.

And as always, the US is stuck with a third world healthcare "System."

You're referring to the WAAS and/or EGNOS payloads on geostationary satellites. While they transmit to GPS receivers using the same data format and signals (and in fact show up as GPS satellites so as to not break older GPS receivers) they are not actually GPS satellites. They do not broadcast the timing data used by the GPS system to actually position itself, instead they broadcast correction factors that the GPS receivers use to correct for atmospheric effects on the signal.

The atmosphere can have all sorts of subtle effects on the speed of light at RF, and while not a big deal for most things, GPS requires such precise timing that it is significant. Military receivers, which use both the L1 and L2 frequencies, can gauge the atmospheric effects from the differences between the two signals. Standard commercial receivers rely on WAAS earth stations to estimate the atmospheric effects, and then uplink them via the WAAS payloads in geosynchronous orbit.

Well, not quite... On manually dimmed rear-view mirrors, what you're actually doing is switching to the surface reflection off of the glass, rather than the reflection off the silvered surface. On average, standard glass will reflect about 4% of the light striking its surface. The glass used in rearview mirrors is manufactured so that it's ever so slightly wedge shaped. During normal use, the reflection off the silvered surface dominates (and the 4% gets aimed down at your chest), but when you flip that little tab on the mirror, it aims the silvered reflection up into your car's headliner, and puts the front surface in its place.

This is also the reason why it's bad to have any kind of lighting (computers, DVD players, reading lights, etc... ) going in the back seat, especially if you have a light coloured headliner... It's pretty easy for the glow on the headliner to overwhelm the reflection of what's behind you.

Technically, the Xenon/HID retrofit kits that put the lamp into your existing headlamp housing are illegal. If you retrofit by replacing the entire headlamp assembly, then it is legal. This is due to the differences in the optics required to achieve the required illumination pattern. You can not achieve a legal lighting pattern when you install a xenon lamp in an incandescent housing, it just doesn't work.

A Halogen lamp produces its light over a (short) line, while a xenon lamp is much closer to a point source of light. As such, the optical design of the lenses/reflectors is significantly different.

Or was it p=3 q=5? I guess it depends on how you look at it... ;)

I'm in the satellite business myself, and the reality is that satellite capacity is expensive, no matter how you you look at it. As a rough rule of thumb, satellite capacity prices roughly at $6000/MHz/Month. If you do the math, this basically works out to $6-10 per kbps per month, and that's assuming at least a 2 year contract. So if you had a 1Mbps connection with a 4:1 contention ratio, you're still looking at $1500 a month. The economics change a little if you own a whole transponder (Typically a few million dollars a year for 36Mhz), but even then it's not cheap. The only way that DirecWay and the other satellite ISPs can keep their prices within the realm of reason for the average user is by having insane contention ratios, and draconian "Fair Access Policies"

It sucks, but there's not much that will reduce these prices. There are only so many active geosynchronous satellites that can be up there, and there's only a limited amount of spectrum available. Even if SpaceX cuts the launch costs by 80%, the prices won't go down, that just means the satellite operators will be (more) profitable. The end-user pricing is demand driven, not cost driven.

Actually no. Most commercially available hydrogen is produced by steam reformation of methane (natural Gas). Electrolysis of water is far too inefficient to use on a commercial scale.

Actually in many places, the geese have become non-migratory. (There are actually several different subspecies, some are prone to finding a comfy spot and just staying there 12 months a year). The resident goose population in the Vancouver area, for example, is huge, and discharging long guns in the heart of the city is probably not the wisest thing to do. Besides, from what I'm told, canada goose tastes horrible.

Eh? They're loud, obnoxious, and leave shit everywhere. Clearly they're American. ;)

We aren't talking about small sensor type devices here. (Attitude sensing is done with laser ring gyros, no moving parts) Reaction wheels are rather large objects and can provide significant force to orient the spacecraft.

Reaction wheels a very well known concepts in spaceflight. The ISS uses them to point itself (The Control Moment Gyros) and pretty much any and all geosynchronous satellites also use reaction wheels to keep themselves pointed at earth. This is actually how they ended up recovering Galaxy 15. After several months of drifting while "zombie", the reaction wheels finally saturated (spinning as fast as they could go) causing the satellite to lose earth lock, and go into a safe mode.

Anyhow, the upside and downside is that they are relatively simple devices, and allow for very precise and stable pointing without spending a lot of fuel (you don't want your exhaust condensing on your optics in a telescope now do you?), but at the same time they're mechanical devices, and thus are more fragile than something that's purely solid state.

The fundamental problem you run into however, is that at the point where you need to verify the certificate you don't yet have a network connection. In a PEAP environment, the certificate is presented to the client before layer 3 connectivity has been established. The client obtains the certificate, sees that it has been signed by a valid CA, but it can not actually verify that the certificate is being presented by the right server since, well, there's no network connection yet. It's really one of those chicken and egg problems, there's no good way to resolve it.

The reality is that in most cases, it should pop a warning giving certificate details (along with the fact that it has been signed by a trusted CA), and asking the user if they would like to proceed (and then saving that approval if desired).

I hear the built-in worm detection and removal is especially handy!

I guess you've never been to Monoprice. I use one of their 2.1A car lighter adapters for my iPad, and it works very well. The main issue i have is getting it out of the socket, rather than having it stay in.