There actually are some good reasons for going with a global menu bar. When developing the original interface for the Mac, Apple studied the various options for the menus in depth. What they found is that when the menus are at the top of the screen, they are significantly faster to access, as they have infinite depth, thus you do not have to be anywhere near as accurate in your pointing to access them. In effect, you only need to have to worry about the left-right position of the cursor, as you can just fling it to the top of the screen and not be precise in that dimension. If the menu bar is attached to the window, you have to position the the cursor in both dimensions. The ultimate of this is the screen corners, which is also the reason for the Apple Menu being up there. This is a subtle effect, but is backed up by some good hard data.

Slashdot Drinking Game?

Consider this your correction. With modern technologies, High Voltage DC is actually the preferred method for long-distance power transmission. In the past, the issue was always the AC/DC conversion at either end of the line.

HVDC has a number of things to recommend it.

1) Uses the entirety of the conductor for power transmission. When you push AC through a conductor, it exhibits what's called the "Skin Effect." In the case of 60Hz AC, the power is actually only using about the outer 7mm of the conductor. Power companies actually do make use of this, using a steel core for tensile strength, and a copper sheath for high conductivity, but it also puts a limit on how much current a given conductor can actually carry. At DC, the power will flow through the entirety of the conductor, and since resistance is proportional to the cross-section area of the conductor, you get less loss for a given piece of cable.
2) AC loses significant amounts of power to the ground through capacitive losses. In effect, the transmission line forms a very large capacitor with the earth. For long transmission lines this becomes a significant effect. Again, because this is due to frequency, DC solves the problem.
3) Isolates and relaxes the frequency requirements of the grid. After they lost most of the power grid to an ice storm in 1998, Quebec Hydro rebuilt their grid using HVDC transmission lines and interconnects to the eastern grid. Because of this, they were isolated from the frequency instability that caused the large north-east blackout in 2003 and thus the lights stayed on.

Anyhow, the main reason why AC has been used for long haul transmission is because when the grid was built out, there was no efficient way to convert power between AC and DC or to change the voltage once it was in the DC domain. With the advent of modern power electronics, it's quite possible to build megawatt and/or gigawatt scale inverter/rectifiers that will do this more efficiently than the AC losses for long distance power transmission. As with all of our crumbling infrastructure, the main problem is that no one is willing to invest in the capital expenditures to make it happen.

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.