Your understanding of orbital mechanics is totally wrong. Geostationary satellites do need frequent stationkeeping maneuvers, but that is because the satellite is required to remain in a 30km box. If these maneuvers cease, as would happen with the sudden disappearance of humans, they will start to drift off their stations, eventually collecting in a couple of regions, one over the Indian ocean and the other over the Pacific. (This is due to the earth's slightly uneven gravity). Because of the vastness of space, the probability of them actually running into each other is fairly low.

A geostationary satellite would need almost the same amount of energy to come down as it takes to put it up there, and probably twice as much to escape the earth's gravity well. At the end of life of these satellites, they use the remaining fuel to boost them another 200km or so in altitude, then vent all remaining fuel (so they won't explode if there's a fuel leak), and then blow the electronics to make sure they don't interfere with anything else. They will remain in that graveyard orbit forever.

I guess they forgot to hit T to enable SAS... ;)

It's gets worse. Chrome throws the dire warnings on self-signed SSL certificates, and then refuses to do the username/password autofill on those pages. I've basically ditched using chrome for most of my network admin stuff that goes over https, because of this.

Also, for those of us operating network connections to remote locations, everything https is absolutely destructive to the network performance. Right now, our WAAS setup gives us about a 30% boost on the satellite connection, mostly through low level de-duplication and compression. When you have 50+ people depending on a 1.8Mbps satellite connection, every bit counts. Enabling https for things that don't need it is a huge performance penalty.

Basically, the people making these decisions assume that everyone has an unlimited, fast internet pipe. This is simply not the case.

Actually, there's nothing really secret about TDRSS. They're just bent-pipe communications satellites like all the others, just with a bit of an odd frequency set. The Radios on the space shuttle were derivatives of those used on military aircraft, but that's about it.

I dunno, if KSP taught me anything, all we need to do is strap 50 MK16 parachutes to it, and everything should be fine. ;)

And there's the problem... Good food doesn't have a barcode. Very little of what I bring home from the grocery store has barcodes on it, and what does usually just has the internal store code on it (meat), or is a bulk package (20lb bag of flour, etc...). All these food tracking/diary apps are really built for tracking packaged/prepared foods, and are a pain to use when you make stuff from scratch. As such, unless you're going to weigh and add all the ingredients manually (I'm way too lazy for that), you're left with generic estimates of what you're eating "Plate of pasta" or "Steak Dinner" or whatever, which can be wildly inaccurate if you're like me and tend to invent as you go and/or substitute ingredients based on what you have.

Because it doesn't cost money. It's an accident of the English language that Free as in no-cost, and free as in freedom, share the same word. In pretty much any other language, they are separate words. In French, this is the difference between "Gratuite" and "Libre"

Why not just a "None of the Above" option? If NotA wins, all candidates in the election are disqualified, and new candidates must be presented.

Actually it can be a great deal... I'm in the process of building up a campus network for a non-profit, that will eventually have some 25 switches (Core and access), and 3 or 4 routers. All of it Cisco. Why? Because Cisco's support policies are such that there is tons of perfectly serviceable EoL/EoS equipment available on the secondary market that suits our needs, and available for very little $$$.

And this is why the United States needs to move to EMV (Chip & Pin) like the rest of the world. Rather than the waiter taking your card away, they bring you a hand-held terminal, which you then take and perform the last portion of the contract yourself, with the card never leaving your hands.

Can you get them in a similarly sized package that is as well built? If so, please cite your sources. Else, you're just pulling that number out of your ass.

Sure, but regular watches don't become obsolete in 3 years.

In Canada, we've been Chip & Pin for at least 5 years ago. I was actually surprised when I was down in the states and had to grab some socks from Walmart. When I swiped my card (which I'm used to in the states) instead it had me insert it and do the usual chip & pin.

The contactless is for small, quick transactions. Buying coffee, a pack of gum, whatever. While Chip & Pin is more secure, it's also significantly slower. So, to move a lot of people through the line quickly, they do the paypass thing. When you have the lunch rush at Timmies, you need to move people quickly. ;)

I've seen this repeated a bunch of times, but it's simply not true. Canada was far and away the largest source of foreign oil to the United States. In November 2014, the USA imported an average of 3.443 million barrels per day from Canada, and only imported 1.014 million barrels from Saudi Arabia. If you add up all the gulf states, and other less friendly nations, that the total imports to the US total 2.630 Mbpd (I totalled Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Iraq, Angola, Russia, Kuwait, and Algeria in that). Additionally, the United States extracts 9.020 Million barrels per day of crude.

The long and short of this is that the gasoline in your car most likely came from domestic crude, followed by Canadian crude, or crude from other friendly nations, and not from Saudi Arabia, or other less friendly nations.

Sources:

http://www.eia.gov/petroleum/i...
http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pe...