Actually launch insurance is expensive enough that if you are doing a significant launch campaign, many companies will go without. If you were going to build, insure, and launch 3 satellites, it's actually cost effective to build/launch 4, and skip the insurance. That way, if one of them goes boom, you still get your three, and if one of them go boom, you wind up with an on-orbit spare.

As many have mentioned, the best thing to do is to get involved with an organization or cause that you care about. If you actually work with the organization, you will a) be helping them out significantly with your time and talents, and b) have a better feel as to whether they are using the funds they receive responsibly. I am on the board of directors of a mid sized (roughly $3,000,000/year) 501(c)3, and I know precisely what our overhead is. I also volunteer heavily for said organization (primarily network design, and electrical type work), and donate when I can.

Despite what other people say, any organization that is viable will have overhead. It costs money to ensure the books are properly kept and audited, there are bills to pay, and non-profits of all organizations, should pay their employees a fair and reasonable wage. From a financial point of view, the real key is to ensure that the books are properly kept, and there are adequate controls in place to ensure that the money is spent in an appropriate manner.

Uhmmm, why are you using your ISP's email in the first place? It's far better to use a third party email provider, so that you can switch ISPs at will without having to change your email address.

This is so wrong, it's funny that you believe it. High density living dramatically reduces the energy requirements for a given population. People tend to live in smaller spaces, which means less energy is required to heat/cool. High density living means that things are closer together, which greatly reduces the need for transportation of goods and people (I live in downtown Vancouver, and while I own a car, I drive it maybe once a week, everything else is on foot).

Low density living means that goods and people need to be transported over much greater distances. Low density generally means that you're heating/cooling a larger space. Low density means more land area covered by asphalt and concrete for a given population. Low density living means far more vehicle trips, worse traffic, etc... In short, it's the most energy intensive way to live.

Having been on both sides of this equation, I've come to the conclusion in my old age that rolling your own solution is rarely ever the right solution. Sure it might save you some money up front, but by the time you document things properly (you are getting full design, code and hardware documentation right?) you have probably spent as much, and you're still pretty much dependent on that one person not getting bored, or hit by a bus, or otherwise keel over.

As much as I love to build things and hack on them, the reality is that for situations like this, the right solution is to go with a control system that will be supported by a manufacturer that will likely be around for a while. Honeywell, Rockwell Automation, etc... When shit goes down, you have somewhere to call.

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 $$$.