You want to offer a bunch of impressionable young people, most of whom are accumulating large amounts of debt, the opportunity to learn as much as they can about the computer security infrastructure of the country. While they do this, we're not paying them a cent or giving them any guarantees regarding future employment, further increasing their financial insecurity in the present and the future, as well as exploiting whatever sense of loyalty they might feel for their country for the purpose of reducing government labor costs.

What could possibly go wrong?

That's not quite accurate. Heavier radioactive elements would have come from supernovas, which only occur in stars much more massive than our own. The more massive the star, the higher its luminosity and the shorter its lifespan. Some of the most massive stars we've found will spend (or have spent) less than 100,000 years on the main sequence before expanding into supergiants and exploding as supernovae. So there's plenty of time for nucelosynthesis over that 15 million year span.

That's the mass threshold for deuterium fusion. No fusion = planet, deuterium fusion = brown dwarf, hydrogen fusion = main sequence star.

So at 11 Jovian masses, the planet is close, but not quite big enough to reach brown dwarf status.

When has politics not interfered with governance?

We'd be able to fly as long as gravity doesn't interfere.

Or leftover dust from the stellar disc that's more prevalent in the outer areas. The orbit gradually degrades until it reaches a clearer area closer in.

No it isn't.

Gah. Almost forgot:

ATLM = All the little Meridians

UM = Uncle Meridian

Still living Dangerously after all these years....

Which is just great until they start deriving the wrong answers. And since they don't ask any questions to confirm, they wind up either being useless (doing something tangential to what they were supposed to be doing), or worse than useless (irreparably screwing up their work and possibly their coworkers' as well). Not asking enough questions is a much greater concern than asking too many.

How does one steal milliseconds from a country's central banking system?

I guess time really is money.

The fact that the people disagreeing with you don't know everything is not in any way an implication that you know anything.

Neither did most things in Gauntlet except for the demons and the lobbers. Even the Sorcerers got up close and personal.

Perhaps a "Francis needs food, badly!" followed by "I HATE FOOD!" would be more to your liking?

I believe the technical term here is "minivan".

You must construct additional pylons to access that link.

Down to 7.7 million at the end of the second quarter according to Eurogamer this morning.