In order not to turn the place into a circus, like has happened in other radio observatories...

So, how do they keep all the 'electrosensitive' crackpots from moving in ? Put random blinking LEDs in the area ?

Yeah. What music snobs don't understand is that not everyone listens to music in a soundproof room, with perfectly placed speakers. We listen to it in our cars, on our bike, in public transportation, at home with a screeching baby next to it, etc... Perfect quality is useless in all those cases. And even detrimental: I turn off the bass most times so as to keep said baby asleep. I'd rather have 100 low res mp3 I can squeeze on a car CD, than 5 completely oversampled raw files I can't actually play anywhere besides a PC.

The more I read about that crazy airplane, the crazier it gets...

It must have been close to stalling at this speed !

It's not like classical music doesn't have its own skeletons in its closets: Lick my ass, by Mozart nonetheless.

Having lived it, I can assure you there is a great big difference between -40C (not that cold with good clothing), -60C (fucking cold even with good clothing) and -80C ("my lungs are freezing and I feel like I've just fallen in a pool of liquid nitrogen argh cough cough cough")...

Yes, but not for long. Lunar orbits are inherently unstable because of the overwhelming influence of the mass of the Earth.

17 ? More lige 1,271 different secret gov agencies. Why are there so fucking many ?!?

I liked 'The White Plague', about an artificial disease that wipes out all women... and the crumbling society that remains.

A colleague got crushed in a very similar accident a decade ago. As an electrician he was servicing a damaged robot in a factory (frozen food warehouse actually) when some suit decided to turn it back on without checking first. He got multiple fractures and almost lost a foot. And a nice settlement.

Spot on, but also in the US trucks are cheaper than the equivalent SUV. Different tax on purchase for 'utilitarian' vehicles.

Half of the people at work (research lab) have been using Ubuntu for the last few years. The others are on Macs. The choice of OS is left open. Windows (XP) runs almost exclusively in a few virtual machines kept on tight leashes.

Get a Dell. The Linux option is well hidden on their site, but I had no problem getting an M6700 with tons of funky options (keyboard different from the country I ordered it from). We order Linux laptops from them at work, but I also did as a private customer. Yeah, I know, Dell is not sexy, but all the Linux laptop companies (System76 and others) couldn't get me what I wanted (I'm not in the US).

I believe a simple solution to that is to use higher tax rates the richer you get, to keep you from accumulating wealth without limit. There has to be a point of diminishing returns which should be fixed by careful consideration by economists and politicians, and certainly not by lobbyists for the housing/renting/construction industry.