6:00? I'll be hiding in my bed at such an ungodly hour.

I find this statement to be true more for computer monitors than for television screens. Too many people end up with TV screens so large that the individual pixels become annoyingly visible. HD mitigates this, but most channels still use SD.

Pick a TV screen size that's appropriate for your viewing distance, instead of the bigger == better fallacy.

The site works well for me; I've got my account prefs set to use the old Discussion System (D1).

That would be an advantage in some cases (e.g. practicing in a non-soundproof room in an apartment building). Finally, a brass instrument that can be played quietly if so desired.

Whoa there. There was no bashing going on in my comment.

GP said "...the massive foresight it must have taken at launch time to make them relevant decades later". I thought GP was referring to Gravity Probe B. GP was launched 7 years ago, not decades. Its equipment was developed specifically for this mission. Development took a long time, but the ultimate goal was always clear, in other words Gravity Probe B's results are due to proper planning. Not 'foresight'.

Foresight is defined as "The ability to predict ... what will happen or be needed in the future". In this context, I assumed that GP meant 'a probe was launched decades ago with some instruments on board that we, decades later, figured out to be useful for confirming Einstein's predictions'.

The satellite we're talking about here was launched in 2004. The project ran for much longer, that time was spent developing the technology. FTFA:

Very impressive research, yes. 'Massive foresight', not so much.

The only thing Betacam and Betamax have in common is the physical tape cassette. Betacam ran at ~6x the speed of Betamax and used a different recording format to achieve much higher quality.

DAT was popular in the professional audio industry as it was the first relatively affordable digital recording medium. Still, the technology used meant it was much more expensive initially than the analogue cassettes it replaced. The digital copy protection imposed by the *AA was an issue in Europe as much as the USA. Lack of sales volume kept the price high.

After the Chernobyl accident, the team that had created the Lunokhod rovers was asked to build remote-controlled vehicles (RCV) to help clean up. The RCV's first task was to remove reactor debris (chunks of graphite from the core) from a roof, by pushing it off the edge of the roof. The RCVs worked well; eventually though they failed due to the radiation. This despite them being rad-hardened, as the original Lunokhods had been powered by an RTG.

Bolt a bass driver directly to your chair.

I wonder if it would be feasible to use one of the intact reactors on the site (unit 5 or 6) to boil the water.

And another remote that tries to confine a computer UI into the classic TV remote. Granted, adding the keyboard is a nice touch, but it's still too limited.

I've been using a mediacenter computer for a few years now. The remote control solution I use:
- keyboard
- mouse
- Griffin Powermate

1. a mouse makes for a much better pointing device than a four-way button
2. the keyboard and VLC's configurability gives me dedicated buttons for VLC's functions, like very short jump/short jump/medium jump/long jump; crop/aspect ratio; subtitles. Much better than the buttons on this remote which are straight copies from a VCR UI.
3. the best way to control volume is a rotary knob. The Powermate is ideal for this. I never want to go back to the incredibly annoying +/- buttons on a remote.

Usually, transparency is a good thing. In this case though, wouldn't the smart play have been to let sleeping dogs lie? Karim can't have been the only terrorist to rely on breakable encryption.

That's incorrect. The Buran program included a number of airframes. One of them, OK-GLI, was an atmospheric test bed. It featured four jet engines so it could take off under its own power. It was used to test the glide characteristics of the airframe.
OK-GLI is now on display in Speyer.
Maybe your confusion stems from the fact that both the program and the first shuttle in that program to be used for an orbital flight (OK-1K1) were named Buran.

If a Shuttle comes to Europe, I'd argue it should go to the Technical Museum in Speyer, D. They already have a Buran (the atmospheric test bed).