Actually, my guess is that most asteroids are pumping out far more energy in terms of reflected sunlight, which is of course how we detect them. A ship next to Earth is going to be bombarded with about 1.5kW of energy from the sun per square meter, which for any non-tiny ship would be a lot more than the 10,000 W or the ship might generate on its own. This presents a problem for the ship, as that energy has to go somewhere. Reflecting the light like a rock would stick out like a sore thumb, and the ship can't absorb the sunlight for very long either, as the energy has to go somewhere and the only option is to radiate it out into space (in the short term, the ship could absorb the energy and store it by doing something like heating water with it, but the ship could only play that game for so long). Probably the best solution would be to have a mirror that reflects the sunlight in a direction away from where you might think your enemy has any detectors.

The cool thing I remember about those old phones is that you could buy a battery case (for lack of a better term) that fit the phone and held standard AA batteries. Sure, it was bulky, but standard alkaline batteries will hold their charge for a long time compared to the rechargeables available at the time, which made it great phone to keep around for emergencies since it could sit in your glovebox (or wherever) for long periods of time and still work when you turned it on. You didn't need service to call 911 so that wasn't a worry. Sadly the phone got turned into a brick when the analog cell service was turned off.

Quite the opposite. A lot of rental cars are fleet-only affairs that you couldn't even buy if you wanted to. Well, not until the fleet owners dump them and they hit the used market. Current examples would be the Chevy Impala, which got redesigned for 2014, but the previous generation is still being manufactured for fleets only as the "Impala Classic" (*). Another example is the Chevy Captiva, which is a small SUV that is only available for fleet purchase. You can't buy one, but you may get stuck with one as a rental.

(*) I believe these may be offered Canada alongside the new Impala, but I'm not sure.
(**) The Captiva is actually a Mexican market car which you could buy if you lived in Mexico.

Why do you keep your Harmony remote charger in your bedroom? I understand if it's a dorm room or something like that, but I would simply move that crap to a different room.

Most of them want a candidate they can place quickly and easily. A Ph.D in computer science generally isn't something that fits that category. Sure, they'll take down your information just in case they happen to run across something that might fit, but that's about all they're going to do.

Look up the Tueller Drill. Quite a bit of research has been put into this. If I remember right, even Mythbusters tested this once and confirmed it.

What are you talking about? Any desktop environment is perfectly happy running at 4K. Most games made in the past few years will render at 4K (whether your graphics card can handle it is something else entirely). 4K televisions are still a bit of a solution without a problem, but I could take advantage of a 4K screen on my computer immediately.

I would just start checking dumpsters if your goal is to get an older computer to run Linux and a P4 is fine. Early LGA775 stuff (which is what a 3.8Ghz P4 would be) is common, and even if the computer doesn't run you could probably harvest it for parts and fix yours up.

It'll probably work too. A lot of people complain about Vista, but if they ever actually used it they'd find it's not much different than Windows 7.

Hey, at least in Windows 8 they brought back the go up a directory button. Though by this time I've gotten so used to using backspace that I don't even push it despite it being there.

Looks like someone played Simtower back in the day? My guess that in a building that large most people would not leave the tower on an average day, so it's more like an arcology in SimCity 2000. It's an interesting point though, as the proposed design would not have living spaces in a lot of the areas where the jetstream would be found (the idea would be to let the wind pass though the open structure to reduce lateral stress) though those areas could not be completely empty as there would have to be elevator shafts passing through them.

Not necessarily. If they can use DNA to prove that the remains are of St. Mark then they can't Alexander's.

There's often going to be difference between an aftermarket charger and a counterfeit one. There are plenty of perfectly fine third-party chargers that are CE, UL listed, etc. that are safe to use. The counterfeiters generally don't concern themselves with that kind of thing and build about the cheapest thing possible.

That's assuming that the newbies can even make it to the front lines. With so many entry-level jobs going overseas or to H1-b's, a lot of STEM graduates end up having to find work in other fields.

Windows is constantly paging ram contents out the disk. That way, if something suddenly has a need for a large amount of memory, Windows can let it have it instantly because the contents have already been paged out. Linux doesn't do this so if something needs a lot of ram you have to wait while the kernel swaps something out to disk first. This is usually a good thing if you are trying to run Windows on a system without a lot of ram, but the thing is Windows keeps on doing it even if there is gobs of ram available. And if you think Windows 7 is bad about it, Vista was a lot more aggressive when it came to this.