Someone at the station must have been watching Earth II again...

Cap'n! She's taking quite a Wallop(s)!

You seem to have some knowledge from whence you speak... Given the use of decades-old refurbished Soviet engines, would either of the components that you mentioned be a part of that old assembly?

Budum-bum!

I don't think that it's a cut and dried as the article makes it out to be. My guess is that it still required human control to activate it, it just might not have required high-ranking military personnel or politburo officials to make the call.

Honestly at that height I don't think it would have mattered that much. Either the buildings of the launch facility were going to have debris rained down upon them from above, or were going to have their walls in the vicinity of the ground explosion absorb the debris.

There have been reports of vehicles damaged, but I think those are erroneous, confusing the destruction of the launch vehicle with possible damage to ground vehicles. There shouldn't have been anything not inside-and-under-cover given the destructive power of the launch anyway.

The ground explosion did take out two of the four towers around the pad, but I'm amazed that the worklights on the remaining two towers stayed functional. They were on through the end of NASA TV coverage a moment ago.

You mean, it wasn't a good idea to reuse those 40-year-old Russian engines even when two of them have been shown as defective before this launch?

Sounds like a mobster name.

Per her source, the deletion of data while she was using it was a warning. Warnings don't work that well when they're less obvious to the user. (I think Tom Clancy actually invented that move originally).

The reference I remember was in Doctor Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, when it's revealed that the Soviets have a doomsday weapon that'll destroy the world if a nuke goes off in their territory, and the Americans comment how a deterrent weapon is only good if it's known.

Hey, it worked for Sigfried and Roy!

Or should that be, "Hay! it worked for Sigfried and Roy!"?

Agnostics that believe that it's unlikely that there's a diety?
Agnostics that don't know if there's a diety?
Agnostics that don't really engage in the discussion?

I'd dub the last group Apathiests. They're not in the debate because they simply don't care. They're probably also the majority. Good luck appealing to them. Until the dissolution of the separation of Church and State goes too far they don't have a stake in this.

It'll be a lot worse than that. The door is open to LaVeyan Satanists and all of the offshoots of Satanism too. There's already a fight brewing over a Satanic statue being carved with the intention of placing it on the grounds of the Oklahoma State Capitol, given the presence of a Ten Commandments statue there already opening the argument. If this conference has religious ceremonies at it, then that opens the way for Satanists to have their own religious ceremonies, which could include live animal sacrifice or sexual rituals.

The university should not have booked the event.

Like the Ferengi captain of a ship?

Ah. I guess what I should have asked then, is what an article about an exercise product is doing on Slashdot...

Only if you're the last vestiges of the Holy Roman Empire, that's not holy, not Roman, and certainly not an empire...