I've been on the street as well. But to claim that, because you've scraped up enough to stay at a motel, you no longer qualify as homeless, I can't abide by that. You have a temporary roof over your head; but, in the eyes of the law, you are not a resident, and as far as any future employer is concerned, you are neither a resident nor do you have a valid home address.

Since the Republicans have been letting the extremists and fanatics drive for the past couple of years, they won't be getting my vote this year.

I'm sorry, living in a cheap hotel is homeless. I was there 25 years ago and I can assure you that a hotel address does not qualify as a permanent address when registering to vote, when applying to a state university for enrollment, when applying for a checking account, or when filling out a job application. In fact, in the area I live in, municipalities are imposing rules limiting hotel guest to no more than 30 or 60 days within a 180 day window unless it is a permitted "extended stay" motel. Nothing says home like being kicked out of a motel after two months.

Because Nerds need funding to do the thing that they do. Funding depends on the economy providing dollars for corporations to spend. It also depends on the Government either directly providing dollars for science and R&D or indirectly creating policy that helps the economy generate dollars. If your a nerd, you should be concerned about what the Government is doing -- it has a direct impact on your ability to do nerdy things.

By the time the weapons are 100 years old (at least by the 2050's) most of the required componentry will be child's play. A little textbook physics (because most of what you need is in the textbooks) and even a private citizen would be able to build one. Only thing stopping anyone would be access to the explosives to make the shaped charges and access to the fuel(s).

Gallium alloys are used in fire suppression systems and thermal safety valve. Anywhere you want a metal plug to melt at a predefined temperature.

All these items have uses besides building a nuclear weapon.

yeah, oops.

Even if only 1 star in 1,000,000 is like ours... that leaves 200 Sol like stars in the Milky Way (which I believe has at least of 200,000,000 stars). And the odds look considerably better than that, based on what we're finding. Fermi Paradox stands.

That definition applies only to our star in general. And there are plenty of reasonable arguments that it needs to be revised. Those planets not circling a star tend to be referred to as "rogue planet" anyway. Frankly, we really don't have a good definition for, or a good classification system for "planet".

Systems composed of multiple stars (binaries, etc.) are more common than singular stars, like our Sun. A binary system is a risky place to be -- there is a strong probability that the gravitational interaction between the paired stars would, given enough time, eject any planetary body which forms there -- the "stable" regions depend on the orbital parameters of the two (or more) stars and can be limited to very narrow bands. So, if planetary formation is a typical process around stars and binaries are more common, then it's likely that the galaxy has a large population of planets ejected from unstable orbits around binaries.

For what it's worth, conjecture is that the Sun formed in a cluster and was, itself, ejected. Nearby stars with identical spectra (implying they formed from the same source material) have been identified.

We're out in the backwater. All the action is happening in the core.

It's also possible they just didn't fall into a good resonance with a neighboring gas giant. There's evidence that planetary bodies shifted around while Jupiter and Saturn came fell into their final orbital parameters.

So, how do you really feel? Sure, Apple was progressive, no one will argue that... The first decent version of DOS (3.x) came out in 1984. My memory might be faulty; but, I thought Desqview had some support for long file names (or long descriptions for files in a file manager). Windows 3 had some long description support. LFN showed up in 1994, VFAT in 1995, and FAT32 in 1996. I'm not sure what decades (plural) you're speaking of. CP/M was out in the mid 1970's. It had it's limitations, as you know; but, it served it's purpose. (Full Disclosure: I was introduced to computers on Commodore PET, Apple ][, CP/M, and VAX machines. My first DOS experience was 1986)

The NASA communications equipment probably includes crypto technology so they can send encrypted communications if necessary. I would swag that it's compatible with the DOD hardware. So, if they were carrying spares for the comm system...