So nice of the US to formalize the pronunciation of metric prefixes. Now all we have to do is the get the US to actually start using metric.

It is just a clever restatement of "If all you have is a hammer, everything look like a nail."

[Cue disaster brewing]

Companion: Doctor, I think we're screwed.

Doctor: No problem, I've got a screw-driver.

[Dramatic, unexpected avoidance of disaster]

My wife isn't interested in playing with configuration settings, tweaking this, adjusting that and so on. A simpler UI, that does what she wants it to do, and no more, is what she's looking for.

Mmmm. Let's get government grants for the whole Flying Spaghetti Monsterism theme park. This gives, "think of the children" a whole new meaning. The children would start a grass roots effort to fight creationistic dogma with, "can you take us to Spaghetti Word."

I'm thinking a Flying Spaghetti Monsterism theme park. Let's get government funding to fight the insanity of government funded religion.

Anybody want to start a Flying Spaghetti Monsterism theme park? It would be a lot of fun, and the government should be willing to fork over an equivalent amount of funds. Kidding aside, this is how the fight against creationism being taught along side evolution was won, and that was just a "paper" effort. Here, we can actually get government funding, and build something that would attract tourism dollars, educate people, and maybe turn a profit.

I don't know how bats do it, but CDMA allows several phones and several base stations to operate in overlapping areas on the same frequency. The transmission is "coded" in such a way that to everyone else, it just appears as noise. Kind of like your "voice" thought, but think of it as "language". You can be in a room with many people talking in different languages, and you can pick up a conversation in a language you know, and discard the rest as noise.

I had a love-hate relationship with my 150-in-1. I could build oscillators that generated tones, and change the tones, and what not. But it never really explained why/how it worked. It had PNP and NPN transistors ... But the difference between them? No info. They act like switches? Excellent. They act like amplifiers? Ok ... cool. Connect them like this and they oscillate. Say what?

I eventually moved up to a 250-in-1 kit with digital logic chips. That was cool! You could understand how a flip flop worked by tracing the logic 0's and 1's. Although analog circuits came before digital ones, digital ones are easier to grok, which leads to more learning. At least, in my case it did.

Add to that not wanting to be pregnant during the hot summer months, and wanting to avoid "cabin fever" (for those of us living with serious amounts of winter snow) with a newborn baby, and you're pretty much left with a spring birth.

Prior art? How about the reserve tank on a Motorcycle? You move a lever, and you can operate the motorcycle to the nearest gas-station. I can't see this patent passing.

That the pulsars move relative to each other (and us) is true - but this is an extremely minor point. The pulsars all have very large masses, which means it would take something HUGE to alter their trajectory significantly. Until that happens, that large mass translates to very predictable movement.

The periodicity of the pulsar is more problematic. With a sudden introduction of mass, or a sudden readjustment in the matter of the pulsar, the frequency can abruptly change. And yet, this isn't even so much of an issue. The pulsars will be monitored from some location (Earth or otherwise), and changes to their behaviour can be uploaded to the Galactic Positioning System receivers shortly after the change is observed. The receivers might compute positions incorrectly in the interim, but more likely "dead reckoning", combined with other pulsar observations could be used to determine the erroneous input, and ignore it until the update.

A more serious "flaw" is that the pulsar emissions are not (at first blush) "marked" with an emission time. One pulse looks more or less like the next. If a pulse occurs once-a-second, this translates to 300,000 km between pulse fronts. If your positioning space exceeds this length, you might end up with ambiguity in your resulting position calculation. The other 3 pulsars will provide constraints, making certain "single pulse off-by-one" errors easily discarded. But as your location space grows, it becomes more than possible for multiple location solutions to a given set of pulse-front timings. With Earth's GPS system, each satellite's transmission is coded with both a satellite identifier and timing information, making this type of error impossible.

I know an old Texan
        who imported a fly ...
I don't know why
      he imported a fly ...
Perhaps he'll die.