I realized after I posted that I'd forgotten the whole "a heat sink needs a medium to transfer the heat to" part. I appreciate the cogent explanation, though. my knowledge of the intricacies of spaceflight basically stops at Kerbal Space Program.

I'm sure there are plenty of reasons, but why does the ISS use a complicated ammonia-based refrigeration system? I had always assumed they just dumped the waste heat into space with something akin to the heat sink in my computer.

as the old saying goes...

I have very strong doubts that disney would bother looking at the expanded universe, much less actually acquiring the rights to make those stories. I wish they would, but I think they won't.

I expect they are rolling out fiber in the middle of the country first to sort out the kinks. KC went well, so now they're taking on a bigger project with Austin. I'd speculate on one, maybe two more cities in between the Alleghenies and the Rockies, and then they'll light up one of the big costal cities.

it seems to me, if your password is random, mixed-case alphanumeric, and fairly long, there is an added layer of security against a brute-force hash attack like this. that being that the incorrect hashes will just be jumbled strings of letters and numbers... but the correct password will be, as well. how would such an attack differentiate the valid password from the invalid in this situation?

my suspicion would be that the hydrogen is expected to escape, and that the cryostat was to prevent damage to the instruments due to sudden major temperature changes. I could be completely wrong, though.

SuperGenPass is a good option for online passwords. especially since the website lets you customize the bookmarklet before you download it. though why there is an option to hardcode your master password into the bookmarklet, thereby completely defeating the security of it, is beyond me. conversely, the option to have it store a hash of your master password and compare it against the master pass you type in the field is nice... especially if you're like me and prone to typographical errors.