eBay is a California corporation. HTH.

They could do it Kindle-style for the boonies. If you're away from WiFi, you can access just Google services and voice calls over cellular data networks. Worldwide.

The USS Enterprise uses the same reactor design as the USS Long Beach CGN-9 (now decommissioned and sitting as a decapitated hulk in Bremerton, WA.). The Long Beach was the first nuclear powered surface vessel ever launched. The Navy only had two designs in the early 60's, one for subs and one for surface vessels. The Big E got 8 reactors because that's how many it took to drive it and also generate steam for the catapults. The Long Beach had two of them. Of course, she had no catapults.

Are you sure about that? Isn't the Gerald Ford one of the Nimitz class carriers? Those have steam turbines to turn the screws. ...after Wikipedia lookup...

Nope, it's the first of a new class. How about that. Last time I saw an electric motor turning a screw was at prototype training following nuclear power school.

Damn! They're going to launch it with systems installed that only use half the available generating capacity. They expect to be able to put lasers on it in the future and have the juice to fire them. Sci Fi is no longer Fi.

It's not. I've manned the steam generator control station on an aircraft carrier, and the drop in water level and steam pressure is dramatic and it takes several minutes to recover. Of course, we had 16 steam generators on the USS Enterprise in the 80's. Perhaps the newer carriers with just 4 steam generators (2 per reactor) are more efficient. But I do recall flight ops were a very very busy time for the MMs in the hole.

This looks like a big improvement. Electricity generation is a much closer to a steady-state kind of operation for a naval nuclear power plant.

I made a snide personal comment in order to push buttons, not to bolster any argument. My buttons get pushed when discussion about an exciting discovery gets sidetracked with all this freshman navel-gazing. It's not relevant, effective, or insightful. Scientific investigations will go and scientists will continue to expand knowledge despite the "insightful" comments of adolescents and creationists about what we can really "know."

So when my buttons get pushed, I push back.

No, I speak of knowing (no scare quotes) because it is tiresome to have this freshman epistemological debate every time the subject gets into cosmology, or evolution, or anything reaching into or beyond geologic time, and sometimes even just historical times. It's infantile. It's like a bunch of Ayn Rand groupies trying to interject libertarianism into every discussion whether it's relevant or not.

If scientists can't use the word "know" to describe the results they obtain, then nobody can use the word, because nobody cares more about rigor applied to the analysis of evidence than scientists.

I have a grandfathered unlimited 3G data plan for Verizon Mobile Broadband. I use it for my primary internet access method (3 the Mifi). I exceed 15 Gb monthly on a routine basis. If it wasn't grandfathered, they'd want to charge me in excess of $100 for the overage. Now that I know about the deal with LTE, they can kiss my upgrade from 3G goodbye.

You seek certainty. That only exists in theory. In practice, we know the laws of physics are universal, for all practical purposes, for the reasons I mentioned. If that isn't good enough for you, stick with divinity school. Science is not for you.

We use a scryng lens, more commonly called a telescope. It allows us to examine in detail radiation from distant parts of the universe. Analyzing this radiation, we find that the processes that produced it conform to physical laws as we know them from our part of space.

That's how.

Nobody believes that atoms arrange themselves and bond together randomly into life-producing molecules. That is a Creationist misinformation meme. Atoms bind together in regular, predictable ways. Molecules are formed in regular, predictable ways. There is very little randomness about it.

This objection is just plain silly. It attempts to attack an assertion no one made.

You got your wish. The bacteria in question incorporate arsenic in place of phosphorus not only in their DNA, lipids and proteins, but also in their ATP. Just astonishing.

And how do you get the IP address of this SSL web server? You must look up the domain in DNS. SSL certificates are tied to the domain, not the IP address. If you must use a service you don't trust to get the crypto tokens that allow you to trust it, you cannot trust it.

Because DNS is fundamentally insecure and there is no way to secure it without a re-write from the ground up. DNSSEC is a bandaid with a limited window of effectiveness. Ultimately, a cache receiving root glue has no way to validate that the glue is the legit root glue. And so they will become poisoned.

It is only sold unlocked, so there are no carrier subsidies.