Or: * (at an age of 37) twice as risky as getting out of bed in any given morning;
That's why I wake up in the afternoon.
International waters are not some magical place where no law applies
you will be boarded and seized by someone who assumes you are up to no good.
Which law will they use for that ?
Thing is since the law doesn't care about the speed of light the 2 pm is 2 pm everywhere
How do you synchronize clocks ? (in the real world, not in an hypothetical Galilean world)
meaning they acted on the information after it was officially publicly know.
Not according to physics
I'm not a rocket engineer (never done rockets, I'm more in satellites) but I guess that the antenna are trying to point toward the third planet around this brightest star, not the star itself.
And I would say that it's easier to implement a robust (with respect to sensor/actuator failure) pointing system with software than with analog hardware. But that's just a guess, feel free to propose me a good hardware design for that. (in fact that's not true for everything, you can have a gravity gradient stabilisation with no software at all, and spin stabilisation, but you still need software to change/control the spin axis)
The problem I have, is that this is happening 5000 miles away. Not my problem, let their neighbours deal with it.
Anyone (with money) can reach any point on the planet in 24 hours. Several countries can nuke any point in the planet in hours. You can communicate with half of the humans almost instantaneously. I think that on earth, every country is neighbours with every other.
We have a dedicated organization to handle such matters - UN. If UN reaches a conclusion that military operation is the only way to proceed and then turns to US to get military help, only then should US start to think about bombing anything or anybody.
When was the last time that the UN reached a conclusion ? I agree that UN should be the place to do it, but the way UN works does not work. Maybe the countries should try to reorganize this stuff, and remove stuff like permanent seats and the veto power.
BASIC is the Computer Science equivalent of `Scientific Creationism'.