Or, you know, load up your cart on the way in and back to the electronics counter where they'll undoubtedly keep the equipment to do this. "Sure, Mr./Ms. Wal-Mart employee, I bought these last week and just never opened them..."

For that matter, what's to keep Wal-Mart from claiming you did this on the way back to the counter when you bring in your collection?

Yes, it's somewhat sad that one of the states that is the most adverse to science and knowledge will now be one of the fastest being able to receive it.

Yes, and look what happened when we "won" that race. The Bad Astronomer made a great post about it.

The Oort cloud is still theoretical, if I recall correctly, but more evidence is stacking up for it. You might be thinking of the Kuiper belt, which is where most of the trans-Neptunian objects lie. The boundary they are talking about is where the solar wind is overcome by the cosmic (intergalactic) plasma currents. Think about the coma on a comet and you have a similar picture to how our solar wind particles look.

The Oort cloud, if it proves to exist, is speculated to extend quite a ways out -- possibly 2/3 of the way to the nearest star by some estimations. It's a much looser "full shell" of relatively stationary objects, where the Kuiper belt is more similar to a large asteroid belt.

Wikipedia has some good visualizations and links --
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oort_cloud http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuiper_belt http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliosphere

Definitely the one I would suggest as well.
Or it's dual-band big brother, the AP WZR-HP-AG300H. $89.99 for the router itself at Amazon, oddly enough. Nice little table at the bottom comparing the Buffalo router model features as well at that link.
Supports DD-WRT out of the box and support by the manufacturer.
My ONLY complaint is that the radio on my G300NH model is a little bit weaker than my old Linksys routers, since I could boost the signal. I don't think that option works in the firmware on the buffalo, but it might be the difference between the N and G signals that I'm seeing. Still covers my entire house quite well, however, and a little bit outside.

Well, jeez... we should just freeze them now, ship them off, and when they get to the star, we'll have perfected a way to unfreeze/revive them and cure all their various ailments!

...wait. :)

Yeah, I guess it boils down to if there is a feasible way to make a converter -- electrons on one end, protons on the other. Otherwise, this could boil down into a new field altogether.. protonics?

I was thinking the same thing here. Would be pretty easy to "fake" that he's a terrible artist when awake, then pretend to be asleep and draw occasionally.

Perhaps we're just too cynical.

I had to actually disable the SATA3 controller in the BIOS and uninstall the driver in Windows 7 to get the lockups and reboots to stop happening.

I'd get a SATA3 RAID controller, but all of my PCI-E slots are used up. :( So I'm stuck with my Intel SATA-II raid on my SSD's, which does ok. It's still noticeably faster than mechanical drives.

Oh, trust me... I've felt lots and lots of earthquakes, at all sorts of depths.