"But as for the airframe ... as long as they can confirm that the fuselage is sound and in good shape, there's no reason why they can't continue to fly"

The life-limiting factor on the B-52 isn't the fuselage, it's the upper wing, which has a maximum life of 37,500 flight hours.

Given how many flight hours are on the airframes (at *most* 21,000) and the rate of accumulation, the mid-2040s is when we can't maintain the required numbers.

I wish people would cut this out.

Have you ever seen a high-energy mirror? It's not something you pick up at Bed, Bath & Beyond. They are expensive, they are fragile, they must be kept completely clean. The reflective surface has to be on the *front* of the mirror, not the rear, because there aren't materials transparent enough to pass high-energy laser light through without absorbing enough of it to react unpleasantly and spoil the reflection. So if there's something like a fingerprint, or a dust speck, on the reflective surface, that bit of crud absorbs the incident light, heats up/explodes, and damages the mirror coating. Which means it's not reflective anymore, which means that area of mirror coating now heats up/explodes and damages adjacent areas, leading to catastrophic failure of the mirror.

You are not going to put mirrors on your greasy *boats* that go bouncing around the surface of the *ocean* and have them remain clean enough to offer protection against a multi-kilowatt laser beam.

He Tweeted, and I quote: "LOL, Fuck Muamba. He's dead."

There's nothing racist in that statement. He might be an asshole, but on what basis are the elements of a charge of "inciting racial hatred" met?

And, no, the UK doesn't have the first amendment. But the UK is a member state of the EU, and the EU's Charter of Fundamental Rights specifically states that:

"Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers."

The mental gymnastics required to reconcile a recognition of such a fundamental freedom with throwing a guy in jail for two months for saying "LOL, Fuck [guy]. He's dead." probably warrant at least a 9.8 from the Romanian judge.

Seriously, this shit's disgusting, nobody can pretend anything even slightly resembling freedom of expression exists in the UK.

I don't think that's right.

It is right. A DCMA takedown notice is a legal document that has to comply with the specific requirements of the act. You can't just write "Yo, doodz, take this off your webs" on a post-it and expect it to have legal weight. From the actual law:

Probably most crucially, one of the things the takedown notice must have is:

(vi) A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.

Basically, whichever person at Wastelands or its legal counsel who put his signature on this takedown notice either didn't include this statement, in which case Flickr is entirely free to ignore it, or committed perjury. What would be nice is if a few DAs hungry for media attention started nailing some of these fraudulent claimants to the wall pour encourager les autres.

I didn't say steam can't be much hotter than 212F. The described technologies don't include pressurizing or superheating the steam, so it will be at 212F.

Considering 80% of my cooking is at 350F, that's sufficient.

It looks like a number of these designs can't even come close to that:

For night cooking, water passes through the system, becomes steam and enters the kitchen through PVC pipes....
At night, the cook pours water into a spout on the side of the device, the water trickles through channels surrounded by the hot oil, converts to steam and rises to heat a hotplate for cooking...
The device stores excess heat in an insulated chamber filled with salt and can continue to heat water for steam cooking at night...

You can't heat a hotplate to 350F with 212F steam, let alone steam that's cooled off substantially by expanding through PVC pipe to enter your kitchen. People want to cook their food, not just warm it up.

"They're not talking about scanning random people on the street and taking their guns"

Of course they're not talking about that. Do you seriously believe that's not what they're doing to do?

"Granted, they certainly could use this device to scan random people. But that's an unconstitutional search which the Supreme Court would slap the Hell out of."

Awww, that's sweet.

Skin effect is frequency-dependent, and at at 50/60 Hz is pretty thick; in copper at those frequencies it's 8.5 millimeters, so you're definitely carrying current in the steel core, not just in the cladding.

Or, it's a fundamental problem that Wall Street has the opportunity (Citizens United) to do this sort of thing.

You didn't actually read Citizens United, because you don't know what the decision says.

Citizens United was a non-profit corporation that was attempting to publish a documentary critical of Hillary Clinton. It was advocating against the election of a political candidate. The decision had nothing to do with giving money to politicians, and the CU decision did not overturn limits on either corporate donations to particular federal candidates or on how much money individuals can give to federal candidates.

The government argued in support of its case that it has the power to ban books. If you're on that side of that argument, I don't think you have much cause to object to SOPA.