From TOFA:
"NOAA is reactivating another satellite, GOES-14, just as the agency did last year when GOES-13 experienced a problem,"

So, yes, GOES-13 had a problem last year, GOES-14 took over for awhile, apparently GOES-13 got fixed and put back on station.

Really strange that you had time to go research and read an older article, but not the one in the story.

Can I ask Congress the same question about the US Governments data collection efforts?
  - How is the US Government going to protect the privacy of Citizens who may not want their every public move (phone call, email, etc ) to be recorded?
  - What about the security of the recordings that are made - Will the US implement some sort of user authentication system to safeguard stored data? If not, why not?

There's a whole sequence of questions that I'd much rather hear the answer to than similar questions about a dorky headpiece.

Sounds like someone who wasn't around for the beginning of the AIDS epidemic (or even the current state of the AIDS epidemic).

There are some health issues that society isn't mature enough to handle. Most of them are sexual in nature - do you really want your STD diagnosis to be water-cooler conversation (Hey, Frank, who'd you pick up that case of the clap from?)? If I had a diagnosis that gave me a 25% chance of dying in the next year, I believe that I have the right to decide who knows that. How about as a potential CEO, having your anxiety disorder (handled nicely with drugs, thank you) bandied about the boardroom?

There are other health issues that are a don't-care. Paralyzed vocal cords? Bummer, dude. Here, I'll tell you one about me - I have vitiligo. Bummer, dude. Exzema? Ingrown toenail? Bummer, dude. Hell, even erectile dysfunction is a prime-time advertising bonanza.

Thanks so much for sharing your knowledge. I'll call up our software engineers immediately and let them know that processing a DBT_DEVICEARRIVAL message in the message pump, or using RegisterDeviceNotification() in our service, can't possibly work and we should re-write those sections of code to poll for device change.

I have mod points, but there's no "-1 - ignorant" mod.

Well, I had the misfortune of owning a Zune, and an iPod at the same time. I think it's safe to say that the two apps were roughly equivalent in the height of fecal matter that they were equivalent to. Of course, that was a few (!) years ago...

Unfortunately, despite decades of wishful thinking, the laws of physics haven't changed much in the decades since we went to the moon.

Yup, that's a neat looking device. But it suffers from a fatal flaw - no niche market can use it.

There's no obvious way for me as a hang glider pilot to integrate a variometer display in it, or show a moving map of my position relative to the turnpoints I need to hit in a competition. As a sailor, I can't modify it to do what I need it to do. As a motorcyclist, a Tour de France rider, a wake boarder, a golfer, a surgeon, a pest control specialist, an explorer, a Nascar driver, etc., I can't modify it for my needs. I haven't read up on Glass, so perhaps it has the same fatal flaw, but it is also far more flexible - a golfer could wear Glass and not look as out of place as he would wearing the Oakley HUD.

In a previous life, I spent a lot of time hang gliding. Competition and Cross-Country pilots have to hang multiple instruments on their control bars - variometers, GPS's, radios - to maximize their performance. This is a problem area, as the $1000 worth of instruments are in an easily damaged location which also reduces performance due to air drag.

Google Glass would be a huge advancement here - stick your $200 cell phone where it gets good reception and is protected, use it for GPS, mapping, and communications functions, add a small cheap variometer interfaced to your phone. You'll have far better information, your instruments will be cheaper and your software will be vastly better, and your physical performance will improve by taking all that stuff out of the airstream.

This, I think, is an example of the niche markets that no marketer in his right mind would build a product to meet, but combined with 1000 other niches could start to make the product ubiquitous. /frank

Well, for the reactor itself, pretty much nothing is expected to happen (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_safety_in_the_United_States#The_missile_shield). No one has actually tested such a scenario, though.

Unprotected parts of the plant (which sometimes include spent-fuel storage areas) may release some radioactivity, but probably nowhere near as much as you might think.

Well, yes, you can light a lightbulb with a turbine in a stream. No one doubts that.

But a hydroelectric plant is simply a way to extract the Potential energy of water (mass x height) in a meaningful, efficient way. Putting a turbine into the flow of a river allows you to extract the potential energy represented by the difference in height between the entrance to the turbine and the exit - the "head". You can't extract potential energy without "head". Putting a turbine into a free river such that there's a one foot drop from entrance to exit gets you a certain amount of potential energy that you could extract. Putting in a dam that raises the "head" to, say, 500 feet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glen_Canyon_Dam), and running the same volume of water through it, gives you 500 times as much potential energy that you can try to harvest. Your only option for doing that without a dam is to put in 500 turbines, each of which takes advantage of 1 foot of head. Wouldn't that be a pretty sight?

Why is it so difficult to believe that a disease that comes on suddenly and without explanation, can cure itself the same way?

I personally wouldn't put my faith in pancreatic cancer spontaneously disappearing, but I certainly put my faith in a head cold, the flu, the mumps, chicken pox, etc. going away spontaneously. We view diseases as either self-curing, or not - but certainly there is a spectrum ranging from 99.9% of the time self-curing, to 0.0001% of the time self-curing (or worse). If you have a disease in the modern world that's seen as "non-self-curing", you're likely to get professional medical treatment, and a spontaneous self-cure would be attributed to the treatment. We don't see it as ethical (well, at least since the Tuskegee syphilis experiment ended in the 1970s) to actively study hundreds of people with a treatable disease and refuse to treat them to watch the progression of the disease and see if any of them are spontaneously cured. /frank

You realize the Amazon has been trialing same-day delivery of orders? This simply provides them with a cheaper (and more secure) way to deliver to you - you don't have to worry about the neighbor kid stealing stuff off your front porch, and they only have to deliver to one location rather than to 50 different houses.

Hmm, an SD card plugged into your camera, sticking out in plain view, with nothing on it. A second card, installed under the dash, that does the recording. "Why no, officer, I don't believe the camera was turned on".

You're reading them? Why?

See, that's the problem with mud-slinging - sometimes, a wee bit of that mud comes right back at you.