You missed a golden opportunity for a comeback:

We are the United States government. We don't do that sort of thing.

What really drives me nuts is watching a plot-and-dialog-driven TV show or movie, with other people in the same room who insist on talking about tangents the entire time. First I move closer to the TV, and if that doesn't work well enough to let me follow what's going on, I leave. I'd rather give up and miss the whole thing than catch bits and pieces of it and not know what is going on or why. If it's broadcast TV or a DVR, I'll probably retreat to another room and complete it there. I've given up complaining, but when someone finds I'm in another room watching the same thing they are, ALONE, they can usually figure it out.

There seem to be two styles of watching TV. In your style (and mine), if you're bothering to watch at all it's because you're willing to actually pay attention to whatever you're watching. In the other style, watching TV is just a setting where people socialize. My wife and her entire family are that way, and I gave up trying to hush them a loooong time ago. They consider my style just as bizarre as I consider theirs, as if I'm anti-social because I want to pay attention. When I finally understood why they do what they do, I got over my frustration with it.

I wish I had mod points. Most libertarians today would not want to live in a utopia of their own creation. The whole premise of libertarianism as it stands today is not only flawed, but also unrealistic and harmful to society.

That's what you were trying to say? You don't need to slow down you just need to say things in a way that makes sense. Yes, the sensors were functioning when it entered orbit and nearly continuously since.

No, it only means that the craft has provided data of unprecedented detail, and that it's about the lunar structure. These aren't Star Trek sensors that just "scan" the moon and somehow directly spit out all the salient details about its composition. Actually going from the raw gravity sensor data to the 3D density map you desire takes a lot of work.

The implication being that they're recording the same data over and over and should have been done after the first 'pass'. Which is hilarious; thank you for clearly explaining. These are gravity probes, not cameras looking at large regions of the surface. Every unique position over the moon is a unique data point.

I think it's perfect that you'd trot out this analogy in an instance where an army of geology majors spending their whole lives with buckets and shovels couldn't get us the data this probe has. It really does put everything you said in perspective.

So you're upset at the lack of progress in manned exploration. Understandable. What's less understandable is how this has turned your thinking on anything related to the subject of space exploration to mush.

Dr. Seuss, will you please claim prior art?

Yeah, and they'll stop these with drone attacks. Welcome to the age of corporate Stalinism

The Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel prepared a lengthy memo justifying that extraordinary step, asserting that while the Fifth Amendment's guarantee of due process applied, it could be satisfied by internal deliberations in the executive branch.

Attorney General Eric Holder then publicly claimed: "'Due process' and 'judicial process' are not one and the same, particularly when it comes to national security. The Constitution guarantees due process, not judicial process."

http://www.salon.com/2012/05/30/how_extremism_is_normalized/singleton/

How music affects job performance depends a whole lot on what kind of work you're doing. What you need (if anything) is much different for an engineering design job where you need to be concentrating on precise visual and logical content than for the supermarket bakery job I used to have, or driving, or reading a lot, or other things. And even though you haven't figured out that "rap" long ago became the old-school stuff that informs hip-hop, and is no longer the noise that kids are listening to today (:-), I find it extremely distracting for many kinds of work because it's highly verbal as well as percussive.

I used to live somewhere that the Grateful Dead Hour was on in the evenings when I'd be using the computer. It was usually really pleasant, but occasionally I'd notice that I'd drifted off mentally during a jam and hadn't actually typed anything in 15 minutes. Jazz can do the same thing. Pop does a lot less of that, because it's mostly intended for short-attention-span radio.

Wave goodbye... At least they didn't make a comic for it.

http://i124.photobucket.com/albums/p30/mrstash/Picture6-1.png