I agree with your logic, but I think the poster's argument was that NASA is still contributing to society outside of putting people into space. There's a vocal group of people out there that think the only things we got out of NASA were Tang and Velcro (neither of which came from NASA, incidentally), and that its current form is an utter waste of money. The poster is pointing out that NASA still is doing research relevant to society, not that society is necessarily better off than if NASA had never existed.

Wow you're the first person in this whole comments section to actually respond to the poster's question. Everyone else is so excited to tell the person what the best laptop is, they dont realize that the poster wants to know how to compare laptops, not which one to buy. I agree, newegg is the best place to go to make comparisons, especially for individual parts, but also for full systems.

Would they be able to use other, more modern wars/conflicts with more reliable numbers to test the same statistical analysis? For example, we know how many Americans died during, say, WWII better than during the U.S. Civil War. Would they be able to reproduce those numbers for WWII using their census-based analysis? Immigration/Emigration rates would be different, but they should be able to account for it in the same way they accounted for it in the 1860 timeframe. If they don't get it right for the 1940's, they're not going to get it right for the 1860's. The British also had quite a few wars (according to wikipedia) in the mid 1800's, during which there was a census, so they could compare to that as well if they wanted a comparable country in a comparable time.

I found that interesting as well. Even safari has small bumps up on the weekend. I do know that Firefox has become a lot more accepted in work environments probably because it's been around so long that IT trusts it by now. I wonder if the fact that Chrome usage increases more on Sundays is because enough people are still working on Saturdays that IE wins.

I thought you had to reverse the tachyon polarity.

Only if you route it through the deflector dish first.

The Northeast grid has gone down before, and there were no meltdowns. As other folks have pointed out, those things have backup generators. I assume that in the blackout of 2003, those generators kicked on.

That's true, which is why I said "mid-latitude and high-latitude" in my original post. I'm aware of the possibility that MSesow lives in an equatorial region, but in case he/she lives in a mid- or high-latitude region, these charts may be useful.

You're totally right, my bad. I should have said the CME from the flare will deliver a glancing blow to the planet. I didn't know that bit about the AR1429 vs. AR11429, very interesting. Is that something that NOAA has started doing, or is it just spaceweather.com? (I didn't call it "spot number", I just called it "spot 1429". Should have said "AR11429".)

At the lower left of the spaceweather.com site, there's a little chart that tells you the chances of high-latitude and mid-latitude geomagnetic storms over the next 1 and 2 days.

yeah yeah yeah, I noticed it after I submitted. Should've checked before hitting submit, yada yada yada...

If having the metal object on the "side" of your body results in it not being seen in the standard "front-side" image, then it will show up very clearly if they take a side-on image. All they'd have to do is take the standard front-side image of you (typically only a couple of seconds), then ask you to turn 90 degrees, and take another image (another couple of seconds). This way they could never miss a metal object being "hidden" on your side.