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Your point is well taken, but the Congressman and Senators who represent the people who live in and around Argonne are much more likely to have the informal political "pull" to get things done quickly without the need for formal action on Capitol Hill than other House and Senate members.

Other members to target would be those serving on or better yet those chairing the committees that do a lot of business related to Argonne.

Moon-bounce and ham-sats occur regularly enough to be useful. Granted, hamsat passes are so short-duration and so sought-after that they aren't useful for much more than bragging rights, and moon-bounce is too technically challenging to be useful for routine communications, but they are there.

RF-based repeater networks on the 2m (~146MHz) and 70cm (~440MHz) bands are common in the United States. They offer communications over hundreds of miles without using anything but the airwaves. Ditto some mountaintop- and very-high-tower-based repeaters. A single repeater that covers a 50-mile-or-more radius is more convenient and therefore frequently more useful in an emergency than an HF-based NVIS net (NVIS is a way of setting up your HF antenna for "short range" communications of about a few hundred miles or less. Unlike typical antenna setups, they do not have any "skip", which is very useful in an emergency).

In situations where the Internet infrastructure is still up (which is almost always except during emergencies, and frequently during emergencies as well), repeaters that link to the Internet can provide worldwide communication on any band.

Everyone in Illinois should write their US Senators requesting that Argonne invite other institutions to take over this project or at the very least become the custodian of existing data on the condition that it be maintained as a publicly-available resource.

Those in Illinois's 3rd Congressional District (where Argonne is) should also write their US House Representative.

I figured they would have had done this a long time ago, especially with security-related products.

On February 25, 2015, you wrote

Mother Nature and the National Weather Service just called to tell you it snowed in Texas today.

Pics, er, I mean, peer-reviewed study with independent confirmation of results or it didn't happen.

Ask her school if you can give a Last Lecture to them and, if you choose to put it online, to 6th-grade students everywhere.

As important as it might be to encourage her geek talents, instilling and encouraging humanitarian values is far more important.

Make sure she knows she is loved. If you are religious, ask your wife to keep making it a priority to encourage those values in your daughter.

Make sure she knows that human beings have value and should be respected and treated well, just as you and your wife have treated her well.

Encourage her to use her talents and interests to make the world a better place.

Robot: And stop calling me Sudo.

... people will serve robots alcohol. Or the robots will just take it.

I know it's true because I saw it on a Fox TV channel.

Romney signed it. He is a Republican.

What's the difference? Obamacare was based on Romneycare, which itself was bipartisan.

Is Astrology bipartisan? If so, then I'm wrong about that being the difference.

I assume you mean places with more sensible security polices and practices, and which are out of reach of foreign national intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

Let us know when you find such a place, but don't bother if it's within ICBM range of America or if it requires more than a month of space travel to get there.

BINGO! Only it will be applied to the person encrypting the data, not the data itself.

How many 360KB floppies does it take to hold each movie in your collection?

Also, "per second" may introduce rounding errors. "Per fortnight" is the traditional unit of time for things as large as a feature film (or rather, for truckloads/planeloades of the same).