That's a bit different. Even then, the DC-10 was very, very popular, and the method of grounding was very different. For the DC-10, they yanked the type certificate- it effectively became illegal to fly that aircraft. For the 787, it's a new aircraft, fairly experimental, and as for the grounding, it's an AD temporarily halting operations. Not quite as severe as revoking the type cert.

Hold on a sec... Can you cite your source for that? Southwest Airlines hand-flies all of their approaches, even under instrument conditions (Legal, because they have a HUD). Plus, not all airports have the instrumentation required for automatic landing. ILS cat 3 is pretty uncommon, and Cat 3C isn't in operation anywhere. I could see them having to shoot an automatic instrument approach once a month per aircraft just to make sure the system is working right, but otherwise, I've heard nothing about that specific requirement.

If Country A and Country B both have nukes, and the ability to detect each other's nukes when they're launched, then both countries know that a pre-emptive strike would be pointless, because they would suffer just as much damage as they would inflict. That's mutually assured destruction. Now, imagine Country A manages to build a system to destroy all (or most) of Country B's nukes before they arrive at their targets. Suddenly, that disincentive to a pre-emptive strike no longer exists for Country A, because they can destroy Country B without being destroyed themselves. This missile defense unbalances MAD. Who knows? Maybe in 10 years we won't be so chummy with Russia.

Well... The skins on those boosters are very thin... If you could smuggle a paper airplane with a titanium tip to the launch site...

TO THE DRAWING BOARD, EVERYONE

I'm going for my Professional Pilot bachelor's. Unless you're in daddy's money, there is no way you're paying for all that up front. Getting your private pilot's license, less tuition, costs six grand- and that's the first semester. It goes up drastically from there. I'm going to rely on these loans. Are they way too high? Absolutely. Is it a bubble? Very probably. Is the amount of student loan debt in this country absolutely insane? A thousand times, yes. But don't fuck over the kids going through college for their dreams to make the point.

Their missiles are less than effective, as of right now. Their anti-aircraft defenses, on the other hand, are all too effective against the most modern fighter aircraft we've bothered to send. What makes you think a 747 could penetrate deep enough to destroy a missile during launch?

It just bugs the hell out of me that Congress can't get their shit together and pass a bill about keeping student loans low (when both parties agree that needs to happen), but they're cool with re-instituting a bloated failure of a missile defense program in the meantime.

How are you going to get a 747 within 30,000 feet- even 10 miles- of a North Korean missile site?

I'll remind you, YAL-1 was built to destroy missiles during the boost phase. It can't reach them once they're at altitude, and it doesn't have the power or tracking ability to destroy them on the way down. If you can't get a YAL-1 within range of a North Korean missile site, then there's no point- and those SAMs have a lot longer reach than the YAL-1's laser.

Well aren't you just a treasure.

New?

Give that he's got a show running right now, and it's been renewed for another season since this dropped, maybe not so much.

Did you know that some claim the Earth is flat? It's true!
Another poster (thanks Nojayuk) dropped this little gem. It's logs from scientists who have collected data at the site (yes, on-site) since last May. So yeah, I'm telling you that scientists are strolling off shore doing some testing.

If you dumped 520 tons of botulinum in the ocean, you'd have a whole 4.38*10^-7 molecules per glass of water. And the scientists themselves addressed the seafood concern, when they said that the radiation present in the local fora was well below legal limits- IE well below dangerous levels.

That isn't what I meant. What I meant was, when the fuel is used up, fossil fuels have pumped their toxic byproducts all over the atmosphere. With nuclear power, it's all still in the reactor. And again, at the end of the 100,000 years, assuming it isn't disturbed, it's still right there- and the places we're planning on putting it aren't exactly easy to find, or easy to open.

Well butter my biscuit, you're right. I must have looked at the wrong thing in WolframAlpha. The comparison from the fly to Pluto and back is correct still, however.