'Nuf said?

If we're THAT CLOSE to the sun, it would be interesting to see how big a solar sail would need to be for a 364.245 day parking orbit. Use the dark side of Mercury as Network Control.

First: What is the purpose of 24 hour communications? If you need SOS messaging, signal recovery, or a simple heartbeat, use the sun as the point-of-reference.
Second: A fleet of solar communications satellites could provide a solar GPS system.
Third: These satellites could use Solar Propulsion and "hover" at a fixed distance from adjacent satellites. Solar sails could serve as a foundation for power generation (focused beam) and for data reception.

Downsides: the sun is a noisy place for communications, as well as a dirty place to park objects with large surface areas.

Solar, Geothermal, Wind, Nuclear ... scratch Nuclear - imagine using the Great Salt Lake to cool a reactor?
Ehr, Isotope Decay! All they need are two wires stapled to the side of Yucca Mountain in a few years.

Patented Feature!!!

Someone with the Heart of a Poet, Soul of a Critic. We suspend our belief in movie theatres only because we, as an audience, do not have all the facts. Watching military counsel meetings, the crew's soul searching, and some redshirt #2 whining would have made the movie drag on and On And ON AND ...

Knock that chimp off your shoulders and get into the facts as the Director & Writers laid them out on the screen. Art is Beauty; no ugly facts here; remember to pick your brains up on your way out (use a claimcheck, or claim someone else's with a large enough tip). Reflect on these facts later and IMAGINE why things unfolded as they did (Transporter Scrambling Fields, Pike has huge respect for Kirk, Sr., all Starfleet cadets KNEW of Kirk's antics & field-of-study & willingness to approach problems in a way they respected)

Kirk didn't technically cheat. Kirk failed the test 3 times, and the first, second & third score alone would have sufficed for graduation otherwise there would never have been a fourth test. You just don't tie up a simulator and fellow cadets' time on a moronic captain wannabe. Even if he FLUNKed the fourth test, his median grade must have been high enough to justify his captaincy.

My apologies for droning on And ON AND ...

Dude! It's just a movie! It's like saying the Shark in Jaws is Fake. OF COURSE IT IS.

1) The Butler always does it.

2) Someone always stumbles at the most awkward moment.

3) Star Trek will have an actor named "Redshirt #1" because he doesn't hang around long enough to be pals with any of the main characters.

... Policy Wonks are Geeks with better smelling cologne.

Phew. Pretty heady stuff here.

... and therefore completely susceptible. But women seem amazingly resistant. Take my wife ....

PLEASE !

Nerts to your radioisotope thermoelectric generators.

I, for one, would gladly greet our Mutant Martian Overlords.

No, they still have "weight", but gravitational attraction at those distances is quite weak. Those satellites' orbits - as well as the debris cloud's orbit - is the result of Earth, Moon & Satellites all falling towards each another. "Weightlessness" is an illusion of moving bodies (Freefall).

I tried to do a quick-calc on this - don't have the tools tho - to find the "weight" at MEO of 1000 pound satellites (Sea-level, Cape Kennedy FL USA) or the sea-level "weight" of 1000 pound satellites measured at MEO.

Scientists & Engineers are FAR FAR more ethical than Businessmen & Bankers, so if the press release was from NASA, then I'm comfortable weight can be assumed to be at sea level. However - if TARP bloated Banker CEOs put this out, then satellites the size of Aircraft Carriers collided.

I, for one, would welcome our new Satellite Colliding Overlords. Any chance this was the Battleship Yamato in a last-ditch effort to save Earth?

... the lovechild of Will Riker and Deanna Troi. I tried to retract it because Wil Wheaton is just a character in ST:TNG.

Not seriously, tho: what is happening in those two unused units that horked your 20Gbit switches? Is it something TIA?

Troll to 1st Knight Crossing Bridge: "How Fast is Broadband Service in Korea?"

1st Knight: "60Mbps, no, wait, 1Gbps"

1st Knight is "Magically" tossed from bridge.

Troll to 2nd Knight Crossing Bridge: "How Fast is Broadband Service in Korea?"

2nd Knight: "North or South?"

Troll: "I Don't Kno..."

Troll has now "Magically" jumped from bridge...

It was a well-known observation that Dr. Brown sent Einstein back one minute in time to Calibrate the DeLorian's Space-Time compensator. Since the terrorists showed up before the calibration could be validated, Dr. Brown's compensator was calibrated 2-3 picometers into the substrate.

Notice in Revision 2 (the Locomotive), there were no contrail.