Didn't we only recently have tons of material up there? Aluminum, plastics, all sorts of good stuff. But no, we just flew it back to put in a museum.

I thought CA had decided that by having amazon "affiliates" in the state that Amazon itself had a business presence in the state? Amazon dumped all its affiliates in CA so that it couldn't be required to collect tax. But that doesn't seem to be what this agreement is about

"It's like saying you can reach your local California supermarket with your bike, so hey you should be able to go to Hawaii with it as well!"

But what we are doing is saying that since we can't ride to Hawaii, we should take our super expensive, super high tech bike and throw it off the end of Santa Monica pier. The numbers are inescapable, but it is very frustrating.

Here's another absurd idea born of frustration: Donate the ISS to a non profit and take donations to boost it slowly to GSO. Outfit it with light sails and boost it mirror arrays from down here. Probably wouldn't work. Probably wouldn't even produce enough v to offset orbital decay.

Am I the only one that thought that photo was one of the Icy Hot Stuntaz? Then looked at the article and that is actually him, way to represent playa

Like I said, I'm sure this has been thought through, but it still doesn't make sense. I wasn't thinking plug and play spare parts. More along the lines of "gee I could make this cool thing if only we had a few spare pieces of lexan" or "we might survive this very bad problem if only we had a few #5 bolts. That shuttle that used to be up here had hundreds, but now it's in a freakin' museum." I know NASA frowns on improvisation and using parts for things other what they were specifically designed for, but at some point we need to get over that.

Filling it with enough waste gas (space farts for all it matters) to maintain a "soft" vacuum for storage also doesn't seem like a big drain.

At some point it would a net negative for fuel. the additional mass is there forever, while the additional fuel left in the shuttle will be used up at some point.

So you'd use it as somewhat leaky storage and a source of spares and raw materials. Still seems way more valuable up there than sitting in a museum.

There has to be a simple reason why they don't leave it up there, but I don't know what it is. It costs $$$ for every kilo that goes into orbit. It's an airtight space full of equipment and other useful things. It has engines and a bit of leftover fuel that could be used for station keeping.

What aren't the shuttles just made a permanent part of the station and source of parts and the crew just sent down via MIR or something?

It's a $1.45B LOAN GUARANTEE, not cash money. Unless they default on the loan it only costs imaginary money.

"The manufacturer will *always* bin the partially flawed parts as their low end units first."

True, but the after market CPU is not the low end, not at any price point. You would put the real X2 and X3 chips in the low end consumer boxes, where the mobo doesn't support unlocking and the consumer doesn't know/care. You sell the perfectly good ones to newegg, fry's, etc. Happy geeks that unlock cores or overclock successfully are morle likely to recommend to others and buy next time. AMD and Intel understand this very well.

Why do you think AMD has a "black label" line in the first place?

you don't even have to reincorporate somewhere else to pull that scam off. The BBB makes money from businesses paying them for "accreditation" and they don't make money from consumers. Their bias is obvious.

Here in SoCal there is a construction fraud gang that seems to mostly be run by a Moroccan/Israeli family named Ben Shulsh. I tried to report their most recent front company (Erco Construction) to the BBB and they would even bother to even look at it. They publicly list the same front people, and they are at the same business address as their last front company (Highrise construction) and 2 miles from the front companies before that (BC Specialty Construction, Bashan and Allied). The BBB only changed the the rating on BC from A+ to F *after* they had robbed everybody, folded up shop and when into hiding for a few weeks. This despite complaints going back months.

I wouldn't put any stock in the BBB or its rating of anything. They are just there to collect the accreditation fees.

For your sake, I hope your wife does not have mod points. Actually either way you are sleeping on the couch

If you have a "normal" DVR then you are part of a sort of stealth nielsen household. Obviously they know how you use your DVR or they wouldn't know that it accounts for 33% more viewers. My cable company can totally tell what channel I'm currently tuned to and if I have something recording on the DVR. It goes without saying that they store that info and sell it to the upstream providers.

Even if you haven't seen these particular eyecatches I'm sure you've seen the technique of going to commercial just at cliffhanger and then doing a 30 or even 15 second ad and right back. This is the networks messing with you.

It almost seems like the terrible scheduling of Dollhouse on Friday night (when their audience is not home) is part of an experiment. Probably less than half of the people that see it are watching in real time. So flipping through the commercials. Show business a business.

How do you make money? Eureka uses aggressive product placement and tries to smirk at itself about it (this sort of works). Have you noticed the Dollhouse eyecatches (do they call them that here?) they come right out and say "dollhouse will return in xx seconds". At least with my DVR a 60-90 second break isn't really worth zipping though, you overshoot and spend more time rewinding back than it's worth. So I watch the ad. When they don't do the eyecatch you know you are in for a local station break of ~7 minutes of crap about shamwow and restless legs that you can zap at will.

Not *all* the people at these networks are stupid. Hell, Rupert Murdoch is far from stupid himself.

FWIW, Dushku is not the Summer Glau equivalent. She's a fairly known actress. She's "Mal". The Glau effect is someone you've never seen before that looks like nobody you've ever seen before. Someone that causes brain lock when she first shows on screen. IS she pretty? Is she too wierd looking to be pretty? Is she an alien or some sort of android from the future? Does she have an interocitor in her dressing room?

That's clearly Dichen Lachman.