After a rather troublesome issue with my internet service and a back and forth episode with my ISP's Tier 1 TS, I was transferred to T2 where I was able to get my issue resolved nearly immediately. The rep gave me the T2 direct number so that "You won't need to fuss with all that pre-recorded bs again, since by the time you've called, you have already done everything it tells you to do and more in some cases."

After a number of years and at least one move, I'm still with the same ISP, but have lost the T2 diect number. Normally I'll just patiently grind through the prompts like it's a bad MMO if I need to call TS these days.

Reactor online. Sensors online. Weapons online. All systems nominal.

Did anyone really expect this to go any other way. SCOTUS has been bought and paid for by corporate interests. This is why they should have term limits not unlike the President. 12 - 15 years, max.

Didn't HP try this BS with inkjet carts and have the courts slap them down? What's the difference here?

The better question, at least in my case, is how many characters have I killed in ToH. I think I've lost 2 as a player but killed 50-75 as a DM. And some groups just keep coming back to get b-slapped more than once.

Regarding Challenger, they KNEW that the seals were partially failing since the second launch. The "partial" failure was deemed not bad enough to warrant a fix, although they did redesign then connections between SRB sections before the Challenger explosion.

What I found most amusing about the Challenger was that after he got home from work that day, my father (an aeronautical engineer) said to me "You cannot properly structurally analyze rubber. There are just too many variables. I bet they will find that the seal failed because it was too cold and it got rigid." Sure enough, that's what they found.

I expect that they would have used Columbia as the go-to stand-by shuttle and not had it fly any normal missions. This would have allowed them to turn over the other ships faster for missions. I also think that the idea of commercial spaceflight would have gotten off the ground earlier had one of the ISS capable shuttles been destroyed instead of Columbia.

This is why every mission after Columbia had an 'Abort to ISS' option that would allow the shuttle to dock with ISS and wait for the relief shuttle (which was sitting at a 48 hour to launch stage IIRC) to return them home.

Exactly Zero. $535 million doesn't even pay for the body of the satellite, not to mention the payload. And while we are on the subject of satellite expenditures, the GOES-R project (the next generation of GOES satellites) is still going on (at a reported cost of around 7.6 Billion).

Plus, GOES-14 has been activated and notices have gone out for all receivers to re-train their dishes to it's location and GOES-15 is picking up the slack that 14 is missing. The GOES network of satellites was built to be slightly redundant in the case of craft failure.

So obviously, in this case, the D in D-Mass means "Dumbass".

If you can afford 1 of the 499 that they are planning on producing, I'm pretty sure you don't give a rats behind what the gas mileage is.

Screw running away, jetwash sucks. That little Reaper is going 300mph (full throttle, downhill with a tailwind). The F-35 just screams over it at cruising speed (probably around 500ish), interrupting airflow and the poor little drone loses lift and finds the ground.

Wouldn't an open field away from the structures be a better place to evac. to? The entire student body could probably been formed up by class on the football field and control would have been relatively easy to maintain.