If people who die in a wheel well always have their dead bodies discovered, while *some* of the people who survive a wheel-well journey don't -- they sneak out on the tarmac undetected -- then the survival rate of 25 percent must be an under-estimate, or at least is potentially an under-estimate.

agreed

I think this is probably right -- the idea is that a valet-parked car has had its interior presented to a valet, voluntarily. But what about the trunk? Did the valets open the trunk? I think the owner of the car *does* have a reasonable expectation of privacy wrt the contents of the trunk. IANAL

Yes, they are planets most likely, because they probably formed around a star and then got kicked out dynamically. This is expected generically in models of how solar systems form and evolve (in particular we think it happened multiple times in our own Solar System).

Free-floating planets are generically expected: Essentially all models for how solar systems like ours (and the others we now know) involve dynamical interactions that would kick out planets at high velocity, leaving them unbound. Astronomers have expected to find these for decades, but have been unable to do so because a planet not warmed by a nearby star gets cold fast (hundreds of thousands to millions of years) and therefore invisible even in the infrared. This result is very important if correct, because gravitational lensing is an emission-insensitive way to find the planets. And yes, IAAA! (ps As for whether they are "spacecraft": I love that idea, but the "people" onboard probably wouldn't give the planet an impulse themselves (way, way, espensivo), they would make use of a free-floater passing by and hitch the ride.)

We adjust for solar time because UTC is an astronomical timescale, not a "count of seconds since a specific time." If "computer people" want a timescale that ignores leap seconds, they can use an atomic timescale like TAI (or GPS time, which is a constant offset from TAI). But choosing to standardize the internet on UTC and then complaining it is too hard to do the programming right is a little like buying a house next door to a turkey farm and complaining about the smell.

Damn that game was fun and it ran on an Apple II loaded from a floppy!

Yep. And guess what party that woud be?

From today's Ohio Beacon Journal"

Walden O'Dell, chief executive of Diebold Inc., told Republicans in an Aug. 14 fund-raising letter that he is ``committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.''