In regard to the Space Shuttle, I have said the same thing since they decided to retire the fleet. It seems the greatest cost of having things in space has always been getting them off the ground. There was no reason to bring the shuttles back once we knew they weren't going to be used again. I remember that, besides the Smithsonian, many institutions complained about how expensive it would be just for annual maintenance to keep a shuttle on display.

So, as you suggested, they should have moved it to a higher orbit and abandoned it. High above all the space junk it would not be a hazard to any satellites.

Am I the only one that is bothered when a URL contains index.html (or equivilent) at the end? Remove it and the link still works; so why include it?

Yes, from the discussion of this I don't see how this is a copyright case.

Works of the United States government are not entitled to domestic copyright protection under U.S. law, sometimes referred to as "noncopyright."

relevant discussion of this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_work_by_the_U.S._government

That was my first thought. Even the explanation of the extra energy coming from heat is nice and doesn't stop solar cell from working. Might actually work well together: the cell is going to leak heat, this will soak it up.

One more, the name of my iPod Touch is Queso.

Enchilada
Tortilla
Nacho
chimichanga
Taco
Tostada
burrito
fajita
tamale
etc.

Um, gotta go, suddenly I'm hungry.

I am also a Sharepoint server admin and I would never recommend it to anyone.

As has been said already, it has a lot of really good ideas, all executed terribly. Search is so important, yet Sharepoint is very bad it. Yes you can drag and drop a whole hierarchy of files to add them to sharepoint, but woe to you if one of those files has a name that Sharepoint does not like http://blogs.msdn.com/b/joelo/archive/2007/06/27/file-name-length-size-and-invalid-character-restrictions-and-recommendations.aspx

I read the Wired article; the amazing thing is he did this with sample size of two.

Sylvia Earle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia_Earle should be a hero to all 3rd graders
Watch her TED Talk http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/467 , it's fascinating.