One time we were doing landing practice at Whitehouse field near Jacksonville, FL. Anyway, one yahoo started spotlighting the planes in the pattern. One plane called back to Jax Tower...they called the police. Then the co-pilot of that plane used his cell phone to talk to a policeman and literally guided the police…

The newest Robotech box sets use the original openings of their respective shows. And I hate it. The Robotech intro seamlessly meshed all 3 shows into a awesome spectacle. It had a bigger scope IMHO.

I don't know, there were a lot of nations and businesses that did absolutely nothing about Y2K and experienced narry a hicup. It was the 21st century version of the world coming to an end at the millenium...nothing more.

I don't know. I've always been a windows user (well, since my Apple IIc days anyway), and I felt that Vista was not good at all. I had old hardware running XP that ran circles around Vista machines whose hardware was 3-4 times more powerful. (in terms of graphic cards, RAM, CPU speed, etc.)

Actually, just studied the Challenger problem in my National Strategic Policy class. The solid rocket boosters actually failed across a wide range of temperatures...but only catastrophically when it was very cold. The O-ring actually experienced low-20's temps before launch and and the SRBs were only at 33 degrees…

Actually it was down in all the sports bars in Newport, RI until about 3:30 too.

Everyone needs to relax.

It makes no sense to enter another gravity well on the way to another. Go to Mars or go to the moon. There's not enough comonality between the the two destinations to use the Moon as a "practice run".

The shuttle was a little more inherently dangerous...agreed. However, both shuttle accidents would not have happened if the policy makers would have listened to the engineers.

Actually, the dogfighting capabilities of the F-22 are not that extraordinary. It's very good, don't get me wrong, but it's not what you are probably envisioning. Because of the AIM-9X, guns get used more often in the air to ground role now. In 14 years of training, I can count on one hand how many times a fighter…

Current plans are to have parallel developement paths. An Unmanned and a manned version. If the unmanned version is mature by the time it needs to be put in production, it will probably get the go ahead. There are also plans to field both systems at the same time for different purposes. For example, UCAV's are…

I would like to offer alternatives to your comments:

Actually both China and Russia will be fielding (and in the case of Russia, selling) aircraft with similar performance to the F-22 and F-35 in the next couple of years. Actually, the Chinese F-X fighter might actually beat the F-35 into production. So yes, we need to design another one.

I'll never understand the hate for RotJ. It's hands down my favorite SW movie. Here are all the reasons I loved that movie: WARNING: MUCH SPOILERS

Kind of obvious. As soon as I read the 2nd paragraph, I said to myself "yeah, gliding might use more energy, but at least they wouldn't get eaten." I never really thought that the gliding was adapted for locomotive purposes.

There is already an asteroid named persephone. I don't know if this elminates the name for moons / planets.

Holy cow, did we just see a civil, polite disagreement on the internet. Excuse me, I'm going to go and start stockpiling some canned goods.

Ahhh, X-wing. I loved how in many missions (like the cargo container one) you could take out the all the TIE's and actually kill the Star Destroyer. Just get both shield generators and then do loops behind it with the lasers. SERIOUS points!

I had Sprint for 8 years (ended service in 2008). Switched to AT&T for the iphone. Man, what a night and day difference. People that complain about AT&T never had Sprint.

The Hubble telescope is basically a spy sat turned the other direction. Their airplanes don't have a hubble painted on the side...they have a Key Hole spy satellite painted on the side.