But that's what I mean by "out to sea". It's quite feasible to moor out ten miles with a decent range of motion so that there's some "give" in the installation, and run power from the reactor station to a shore-located pickup and distribution relay. Design the reactors right and you can keep the core submerged with…

Sea-based reactors have been in use for decades in the form of nuclear ships/submarines, so the technology is there and mature. So yes, you're right, the political question is the bigger one. And that's a royal PITA to negotiate.

Take the reactors offshore. Semi-submersed, moored platforms that use seawater convection and/or active pumping for cooling would never be subject to earthquakes. Power conduits can run either submerged along the bottom or at any other depth with neutral buoyance.

I can't make a single pick but there really should be some Farscape on this list.

That really was, to me, the point that Firefly became an icon.

Doesn't it? I thought 4G coverage cost a premium over 3G.

Huh. Interesting. Maybe that's just a Verizon screwup or something. In any case, I think I'd feel more screwed by it if I hadn't already decided to quit waiting on Big Red and took the bull by the horns.

womp womp

I agree...there are definitely cases that absolutely blow my mind in how poorly the decisions are made. The current fiasco over the C-27J is one. Regarding the F-35, I'd have approached the overall project differently and focused on the naval variant first, the land variant second, and eliminated the STOVL version…

Not being cutting edge isn't the same as not being functionally useful. Look at the B-52. It's not a stealthy aircraft, but it's highly functional in a lot of roles that don't require it to brave a modern networked air defense system. The F-35 airframe itself, even if you discount some of its stealthy features, is…

Some of the episodes of the CGI Clone Wars series have utterly brilliant lightsaber scenes. You can pick out different characters using different styles (Dooku's Makasi, Obi-Wan's Soresu) and some of the moves are absolutely spectacular, like Ahsoka cutting four Mandalorian throats in a single leaping spin.

[ahem] [starwars.wikia.com]

No, they're really not. The costs and risks outweigh the benefits, and speed fo the sake of speed isn't enough of a motivator. Not to mention that the bigger you are, the harder it is to go fast.

In my car, I really only play audio through a line-in cable that routes to the back of my stereo through the glovebox. While I sometimes use my phone as an audio player, either local files or streamed from my Google Music (er...Play) account, my primary player is a tiny Sansa Clip 2GB that I paid $12 for as a refurb…

"Captain, we're navigating into a swirly!"

It's fucking disgraceful what the Air Force did to the C-27 program. "Oh, we'll just use our C-130s instead" when the missions don't call for C-130s, and then the AF doesn't want to fly the Herks without full loads anyway. SecArmy should be pitching an absolute fit & calling for heads.

That's spectacular. Not just the close proximity but the mother whale *presenting* her baby up for greeting. There are degrees of intelligence there that I never thought we'd see.

Yessss...was it the one that's been touring the country with a B-17 and P-51? I saw the Fort do a flyby over our neighborhood at near-dusk. It was heart-wrenching.

And I think that's incorrect, anyway. The plane flies slightly nose down because the center of gravity in a typically loaded B-52 is way forward. When flying very lightly loaded (which they don't usually do), B-52s ride much more level and may even take off slightly nose high, but a heavily loaded B-52 takes off with…

Yes, and from the get-go they've been considered to be a handful for Jedi. IIRC, Yoda had trouble with them.