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Um, none of those are acronyms, they're initialisms.

See: http://lyberty.com/encyc/articles/abbr.html

the current satellite bounce links can be reserved for use only if/when the direct links go out.

Basically, I agree with you, except in the above — the plane's "pilots" would have to be located fairly close to the action. Placing them, as is done now, half way across the globe in Nevada, just would not work. Ever.

Earth's circumference is 40076000 meters. The speed of light is 299792458 meters per second. The round-trip latency will thus be at least 0.13 of a second, which is substantial even for driving in the rain — and the real lag will be bigger. This is a serious disadvantage and no money or technology can solve this problem.

Only deploying the controllers closer to the battlefields — itself quite a logistical challenge — will. Perhaps, retrofitting the carriers to keep the "pilots" on the ship is the next practical step... But first, most of the current decision-makers among military pilots would have to retire...

Award Captain Obvious a bonus point!

A case in point would be exemplified by the difference between Starbucks coffee and traditional European coffee. Guess the calorific difference between a Starbucks 'Venti' latte (600ml of milk and sugar) and a short black (30ml of unsweetened unmilked coffee)

Trust me, a *good* espresso does not need sugar or cream to be delicious. If you have to add sugar and cream to your coffee to make it taste nice, get better coffee.

"More is not always better." - Captain Obvious

More to the point, the distance between San Francisco (in California, USA) and London (in England) is about 5000 miles. That same passenger jet at mach 7 can bring its passengers from London to San Francisco in about 1 hour. The trip would be much cheaper than that offered by a subsonic plane because 1 hour is only enough time for cheap snacks like airline peanuts and Coca-Cola whereas a 14-hour flight would mean an expensive (but low-quality) dinner tray.

On the other hand, a 1-hour flight would facilitate global infidelity. An errant British businessman could fly to San Francisco, have dinner and sex with his squeeze, and then return to London within 4 hours.

Big number fallacy; a nuke is big, sure, but let's be amazingly optimistic and assume it can completely physically clear a 10-mile radius of space junk, while not adding anything itself.

The average radius of the Earth is 3,959 miles, call it 4000. The definition of LEO orbit is from 400 to 1600 miles above the Earth. Sphere volume (close enough) is defined as (4/3)*pi*r^3.

To cover LEO, we need to cover a volume of (4.0/3)*pi*((4000+1600)**3 - (4000+400)**3) miles, which is 378,000,000,000 cubic miles (378 American billion). Our incredible optimistic nuke can "clean" (4.0/3)*pi*(10 **3) cubic miles, or 4,200 cubic miles. Dividing the (unrounded) numbers reveals that we need to set off 90,449,062 (~90 million) miracle nukes to clean the orbit.

(If you start python and type as your first line "from math import pi", those expressions will slide right into Python so you can verify them. Insignificant figures have been trimmed for presentation.)

And it's even harder than that, since the objects are moving at different speeds, and it's quite easy for objects to slip between the cracks if we don't light up the entire orbit at once.

Clearly, this is absurd, because we don't even have that many pieces of space trash in orbit, by many orders of magnitude. Because of the difference, we don't even need to do any sort of statistics to safely conclude that there are no "concentrations" of space trash that could be nuked, and we are in fact going to have to address the situation one piece of trash at a time.

The Wachowskis probably didn't take the reference from Sandman, since Gaiman himself probably chose the name as a reference to the bibilcal Daniel, who was famous for his ability to interpret dreams. See here and here for more information.

When that writer lady accused J.K. Rowling of stealing the idea of Harry Potter from her books, either she or the media made note of the similarities between Potter and Neil Gaiman's Tim Hunter character from Books of Magic, such as the spectacled brown-hair look and the owl companion. But Gaiman stated that the owl was based on the Merlin legend, and that's probably where Rowling got her owl from too.

Logical enough. But then the game that defines RPG games isn't even a computer game.

How many people had to look up "disjunctive syllogism" to follow these posts?

Incidentally, it takes the form: A XOR B, not A, therefore B.

Wikipedia sucks, heres another link. http://www.lyberty.com/encyc/articles/inconsistanc y.html

Just like 1 Atmosphere is air pressure at sea level, Mach 1 is the speed of sound at sea level.

Interestingly enough, according to Google Math, Mach 10 is ~127 miles a minute. Assuming it takes them at least 5 or 10 minutes to achieve Mach 10 (I have no frigging idea), they are going to cover some serious distance. Sheesh.

At Mach 10, you will circle the Earth in under 200 minutes.

Damn I love Google math.

No, you are a little bit mixed up as to the history.

The Basic Set was around the same time as AD&D. I'm pretty sure it actually came out after AD&D, at least after the AD&D Player's Handbook.

The original was a set of very poorly edited, poorly organized books. You can see pictures and read about them here, if you like:

http://www.lyberty.com/encyc/articles/d_and_d.html

steveha