True, but the Earth is very big and the ISS flies less than 200 miles above it; so you can only see it when it flies within a few hundred miles of straight over your head. Also, the light has to be just right. Its only visible when the sun is not shining where you are, but is shining on the station. That's why the best time to see any satellites is near dusk or dawn. The point of the article is that conditions will be just right more often than usual this month, giving us less than amateur astronomers (especially people living in cloudy areas) a better chance of seeing it.
I went to http://www.n2yo.com/ and found that it will be flying straight over my head and be very bright in a couple of days.

That's exactly what I don't understand.
A meteor the size of a large caliber bullet blows a 12 inch hole in the ground and is still intact? You'd think it would get pulverized into dust in the process.

Just ask a cook
Its like taking a steak that's frozen solid and throwing it on a BBQ with ten pounds of blazing hot charcoal. One minute on each side, and the outside will almost be burnt. Try to eat it though, and you realize the inside is still raw and cold, probably partially frozen still.

You're right. "Never trust a computer." : ) I learned that the hard way with ATMs.

Amen. A lot of people also like to blame new tech for these kinds of problems.
Have we really become a society that believes that the only way to prevent anti-social or anti-productive behavior is to use tech and patents to make it impossible?
If a company doesn't like what people are doing during their meetings, they should consider why people aren't paying attention (maybe the meeting wasn't necessary) and if they determine that the employees really are out of line, punish them.
These days, we've adopted this concept that you can't punish people for incompetence or negligence, as long as society didn't do anything to prevent the person from doing what they did. Trust me, within a few years, you're going to see the first murderer use the defense that they are not at fault because society allowed them to purchase the weapon, or a child-molester who says "neither she, nor her parents did anything to prevent me from having sex with her, If this 10 yr old didn't want to have sex, she should have said so, or her parents shouldn't have sent her to summer camp.

That explains why the last time I called 911 (I was in a building), they pressed me for an address. When I told them my phone had GPS, they said it was easier for them if I gave them the address myself.

I know a few women who would probably like to see both of their butt cheeks collapse.

Here here. They don't even blink an eye about handing the bankers billions of dollars. But they can't agree on any spending that would actually benifit our country. OK, its arguable as to whether space exploration is prudent right now. But the Republicans in congress are saying that expanding and repairing our worn out infrastructure is a total waste of money. No, they insist that if we just hand it out to the people who still have money, then magically, it will somehow help those of us who don't. What they are actually doing is called looting. They realize that they have driven us to the verge of collapse, and now they are just trying to horde as much as they can so they can come through the depression ahead of everyone else. They're getting kind of desperate right now because they are realizing that their $5 billion will only be worth $500 million in a few years.

Having a backup is a good idea. But there is no reason to think that it would be difficult, or even inconvenient, to provide that.

I don't know how old you are, but I'm guessing you weren't born yet in the early 80s, when the shuttle first started flying. Trust me, a modern iPhone would out perform a 4 x 6 x 2ft mainframe from that time. I'm sure that the first shuttle had less computing power than the computer that I'm using right now. And GPS hadn't even started to be implemented yet. Yet our ICBMs could hit targets within a couple hundred yards on the other side of the world.

I'm just guessing here, but I would think it is basically a turbojet engine with an afterburner (which dumps extra fuel into the exhaust for extra thrust) which has already been used reliably on most fighters for decades, and has archived MACH 3 at very high altitude. But this one starts dumping oxygen into the exhaust as well, when the engine starts to become starved of oxygen. Actually, the major drawback of traditional afterburners is that they are very inefficient because there is not much oxygen left in the exhaust. Adding oxygen would make them more efficient, and theoretically allow them to work even in a vacuum.

I hope you guys are being sarcastic. Yes a lot of hippies put themselves into "space" before USSR or NASA did it for real.

Then give your blood to the Red Cross. They are a non-profit organization.

Yes, as R2.0 points out, they do pay their electric bill, they pay their employees, they pay for the equipment they use, and every other cost of doing business; and they do charge hospitals for the blood, to cover these costs. "Non-profit" doesn't mean that no one makes a profit (for example, the employees deserve to profit from their time and effort), it only means that the company itself doesn't make a profit. In other words, nobody is getting paid simply because they own the place, even though they don't do anything.

The one place where profit is likely to be made on your blood, is at the hospital. They most likely charge you more than the Red Cross charges them for the blood, but hospitals make sure they make a profit on everything. What's the alternative? Don't give blood, and let people bleed to death to teach the evil hospitals a lesson? Yeah That'll teach 'em.