Yes, but those unmapped stars are very, very far away, far enough that even in aggregate, they have less angular area than the nearby, mapped stars. If that weren’t so, we’d see a glow from them across the entire sky.
It’s not the total area they cover, but rather that at least one of them is directly above a vehicle taking that exit. And that’s a virtual certainty when you also consider the galaxies.
I suppose it depends on whether you’re considering clearance above some point, as I was, or clearance above an entire vehicle. I suppose above a vehicle is more relevant, but then again, the sign can’t know how large any given vehicle is.
Relevant Straight Dope column.
I learn a great deal from the SDMB commentary on xkcd comics that I don’t understand.
Hence my reference to Olbers paradox upthread (but thanks for the link to the Master’s words)
“Tired of waiting on hold? Use our website to chat with one of our live agents, who are available to produce words at you 24/7!”
That’s happened to me sooooo many times.
Nope. Because of redshift, not because they’re not up there…
Most recently, with my public library account. Your library card has to be entered in exactly the right format, and they don’t tell you what that format should be.
I’m having a hard time imagining a login page that is so complicated that I would spend hours unsuccessfully trying to log in before giving up and calling support.
It’s not that the page is complicated, it’s that there’s are unwritten rules for passwords and it’s rejecting yours for stated reasons that aren’t the actual reasons, so you think you might be on the right track, and then things fail out and you need to start over, and it looked like it might have been an Internet glitch and …
This has happened to me with he website of the casualty actuarial society. I still can’t access it except from one computer.
For an online game, I set up my account on the website with my email address and a password. So far, so good. I downloaded the game app. Then I tried to login to the game app and it didn’t work. I tried multiple times over a day, just in case there was a long delay between account creation and being able to actively use it. Nope.
Talked to customer support and eventually made contact with a lead developer (game was still in beta testing). After much back and forth, we discovered the website allowed passwords up to 32 characters and I had made mine that maximum. The game client didn’t allow passwords longer than 24 characters. Fun times!
One of the online textbook sites I use, in order to log in, you need not only to be on the right login page, but the login page has to have the right browser context (cookies? History? Some combination? I don’t know). And when you log out (or it automatically logs you out, after ~1 hour of inactivity), it doesn’t provide a link to log back in. So you have to find your own way back to the login page, in a way that provides the right browser context.
I’m currently using an app that logs you off after 30 minutes, and helpfully takes you back to the login page to get back in. Except something about the context is off, so the login fails with a useless error message. You have to close and reopen the browser to get back in. It took way too long to figure that out the first time, and it still pisses me off every time it happens.
My bank altered their website so that now I get a stack overflow message every time I try to log in. Customer support insists that their webpage hasn’t changed. The only way I have to defeat this is to start loading the page and immediately hit my browser’s stop loading button after I have the login fields but before whatever is causing the stack overflow can load. Sometimes this window of opportunity is a tenth of a second or less; and I have to hit it before I can even see the login fields.
A “What-if?” That doesn’t involve the Earth being vaporized:
Brian
“Overly complicated fantasy novel” 
“Some tires are marketed as ‘all-shape tires,’ but if driven in a climate with both inverted catenary falls and triangle falls, they wear out really fast.”
Sounds like the tires he had on don’t really qualify as “all-season” in that place, do they.
I love how we’re all such nerds that we all just understand the basic premise and roll with it.