You're then pulling along a 20km hose behind your rocket, and that hose has to be strong enough to support its own weight. You're going to add more weight than you're subtracting.

Unless you built a 20km tall tower that the hose hangs down from and as the rocket ascends you retract the hose so the rocket doesn't have to carry the slack. But then you have to build a 20km tall tower that can hold an enormous amount of hose (still sturdy enough to be 20km long) and the weight of the fuel item you're moving, and since that weight is going to be on one side of the tower you'd have to counterbalance it on the other side. Tricky.

Yeah, that's a pretty common thing to say over here in the States whenever anyone from Europe doesn't kiss our butts hard enough. Please know that while Americans that aren't jerks are a minority, we're a very large minority. Unfortunately we tend to just be quietly cool about things, so we're less well-known than our loudmouth brethren. But trust me, we exist, we're numerous, and we want to punch those morons in the neck from time to time just as much as you do. But we don't, 'cause that wouldn't be very cool.

But anyway, sorry about those guys.

They're not claiming a patent on app stores, just a trademark on app stores called App Store. You can have a McDonalds Shoe Store and trademark it to prevent another shoe store from calling itself McDonalds, even if there have been other shoe stores and other McDonaldses for decades.

However this trademark is quite likely invalid, 'cause you probably can't trademark a shoe store called Shoe Store.

Constant, real-time monitoring - sorta
robotic cops - eventually
a TV channel for just about every imaginable thing - yay!

lose of humanity & compassion - not really at all
state-run religion ("OMM" -- "Blessings of the state, blessings of the masses.") - also not at all.
mandatory drug sedation beginning at adolescence - I'm guessing this is ADD-related? Ritalin is the parents' choice, not the government. Adderall gives you superpowers, so when it's even available for normals, I'm first in line.

Because you're not shopping on Black Friday. Given how cheap a cash register is and how little space it takes up, it's really not a bad idea to have 7000 of them for the one day a year you need them, even if you only use 1 on weekdays. But it would be a bit of a blunder to be paying 40 people $8 / hour just to save a customer that isn't going to get better service elsewhere 2 minutes.

Murder in real life makes 99.9% people want to vomit. If you watch a horror movie and start fantasizing about being the killer, there's something incredibly wrong with you.

Squirting DNA at other people in real life is virtually irresistible and damn near the meaning of life. If you watch porn and DON'T want to have sex, you either recently had sex (with zero or more partners) or there's something incredibly wrong with you.

I don't understand why people even compare the two. They're nothing alike, except that they can both be seen on TV if you film them and put them on TV.

But my usual disclaimer when I say that: I don't support censorship of it. Kids will learn to screw. I watched a bunch of porn as a kid, and it was only a minor contributor to why I'm a miserable piece of crap adult. Just teach kids how condoms work so it doesn't destroy them when they figure out how to con their classmates into scratching their itches.

Weird. Easily my favorite of the Stargate series' and the only show on SciFi I ever watched.

And yay; since no one knew it was getting canned it will end with everything unresolved. Probably on a cliffhanger. That would be swell.

A business owner or CEO in the 250k bracket that has his taxes raised is not going to tell his company to hire fewer people.

Partnerships are pass-through entities, meaning the owner and the company are the same for tax purposes. The same is true for S-corps and LLCs taxed as S-Corps (though LLCs can elect to be taxed as C-corps, but it only makes sense to do so if your company is expected to re-invest profits in the company).

Additionally the business owner will anticipate his own reduced income and distribute a larger share of the company's profits to himself to compensate, reducing the cash pool available to hire new employees.

It's a valid point. It's less valid than taxing the fuck out of the top end and giving tons of free money to the bottom. The bottom is going to spend it buying the top half's products anyway, making them richer ten minutes later than they would have been if we reduced their taxes. Tax reductions don't make people rich, sales do.

A "push" credit card transaction would also solve those problems. Why is it that I can only pay for something by giving my entire credit balance to someone and trusting them to give me back everything but what their invoice says? Why can't I say, "Hey, MasterCard, give this guy $50." He gets an email, his automatic email-getting-password-sender-outer tells me how to get to his jiggly bits. ... I mean, the jiggly bits he has video of, not the ones between his pockets.

If that happens, the guy on the other side created a universe, of which something as insanely complicated as a human is one trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a percent. The guy built the moon and is way better at physics than Steven Hawking, so it's not like you're dealing with a guy that lacks either brains or brawn. Plus if the lake of fire is actually on the moon, you're pretty much fucked on that escape part. So best of luck, assuming you weren't the rare total douche who deserves a lake of fire, but I don't like your chances.

They presumably won't overcharge for them anymore once they're mandatory.

"What, you don't want to pay an extra $500 to save babies? Sorry, can't help ya with a new car. I do have some fine used cars over here, though. Only $475 more expensive than they were last year. Convenience fee. Don't have to worry about those annoying backup cameras."

If networks enforced quality standards on ads and didn't repeat them each 6 times an hour, people would stop turning the channel for commercials. You could even rent out writers and production staff to make sure the final product is going to meet your standards (cheaply. You're making money on the ad, not the production. Just cover your costs). Whichever of the big 3 networks that figures that out first is going to make a trillion dollars while DVRs drive the rest out of business.

Three times as many as before.

I always assumed the point was to split people who, being progressive for progressiveness's sake, would vote for any serious black candidate or any serious female candidate (I've decided to call them "flying car progressives". They don't really care about policies, they just want to live in the future, where an openly gay Chinese candidate giving a speech from the moon doesn't raise any eyebrows). But Republicans apparently didn't anticipate the power of Tina Fey's glasses being similar to their candidate. Not that they could have overcome the Obama's ability to shoot rainbows from his nipples anyway.

We can discount anyone that tried it while paired with a president-for-life, nationalizing foreign businesses, doing your best to destroy anyone with an IQ over 95, and getting embargoes sprayed all over yourself. Those things tend to muck up your economy independent of your tax structure.