Space has resources. They're called asteroids. Often quite valuable resources, actually - although learning to mine in microgravity will be a trial-and-error process.

Let's be honest, the main sellable goods of a Martian colony would be martian minerals for the jewelry / collector industry (which would sell for many times their weight in gold... a fundamental requirement of martian exports, given the cost of return payload deliveries) and tourist trips for the few multi-billionaires obsessed with space. It's hard to envision in even the medium term much more coming from a Mars colony than that which could pay for itself. And these things wouldn't come close to paying for the cost of the colony, in any regard. I certainly don't expect to see, say, industrial minerals exports in the medium term; a "creative economy" means people which means ridiculously high upkeep costs; and the concept of martian manufacturing being competitive with Earth's is just laughable. And science is much more cheaply done with disposable robots. One could probably factory-produce a hundred Curiosity rovers and mass launch/land them in every corner of Mars for the cost of one manned mission (let alone a "colony"). One could probably launch an automated nuclear submersible-drillship into the oceans of Europa for less than the price of one manned Mars mission.

If you thermalize your fission fragments. Sure, that's what all current fission reactors do, but it's not a fundamental requirement. About 80% of a nuclear reaction's energy is in the form of fission fragments - high energy heavy ions - which can be decelerated for power without Carnot losses, without a thermodynamic sink. The key is that you can't use fuel elements with any serious thickness to them (otherwise most fragments will thermalize) - the fuel elements have to be wires, sheets, dust, things of that nature, with magnetic fields to separate the fragments from the fuel.

On the other hand, when it comes to propulsion, nukes are the bees knees. No form of currently-achievable propulsion yields a higher Isp than a fission fragment rocket, with the exception of photonic / magnetic sails, which are impractically low thrust for interplanetary travel. Some day I'd love to run some simulations as to whether you could have a spallation-driven subcritical dusty fission reactor get rid of much if not all of the moderator mass (power to drive the accelerator should be copious from a fission fragment reactor), and whether you could run one in an infrared nuclear lightbulb mode (making use of the electrostatically-contained dust's extreme surface area and low IR absorption spectrum to get high output, rather than using extreme, unmanageable temperatures to get high output as in a traditional nuclear lightbulb concept), thus opening up non-dirty high thrust power modes for surface operation (airbreathing, simple fuel heating, etc, including using electricity from fragment deceleration to run a microwave beam to help ionize the air/fuel and make it more opaque to IR) and a few other space options (such as a nuclear VASIMR-like mode)

Why so popular? Because the storyboarding and visuals are already sketched out by the original issues of the comics themselves.

Adapting a novel requires an imaginitive F/X team to create the F/X from mere text descriptions of the scenes and items to be depicted. Having existing pictures makes it cheap and easy to skip that creativity in the process.

There is also the fact that an awful lot of movies adapted from novels just tank at the box office because they don't express a vision that the readers of those novels had in mind. Even short stories tank. Take, for example, "Enemy Mine." It was a great short story, but kind of sucked as a movie.

I'd like to believe that a better job could be done by a competent team with a good budget, but then along comes something like "Ender's Game", which was so bad I gave up on watching it less than half an hour in. Yet I'd devotedly read the entire series of novels set in that world in my high school days, and enjoyed them thoroughly.

I've often wished they'd get around to adapting some of C. J. Cherryh's universe to a movie format, but I fear they'd butcher her excellent writing and characterization and leave us with yet another F/X fest that tanks at the box office and loses all the appeal of the novels.

Berating the stupid is being "professional" in my books.

Molllycoddling the incompetent just leads them to think they're better than they are.

Wireless bandwidth is limited by the allocated spectrum. With landlines, you can always drag more fiber or copper, hook it up, and expand your bandwidth. You can't do that with wireless.

But I expect to be modded down because I'm not jumping on the "everything should be unlimited" bandwagon.

Parents are and have always been responsible for the behaviour and expenses incurred by their children. If they go on a rampage of vandalism, the parents are responsible for the damages. If they steal a car and wreck it, the parents are responsible for the damages.

This is no different. The parents are being held responsible for the damages done by their children.

To hell with absentee parenting that lets children do whatever the hell they want with no restrictions or monitoring.

You bred your rug rats -- now bloody well take responsiblity for the results of your actions: raising and training your children!

Gates and his ilk want consumption taxes instead of capital taxes because they don't spend anywhere near as much as they have consuming things.

As per usual, it's the rich trying to protect their ill-gotten gains.

Let me guess: "This content is not available in your region" messages for anyone outside the US. :(

Had the goobernmint not let the NSA run roughshod over the constitution and the rights of people both foreign and domestic, the general public would not be baying for the means to keep them out.

The goobernmint brought this upon themselves through their abuses.

Screw 'em.

When I was in college I took several courses from the famous scholar of Japanese literature, Howard Hibbet. In one of the classes there was student who liked to talk about Japanese culture's "Samurai values". The professor listened politely to this student, until one day he said somethign that has stuck with me for thirty years: "You should be careful about uncritically accepting the way a culture likes to present itself."

I have found this to be very true, even of corporate cultures.

Many years ago there was a brief vogue among a few companies for psych testing potential employees. So I paid to have myself tested so I'd know what my potential employers "knew". Among other things, the tests informed me that I have an IQ that is 4.3 standard deviations above the mean.

This got me thinking. Which is more likely, that I'm smarter than 99.999% of the population, or that the test score was bogus? It should be obvious that it's far more likely that my test results were bogus!

Just because we can assign a single number to a person's intelligence the way we can to that person's height or weight doesn't mean that that number is as objective as height or weight is. What IQ tests purport to measure *cannot be observed directly*, and therefore cannot be measured directly. So we must not lose sight of the fact that IQ tests are *devised* by psychologists to correlate with something. How do they do this? By comparing a test's scores against something easy to measure -- rank in school for example. An IQ test that correlates poorly to performance in school would be considered "faulty", but one that correlates strongly to performancve in school would be considered "accurate".

In other words, IQ tests are only as meaningful as the outcomes they're deisgned to correlate with. An IQ test correlated to school success doesn't necessarily correlate precisely with "street smarts", many components of which are evolutionarily important (e.g. reading facial expressions).

Another thing to consider about how the test are calibrated is that the result is bound to be reliable ONLY near the mean, simply because confirmatory data out on the tails of the distribution is necessarily rare. So while I'd lend considerable credence to the 20 point spread between a 90 IQ and aa 110 IQ, I wouldn't lend the same credence to a difference between 140 and 160. I'd lend no credence whatsoever to the difference between a 140 and 160 IQ.

Basically, I consider distinctions betwen IQs over 125 unreliable, and distinctions between IQs over 135 as absolutely meaningless. There's no epistemological justfication for ranking people's intellectual abilities by IQ at that level. It's entirely possible that John Sunnunu would score 2.6 standard deviations higher than Stephen Hawking, but that's an artifact of the test, not reality.

Your observation would be insightful if holding a software patent demosntrated ability in the field.

Yup, exactly. Taxing consumption would disincentivise spending, and when people aren't spending, businesses aren't making any money and hence going out of business.