Often people wonder whether we will be able to support a population of 7 or 10 or whatever billion people. I don't find that interesting, I'm sure we can have many billions more on just this planet alone. The real question is what will be left of nature with 10 billion western style living people? Will we as a species be able to preserve any significant amount of wildlife, ecosystems and natural beauty for our children?

The Space Station is in a Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and will fall to the Earth without its regular altitude boosts

Getting the Space Station in a Geo synchronous orbit, let alone deep space (that means outside of the solar system), is a totally different league in terms of needed energy to overcome the gravity well called Earth and mainly the Sun. I can't be bothered to do the calculations but the amount of energy needed for a massive object as the ISS will be staggering.

Also question is for what? Most of the ISS is build for local gravity experiments maintained by manned personel. It has communications optimized for a LEO, etcetera. It won't be able to do much which can't be done by much cheaper ways with a new space probe.

It's like saying you can reach your local California supermarket with your bike, so hey you should be able to go to Hawaii with it as well!

They probably got a good pile of money in their pockets anyway

Also, from the same site: http://www.itworld.com/unified-communications/166637/5-skype-alternatives-linux-users

While many people use Skype for its free voice over IP (VoIP) services, Linux users have a love/hate relationship with it. Yes, Skype will run on some versions of Linux, but it doesn't run on all of them, and the Linux version (2.2-beta) lags far behind the Windows version (Skype 5.3). That's three major generations behind. Need I say more?

Seriously I can't take that site too serious now

According to the comments on that site it is 1 KW

Its a shame somebody gets modded up that much on /. for such an unconstructive post, not giving any idea how the very scarce resources of our physicists should be assigned and what your framework in such a quest would be.

I don't qualify under current law, but the first thing I would do is to look at how to make the current US problem in Iraq someone else's problem. Over the past five years Iraq has all but destroyed the US army. Whose army do we most want to destroy most (or care least about)? That would be Iran. So the US says to Iran 'your problem now', withdraw to Kuwait, see whether Iran prefers to have a festering civil war on its border or gets sucked in.

This is even worse policy then Bush did/does in his terms. So basically you say the solution to end a civil war is to create another one in a neigbouring country? I can see Iran having some influence in the current affairs, but no so much that it would justify burdening the normal, hard working, mostly non-fanatic, Iranian people with a (civil) war. Anyone doing something like this should be treated as a war criminal.