Well, yes, I live very well with on an income of $10,000/yr, barring a catastrophic health issue. I do so by being very careful about avoiding frivilous expenses. A one-time expense of $300 on top of a continued monthly expense that is only a few bucks less than what I am now paying doesn't work for me. But spending $300 now to avoid years of monthly payments would be a good deal.

I don't really need any faster access or greater bandwidth than what I now have. Yeah, I'd like those, but I'd also like a trip to Hawaii, a larger appartment, room for an infinite number of bookcases... Not going to happen.

It's not the viewing of the picture which is offensive, but the making of the picture. Distributing it is rubbing salt in the wounds, and makes the difference between a secret, private image of Muhammad (which were quite common in Islam), and a public spectacle. The secret, private images were tolerated because the owners would know that the image was not being worshipped or being used to degrade Muhammad. When it's public and all over the place, that security is lost.

It's just a respect thing - when a religion has been pushed into the corner by the meddling of other countries, often with no regard to their sensibilities, they will fight tooth and nail to secure that which is the most important thing to them. We've seen this with other religions and cultures, too, so it's not just an Islam thing.

If someone respects the hell out of something I'll not go out of my way to show how free I am to disrespect it, or show how much I dislike people being offended by disrespect, by disrespecting it - "told you so" is not productive. That's just me, though.

There you go again - any opportunity for you to throw in some casual xenophobia in a completely unrelated article, and you jump at the chance, showing us just how scared and little you are.

Your intelligence is about as high as your morals.

Thank you for posting that. I think I had stopped reading when I hit the "$300 construction fee". That was a show-stopper, so why spend any more time on the thing?

Yeah, I would be interested in the $25/mo for 12 mo, then $0 for the next 6 years.

The Skylon project is aiming to reduce the price to ~$1000 per kilo (to begin with), and then further reduce that through the life of the project. They've made some amazing progress, and they don't need to use nuclear fuel (just hydrogen), which means there's less for anyone to complain about. Couple that with being entirely reusable (and possibly capable of flying a second mission within 2 days), and it looks simply genius.

Some work exceptionally well. You'd know that if you'd bother to actually read the real research, instead of simply plugging your brain into a site whose attitude gels with your own, and letting them think for you.

You really don't understand how the web works, do you? You are saying that everyone needs to write and maintain an app for each and every OS out there, instead of having an interface which they can support, which in turn is supported by each and every OS. You are calling for the web to return to the incredibly-limited mid-90s. "How it should be" for you is not how the rest of the world wants it.

With a proper SLA and a good backup solution it is no more risky than putting your data in any other system. For example, there are thousands of companies who use hosted CRMs for their entire sales workflow, generating billions of dollars in the process. I guess they're all dumb?

Don't worry, you can buy a $500 phone from my non-profit, $400 will be my for salary and $100 for a junk Android phone. Profit is an indication that you're delivering more value relative to cost than the competition, after all sales price is just a number you decide. They're not competing against some imaginary non-profit, the day Google, Microsoft etc. deliver a competing product forcing them to lower prices they will. Until then, keep blaming the one delivering what people want and not the ones who don't.

No one is forcing you to use it. Don't use it, and then you won't feel compelled to complain about an option you can easily ignore.

Many posts suggest doing away with the cable by putting the motor on the elevator car; but this overlooks the fact that the elevator needs to be connected to a counterweight for efficiency reasons.

However, here's a thought: you put motors on the elevator *and* the counterweight. As the elevator goes up, the counterweight goes down and uses its motors as generators to partly power the elevator's motors. And vice versa.

Sure, you're not going to break even due to electrical losses; but it'll be a damn sight better than no counterweight.

And how do you handle the counterweight? What's that? You don't actually understand how an elevator works?

That should actually be that Kepler-444 is of the same type as Alpha Centauri B, the smaller secondary star in that system. The primary star in Alpha Centauri is a G dwarf (yellow) like our sun.

What's interesting about this star though, is that according to the paper, Kepler-444 is not some primordial supergiant, but a K dwarf (orange, of the same type as Alpha Centauri) with a smaller companion red dwarf (or possibly two companion red dwarf stars which are closely bound to each other).

I'm disappointed that Portland did not make the cut this time. But I don't expect to directly benefit from Google's fiber anyway. I'm on a fixed income and the last I looked, Google would be more than I could afford.

That said, I expect that when Google does come to Portland that will force its competitors to sweeten their offerings. But maybe that will happen soon anyway, in an economic equivalent of 'spooky action at a distance.' If Google succeeds big time in these other cities, the providers already in the Portland market might realize that it would be advantageous to drop their rates and offer better packages now, and thus make Portland look like a less inviting market to Google.

Well, a couple of providers would also have to improve their customer and technical support (here's looking at you Comcast). But I'm sure they would sacrifice some of their excess profit margin if they felt the Google dragon breathing fire on their butts.

So I for one welcome our new google overlord. Even if he never comes completes the courtship ritual, he might put the fear of loss of market share in the boardrooms where it will do the most good.