Great! Now you just need to invent an actually functional confinement method for the absurdly-hot gaseous/plasma nuclear fuel to stop it from destroying its containment vessel or leaking out its fuel in short order. And while you're at it, you should probably go ahead and invent a way to stop the quartz / fused silica bulb from undergoing blackening when exposed to a neutron flux, something it's so prone to doing that people deliberately expose quartz to nuclear reactors to make opaque black quartz for jewelry. And of course, a way to start the whole thing, a process that's been so problematic that they've been investigating bombardment by sizeable amounts of bloody antimatter as a potential solution.

Easy as pie, surely! Riiight around the corner.

What isotope are you thinking of as fuel? Unicorn-235?

The shuttle wasn't thrown away, nor were the boosters - only the (rather simple) ET. How did that work out, price-wise?

It's simply not fair to pretend that launch costs are a minor issue. They are the limiting factor, and progress in reducing costs has been lethargic over the past decades. "in orbit operations" are expensive precisely because launch costs are so high. Bargain basement, pay-out-the-nose-for-insurance launch rates are $4-5k a kilogram. More typical Russian rates are about $6-7k, while typical US and European rates run about $10k. And that's for large payloads, for small payloads expect in the (very) rough ballpark of $20k. How do you expect to live affordably in space if launch costs are even within an order of magnitude of that?

That's not to say that rockets fundamentally can't provide cheap access to space. But today's rockets certainly can't.

Presently working or theoretical? If you want "presently working", then that would defeat the point of asking for suggestions, would it not? If you want theoretical, there's tons. I kind of like the Launch Loop concept - sort of like a space elevator except that it doesn't require unobtanium, avoids or reduces the countless other problems with space elevators (micrometeorite damage, oscillation modes, power transfer, lightning and ionospheric discharge, and about 50 other things), and it gives you much more ideal/customizable orbital momentum, plus is 1-2 orders of magnitude more energy efficient at lifting cargo (space elevator climbers have to rely on beamed power, there's no practical way to send it through the cable, and beamed power over great distances where one receiver is only a few square meters at best is very low efficiency) AND offers a far higher launch rate.

Earth-based space elevators, the stuff of sci-fi nerd dreams, really are an awful solution when you start looking at the details. There's far better solutions out there.

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)

I think balkanization is the way it's going to go. It may suck in some respects, but if I end up paying $30 or $40 a month, but it's made up of programs I actually have to watch, as opposed to flipping through dozens of channels filled with duplication or crap I have no interest in, for double that price, then i'll be happy.

And frankly, the studios should start getting worried. With Netflix producing and buying original programming, with HBO bringing its own suite to streaming, you can be sure players like AMC will be close behind. The traditional production and distribution model is beginning to break down. It may take a few more years, but you will, in a decade, have companies like Netflix and HBO as online behemoths, and the studios will find themselves the poor cousins.

For me it's never really been about price. I've started using Google Play to rent movies and episodes of TV programs. I won't pay $18 for a brand new movie, so Google can get stuffed on that, but $4.99 isn't too bad.

Just buy a Chromecast and deal with it. I stopped caring about DRMed video a long time ago. All I care about is that I can watch Netflix with my tablet as a remote control. If HBO works on Chromecast, I'll be the first guy in line to buy a subscription.

Will someone just tell me if it's time to panic or not?

That depends. Are you bleeding through every orifice yet or not?

Years ago I took one of the Windows server 2008 courses. While I did learn a bit on how to manage CAs in Windows, all in all, it was a tremendous waste of time; equal parts obvious crap and annoying horn tooting ("Windows Server 2008 is the best server operating system on the market today" was literally one of the statements in the intro). It was an utter joke and worst of all taught very little that couldn't be find in other, more definitive sources. At the end of the whole process, I decided that Microsoft certifications were in some ways more of a marketing ploy than educational tool.

Else all this is going to prove is whether you paid the tithe to oracle or not.

I thought that's what certifications were pretty much for.

That's not true, the mAh levels of batteries keep rising as the batteries themselves shrink. And while there have indeed been some improvements in electronics efficiencies, these have been largely offset by increased demands in various roles.

Li-ion loses a negligible percentage of its energy as heat. A li-ion pack charged over the course of an hour or so is usually around 99% efficient. Surge charging can drop it to 94-97%, depending on the chemistry and rate, but again, li-ion is very efficient. Flywheels are much lossier. They're also more expensive, larger, and have more catastrophic failure modes.