I'm sorry, but pendantic flair is an example of an oxymoron, not irony.

No. It's a valid US patent.
It means that IBM can sue whoever created your HR software and get an injunction to stop its sale in the US. Whoever makes your HR software would then need to fight IBM and a team of wicked sharp lawyers in court, and convince a bunch of dumb-fucks in East Texas, who have nothing better to do for three months than sit in a jury for $12 / day, that the patent isn't valid do to prior art or obviousness.

Welcome to the giant cluster fuck that is the US patent system.

OMG! It's just like Firefox!

Not sure about awesome, but definitely scary. Case in point, Michele Bachmann.

My big concern is that the world is full of dumbasses. A dumbass cop will try to force some stubborn dumbass to move. The stubborn dumbass will sit there with the beam in his eye until the damage is permanent while the dumbass cop will keeps on pointing the beam. I believe that the technical term for this phenomenon is dumbass positive feedback.

The parent is technically wrong. The parent doesn't understand Gaussian beams. If a laser is tightly focused, the far-field divergence is large. The larger the focus, the less the divergence. A visible beam collimated to 5 cm diameter or so will stay collimated for over a kilometer.

That's the roadmap summary. Here's the detailed roadmap:

1. Adopt a plan.
2. Make the plan more ambitious at the insistence of the President and Congress.
3. Receive 30% of the required funding from congress, 25% of which is non mission-critical pork.
4. Overrun lowball funding by a factor of 3.
5. Congress cuts off funding before real accomplishments can be met.
6. Repeat

So they stole the plans from PG&E?

It has nothing to do with climate change. Satellites in Earth orbit that study climate change can get plenty of power from solar panels and will eventually de-orbit. Nobody wants to release Pu when these satellites de-orbit. The Pu is reserved for missions to the outer planets where there is not enough sunlight to power the spacecraft.

The summary clearly states that the power is generated by theoretical shoe inserts. Therefore one only need to walk in theory to generate power.

I agree with your premise that China would hurt itself as much as it hurts us if they try to screw with their T-bond holdings. A default would be extreme. If the Chinese wanted to "teach us a lesson" they could dump a bunch of treasuries on the market. This would cause bond prices to go down, interest rates to go up, and if they dumped enough bonds, the dollar would also drop. In order for them to really make a painful impact, they would need to sell a lot of bonds into a market that's already depressed by previous sales, causing them to loose a lot of money. Furthermore, they wouldn't benefit from the higher interest rates since they wouldn't be holding near as many T-bonds. Finally, their economy is driven by cheap exports. If the dollar tanks, their economy goes down the tubes.

The only scenario where we come close to a default is armed conflict. In that case, we would probably pay interest into an escrow account in order to provide leverage for eventual peace negotiations and secure our credit rating.

The link in previous post doesn't have a lot of specifics, but I suspect that the UK debt is largely held by individual investors and banks. Also, whatever the UK has for a central bank probably needs to sit on some large and liquid dollar investments in order to help regulate the monetary supply and keep the currency stable.

At first I thought that the OP wanted to continue exponential growth by moving people into space. However, there's no place in the solar system that can sustain human life with anywhere near the efficiency of Earth. The resources in terms of energy to move a large portion of the population into space would be enormous, and I don't see how this endeavor could possibly be self-sustaining. It seems that the space option would only aggravate the problem. Then I though that perhaps the OP is suggesting a kind of Logan's Run type approach--we could use space as a means of disposing of excess population. However, there are other solutions for the Logan's Run strategy with far greater energy efficiency and without the problem of generating copious space junk in LEO.

The next time I get a cold, I can replace all my lost phlegm with no fear of the dreaded phlegm rejection syndrome.

That's more-or-less how I see it. On the security side, no matter how good the encryption and overall infrastructure, you always need to worry about the dumbass in the middle attack, i.e., social networking. In the case or organized crime, they are vulnerable to the same tactics that are used to dismantle "brick and mortar" crime organizations. Do some good detective work, catch someone in the organization who knows enough and is ready to rat everyone else out for some leniency, and you can take the botnet down along with the bad guys.