Lifting a ton of material from the Moon to LEO requires a lot less thrust than lifting it from Earth. Even better, lifting it to orbiting the Moon requires so much less thrust that you could almost throw it there.

How about a linear accellerator using nothing but electricity to lift materials from the Moon to LEO?

The problem is for the families of the original creators that they evidently structured a deal based on getting paid right now rather than some kind of residuals deal. A residuals deal might have turned out badly - if the movies flopped - and wouldn't have been instant cash either. But, if the studio made $500 million they could have gotten a much bigger chunk.

Studios, and just about everyone else in the businss world, hates risk. Let's say you develop a game and want to sell it to EA and they want to buy it. They (internally and secretly) think they can make $50 million selling it. You want $1 million and know you can't sell it retail and get anything like that. EA could easily come back and offer you $50K up front with them assuming the risk that it might flop as a retail game. Now, if you are pretty confident you don't take that deal and say you want 10% from net profits for five years and nothing up front. If they take it, you get nothing right away and in six months the game starts selling. If you guessed right and EA does make $50 million selling the game you get $5 million in the end - but again, you get nothing up front. If the game flops, well, you were sharing the risk with EA and that's how the ball bounces.

So you can have some guaranteed money or you can have a share in the risk. Sharing the risk gets you more money, sometimes a lot more money.

Based on the history of Superman - some flops, some big money - I'd say the creators negotiated badly and wanted the studio to take all the risk. What they got was a tiny cut but it was probably all up front and no risk at all. They should have had more confidence in their product and what the studio was going to do with it. Of course, they might have ended up with nothing that way - so maybe at that time getting a sure thing seemed the better choice.

Let's see... they are sharing the cost with some neighborhood group but you can bet that Google will receive 100% of the market research data, tracking data and web advertising benefits from this. All the while the people are using this thinking that it is a free service given to them gratis out of the goodness of a multibillion dollar giant.

Right.

Google has found a way to monetize the Internet in interesting ways that either haven't occurred to others yet or aren't available to others because they do not have the market reach. This allows them to give valuable stuff away apparently for free while all the time raking in huge amounts of money. Some disclosure might be nice here - like how much Google will make the first year of doing this. If this information became public it might inspire other companies to do likewise until everyone had their fill of apparently free stuff with huge hidden costs in privacy and tracking. Rolling out a city or two a year isn't going to show people the real downside to this tactic.

You will find that the number of people that will risk spending money without such legal protection is very few. So few that you can imagine an economy without any sort of risk-based investment. I think another word for that is "dark ages" - until the corporation was "invented" there was very little risk investment and very, very little commercial activity. You had the village baker risking pennies on a new pan with hopes of making a couple more loaves of bread, but that was about it.

Employment was pretty limited with most people spending their time in fields farming. A shopkeeper didn't really need much help and that help tended to come from within the family of the shopkeeper.

I suspect we could go back to that, but it would be an interesting change to say the least.

OK, so you are sure it is proven that humans are destroying the climate. Great. So what did you do today to stop it? You do realize that if nothing is done - and it is reversible and solely caused by humans - billions of people will die.

Understand that destroying ONE coal-fired power plant will probably save tens of thousands. So how come nobody has destroyed one such plant yet? What are they waiting for? People to start dying?

Destroying a few cars will make a difference. Destroying a bridge so cars can't be driven into a city will have a bigger effect. When the I35 bridge was down in Minneapolis there was significantly less car commuter traffic as an example. So how about knocking down a bridge in NY City or Chicago?

I see a lot of people that apparently believe that the climate change we are seeing is 100% human-induced and 100% reversible but nobody is doing anything to stop it. I would say this is like watching a bathtub filling up with a baby in it - everyone knows the baby will drown if nobody shuts off the water but everyone sits there watching and not shutting off the water. So what's it going to take?

Personally I do not believe it is either 100% human-induced or 100% reversible. Unfortunately the only way to be absolutely certain of this is to remove all CO2 production from humanity and see what happens. The effects of that would be at least interesting but the suffering and death caused by that would dwarf the effects of any sort of climate change envisioned. However, I keep running into people that think it is the only possible solution and should be implemented.

Come on, haven't you heard of hybrid crops? Something we have been doing for at least a hundred years. It makes the seeds you plant produce crops that don't have viable seeds in exchange for healthier plants and greater yield, which is something every farmer wants.

The reality though is that once you go down the hybrid route, there is no more "saving seeds for next year". It simply doesn't work that way anymore. Where on earth are they not using hybrid wheat and corn plants? I suspect the answer is "nowhere" but there might be some subsistance farmers in Bangledesh that aren't doing it.

I assure you that every farmer in the US growing corn and wheat is using some type of hybrid plant that does not produce viable seeds.

Absolutely. Revolution is hard and dangerous. So stop saying you are for a revolution that will kill millions of people unless you are really, really serious about it. So far, I haven't seen anyone that I would call serious about it in the US.

Some folks came close to being serious in 1968-1970 between the riot in Chicago and Kent State. There were too few people to really accomplish much and the people that were really committed to revolution were just a little too far gone to get anything done other than make a few bombs and generally blow themselves rather than others up.

What an occupy movement could have done is to stage a 1968-style sit-in protest and block business from getting done on Wall Street. Sure, after the first couple of rounds with the police arresting hundreds of people it might have gotten more and more difficult, but this would have forced both government and business to stop what they were doing - business of the day - and focus on protecting infrastructure. Armed guards everywhere, ID checks at every door, security, security and more security. The result would have been a lot of security and not a lot of real work getting done - hence at least a part of their objective achieved. It would take more than 30-40 people to do this - it would have taken hundreds.

Look, supposedly this was a movement by "the 99%" against 1% of the country's elite. If that were true there would be no way it couldn't succeed because at some point the guards (part of the 99%, after all) would be joining with the protesters. Once that happened, it would all be over. That's what happened in Russia - the army and police stopped fighting against the protesters and joined with them.

Now, to be real, it is very very unlikely anything like that could happen in the US. People subconciously know which side of the bread is buttered and that their interested lie in the status quo. Some people would actually figure out that an economic collapse like what OWS seemed to be going for would result in millions, hundreds of millions or even billions of people dying. So while it might seem like a good idea for a few moments, it would be quickly shown to be a disaster. So it wouldn't really work. One thing the American Revolution didn't do was try to wrench the social order too much - that is what leads to a lot of people dying. Again, as shown by Russia and a bunch of other places.

An important point is in Russia the elite fled the country. In France today they have decided to tax the rich to support the government - a futile policy that Mr. Obama seems to be leaning towards. Of course, anyone with portable money in France is looking for somewhere to go - check out Google. Stir up things enough in the US and similar things will happen here.

You want a peaceful revolution? First thing right off is don't try to destroy the social order and don't try to collapse the economy that is feeding 300 million people.

No, I am dissatisfied with any group that offers only a pretense of action towards their goals. Sort of like someone selling Girl Scout cookies would be a joke if they only tried to sell them at their neighborhood homeless shelter - no money, no sales and no real effort at sales.

What OWS (and any similar group) should have been able to foresee was that the government would come down on them with both feet hard because their goals are the diametric opposite of what the government in power wants. So of course they are going to be monitored, tracked and observed. If they tried to do anything real it would be a race to see who won - the government in stopping them or their achievement of their objectives.

Sadly, their objectives were so pie-in-the-sky without any real plan for implementation that the government didn't have to do anything at all, just sit back and watch. The news media figured out there was no story there and never would be one sometime about a week after the group emerged.

What I am fine with is a pretense of action being exposed as a pretense. You want to see action? How about Bloody Sunday as an example of action - what Kent State could have turned into, only it didn't.

The time for this has evidently passed. So much could have been accomplished when the movement captured the interest of many people, but they instead decided to do some pretty lame-assed stuff and not accomplish anything.

What these people were preaching was revolution. Toss out the bankers and leaders in the financial world and bring the economy down in a big crash. Rebuild it in a different model, one that works for the common people. That is going to antagonize the current powers to no end and certainly justifies a significant response.

What OWS didn't do was actually "occupy" anything. They sat on the sidewalk with signs as people passed by. The could have stormed the citadels of the finance world and brought business as usual to an end. Sure, they all would have been arrested and some possibly killed. But it would have done something. Instead they put on a big show for the media and did nothing.

Using explosives and guns to actually force an end to the economy as we know it would have resulted in most or all of them being killed, but it would have had a farther reaching effect. We would be picking up the pieces and might actually be figuring out how to make the world work with a lot fewer people - a big economic crash and restructuring would kill millions if not billions. That would have put them on the map in a big way.

There was a time when people like myself thought they might actually be able to pull something like that off. I can only imagine how worried people in power might have been - and you can therefore see the response. They wanted to make sure nothing was going to happen and look, it didn't.

Absolutely. Step 1 is figuring out if the statement "all Americans require fiber-optic Internet access" is true. So far, it isn't by a long shot and the assumption that it is true is one of the big problems.

If Internet access is needed by everyone, then maybe a utility model would work - everyone pays and everyone gets service. However, if it isn't true then moving to that kind of model would impact a huge number of people in very negative ways, especially in the pocketbook.

Another aspect that should be considered is if the Internet is ready for everyone to need it. What would happen if the entire US had unlimited fiber access? Well, my guess is that spam would increase (ha!) and that scammers would get a lot richer. Most of the people that do not have access today wouldn't know what to do with it if they had it and would certainly believe that a Nigerian prince was holding millions of dollars for them, if they only send $125 to him today.

Does this sound like a good idea?

At this point the only way to get guns out of the hands of the people would be to (a) close the borders such that smuggling in guns wasn't really possible and (b) go house to house, farm to farm, apartment to apartment breaking down doors and confiscating guns.

If guns were banned from sale in the US all that would mean is the illegal gun sellers would have a monopoly and their slightly higher prices would be free of competition. Smuggling isn't even thought of as smuggling today - it is just evading CBP (Customs and Border Protection). We have maybe 5% of the manpower that would be needed to effectively monitor today's import traffic, not to mention what would be required to actually block illegal importation of goods.

OK, so let's assume that we have successfully closed the borders and smuggling is limited to small quantites rather than containerloads. Now we have to deal with the guns that are already here. Most of these are in the hands of people that are legal and have registered their purchases. Good luck in getting these people to give up their guns. Except to implement any sort of gun control in the US that would mean anything we have to eliminate these guns - they are just too tempting a target when maybe 1% of the homes have at least one gun somewhere. When it gets down to 0.0001% of the homes then robbing a house to find a gun becomes pointless - unless you have inside information. So we are talking about jackbooted ATF agents breaking down doors to confiscate guns. Sure, that is going to go over well. Maybe we need to think about Ruby Ridge and Waco for some recent top-quality ATF action.

Surely we can have gun control without doing this, right? Well, no. The guns used in the school shooting were legally registered and not stolen or otherwise obtained illegally. The only way to stop one family member from "borrowing" a gun registered to another family member is to get the guns out of the hands of the people. Hence the two steps mentioned above.

It might be possible to pass a law saying possession of a gun was illegal and offering a six month period for people to just turn in their guns. Problem is, a huge number of guns are presently in the hands of people that haven't registered properly and have no intention of doing so. They aren't going to turn in their guns, certainly not without being forced to do so. Just passing a law would result in maybe 30-40% of the guns being turned in and result in zero changes in the death-by-gun rate in the US. The people that would turn their guns in aren't the ones using them to rob liquor stores or kill their spouse with. Ah, you want to do something effective? That would require getting the ATF into the action - and we all know where that would go.

What most people do not know is that if you want a fully automatic machine gun today all you have to do is pay the $3000 tax stamp (for each gun) and pass the required background check. It isn't that hard, but it is expensive to be legal. For maybe $5000 you can purchase a full auto weapon from an illegal dealer and there is no background check or other nasty things. Which is why the people that have paid for the tax stamp are primarily speciality gun dealers and cops.

Is Mr. Obama going to recommend these two steps to the American people? Probably not, if he has a brain in his head. He is likely to propose some ineffective measures that aren't going to do anything at all but will enhance and extend the federal bureaucracy. I don't see him sending the ATF to do battle with the people that aren't going to give up their guns without a fight - probably using those very guns. But that is the only way to do anything effective.

It is necessary to understand that the US is a different place than say, Canada. Many places have even more guns per capita than the US without the high death-by-gun rates. I don't think anyone has come up with exactly why people get shot more in the US than these other places. But it is clear, the US is different.

Let's see, today we have basically two sorts of tablet computers - iPad and Android. The iPad family is pretty closely tethered to iTunes to load content on the device, which clearly favors purchasing content in particular ways. But once you have one your connection with Apple is pretty light.

Conversely, the Android tablet is ad-supported to its core and you have a continuing relationship with Google in the way you are monitored, tracked and have ads shoved at you.

I'm not sure which is worse but I certainly prefer the lighter touch of Apple. I do not like the Google attachment with Android in any way whatsoever.

I find most of the people complaining about contrast on a Kindle do not understand the difference between the displays. To them, the Kindle (every Kindle) is clearly defective because there are no reds, greens, or blues. The lack of color is perceived immediately as a lack of contrast first and foremost. Then they realize the display must be broken because it isn't full-color.

Hence, the Kindle in their eyes is simply defective. This can be clearly shown because these sorts of people will compare a Kindle display to that of a cheap Android tablet and shout "See, this one works!!!"

I don't get along very well with such people. These are also the sort of people that would go to a film festival and fill out a comment card about a B&W art film saying "color missing".

To me, the Kindle is a reading device. I have an iPad 3 and it is primarily an email and video watching device. It is plugged in every day and charges. By the end of the day it is usually less than 50% charged. The Kindle however gets charged maybe a couple times a month and sits with the cell modem turned off all the time, except specifically downloading something new. My Kindle is a 2 International device with just a cell modem and it is at least three years old. A huge problem with the Kindle is the fragility of the display and I am astonished that I have one that is as old as it is - I used to break the display within about six months of all of the previous units.

Where all the expense is in books is the editor, copy editor, translation from whatever the author did it in to the system the publisher uses, and cover art. You don't get away from any of that with an e-book.

Oh, some folks have tried. And you can tell about 10 pages in that the functional role of "editor" was missing. There are very, very few authors that can forgo the editor completely or do a good job of it themselves. All of the major (i.e., money-making) authors I know of treasure the work the editor has done for them.

My book (yes, I am a published author) costs about $0.22 to ship in a box with 20 or so other copies of the book - the way it is shipped to a book store. Printing the book runs about $2 at most as it is a perfect-bound paperback format book. So absolutely they can take $2.50 off the price when it is an e-book. But do not believe for a moment that the other costs go away and trying to make them go away (self-edited, no cover art, etc.) is just a recipe for disaster.

Interesting, especially since the "desired outcome" for Yucca Mountain was always to never implement it. It was a pipe dream that some folks thought up in the 1970s that would have made quite a difference in the handling of nuclear fuel rods. Contrast this with today where there is a multibillion dollar industry in keeping fuel rods safe from politicians and scientists.

We could start recycling fuel rods but with the current thinking (or lack thereof) we are going to be storing these things indefinately - until Yucca Mountain is finally approved, which will be never. Recycling fuel rods results in around 93% reuse of the nuclear materials and elimination of 99% of the high-level waste involved. So the output of the process is new fuel rods and around 1% of the material as high-level waste. Sounds like a really good idea, especially since Fukishima was pretty much caused by fuel rod storage.

But apparently we are still in a waiting mode for Yucca Mountain to be approved.