Protons.

Lab made diamonds are cheaper to create than gem grade consumer diamonds. I'm no expert, but I thought that industrial grade diamond (e.g. tiny ones, which this would DEFINITELY USE) was really cheap by virtue of being pretty abundant.

Given that it's a software licensing office, I wouldn't be surprised if a huge amount of income actually does pass through there. What right does the state of Washington have to make claims on revenue outside their jurisdiction?

As someone who has physically visited Microsoft's "Nevada Tax Dodge", I can tell you that they have hundreds of people employed across three office buildings, doing real work. Here's a street view: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=microsoft+licensing,+GP&hl=en&ll=39.466978,-119.777091&spn=0.014196,0.027874&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&hq=microsoft+licensing,+GP&radius=15000&t=m&z=16&layer=c&cbll=39.465765,-119.778911&panoid=SCavTRVJLjF335ijk_l6-w&cbp=12,0,,0,0 The white buildings to the left and right of the frame are wholly occupied by MS while the brown building in the center has one whole floor occupied by MS employees. Declaring that MS has no right to do business in states where taxes are lower is...well, disgusting.

I think you need to do some serious reading from unbiased sources on the logic of dropping the bomb given what was known to the various players at the time of their decision, and the background that led them there. I think anyone who gives it a fair shake will agree that all the alternatives were worse.

I think I fit in with a lot of 20-something /.ers. Being born in the mid-80s, I remember a time before internet access was widely available, but I was also too young to ever get involved in the BBS scene, and my first internet experience was web access via lynx and a library account (although my first home access was ...AOL [briefly] a few years later).

Yeah, they swap them out. People fly up and back on the ones they came on, and leave them parked for the duration of their stay, more or less. It's kinda like calling your parked car an "escape car".

I guess they didn't Czech for edge cases.

This needs more positive moderation. projectrho analyzes the topic exhaustively.

Yes and no. We would need to build a single walled carbon nanotubes that run the whole length of the elevator, but we can currently build them a few centimeters long at most, and we need something like 25,000 Kilometers.

As messed up as Reddit already is, can you imagine what that place would be like if they allowed users to transfer karma from one person to another? No need to make it do anything, just allow it to flow. The site would implode in a week.

You're incorrect. There are plenty of metals and oxygen on the moon. The moon (apparently) lacks carbon, nitrogen, and possibly hydrogen (for water) -- although recent evidence indicates that h2o may in fact be available on the moon.

I don't know where this 'there's nothing useful on the moon' meme came from, but you're not the first person to voice it, and it's rather silly.

Hey, man never figured out how to fly, did he?

It always amazes me what people decide can not be done based on a sample population of one.

I don't think you realize just how many launches it would take to get useful scale solar in orbit. Its just not possible. The ISS took dozens of shuttle and soyuz/proton launches and it has a total capacity on the order of a few hundred kW. For space solar to be worth it, you'd need several hundred Megawatts, and it'd have to be cheap. If you can build panels on the moon and launch them electrically, you might hope to do it and clean up earth's power problem. If you build them on earth, you'd need thousands of launches at least.

A bootstrap type facility used to build progressively bigger sets of machine tools using in situ materials would certainly take more total launches than Apollo did. However, the total launched mass in machine tools to the moon would be far smaller than sending all of those solar panels up directly. Now, I'm not saying it is the only solution to our power problem, but it is a mighty attractive option and is certainly a way that a bootstrapped moon colony could be justified.

Additionally, of course, once you have people there, you could start to do other stuff that would be expensive to launch from earth. The science projects that you could do on the moon are frequently discussed, and if you had manufacturing capacity for satellites on the moon, along with a staging point for most of your equipment, a trip to mars would become much more feasible. Yeah, it would be easier to go directly to mars -- if that's all you wanted to do -- another flags and footprints mission. But if you want a supply train that leads to a multiplanet trading economy, a moon colony is a cornerstone.

Readily accessible bulk material already in orbit, along with tools to shape it into things we need would be a game changer. It would open up the whole solar system. Sure, getting off the planet would still be hard -- and it would do nothing for population pressures here on earth, but it would bring some of the more valuable assets of deep space into reach.