Well, silicon is quite abundant on earth, about 15% of it, and more importantly almost 30% of the crust (still second to oxygen, by the way), but it's not even close to being "the most abundant in the universe". As irrelevant as it is to chip manufacturing, almost all baryonic matter in the universe is hydrogen and helium. Silicon is not even close...

Well, if this id going to be a discussion of rights, please tell me how wealth (as opposed to immediate property, wealth - your stocks not your house) is a right and not a privilege given by the society. You aren't Ayn Rand, and I doubt you'll manage to make a more cogent argument than she ever could... You see, the limitations on those privileges make a lot of sense once you understand this...

If people wanted to vote through the group, there is something that will stop it, however. I'm not an American, so I might be wrong regarding your laws, but you can't give your vote to the corporation and send it to vote for everyone. This right is not transferable. It would make sense that other rights, such as free speech, are also not transferable. If this was the case, you could do whatever you want, publish books and movies and so on, but corporations will not. I see no problem with this.

seeing the big bang is easy, it's called cosmic radiation.

This question is not well phrased. There is no universal "now" in relativity. You probably mean something like "in our reference frame does this galaxy exist somewhere now", and then the answer is that we can't tell. If you'll choose some other reference frame, you'll get different points to correspond to our "now". So abandon the notion of "still exist", it exists "now" in the most meaningful way, the point we see when we look there...

Desalination costs are about 0.5$ per cubic meter (0.0019$ per gallon) with modern technology (price should drop with scale, this is estimated current costs in Israel and Singapore). It should definitely be lower than transportation costs for this distance, but maybe they wish to make money with high priced bottled water? If someone RTFA maybe he can answer this...

If this is a legal requirement, than you're not in a war. The US congress declared war for the last time (so far) in June 5, 1942 and this is what it takes for you to be formally in a war. So the president probably can't use anything that can be done only in times of war.

This is science, you never know for sure. In science you never have a complete answer, just a series of partial, half wrong answers. Hopefully you get better answers over time, but you never know the exact, complete answer. In this case we have a complicated system, one we have very little success in predicting its behavior. And they didn't say there will be no earthquake, just that the minor ones don't imply an imminent major one. I see no problem with this claim (as long as it is reasonable by modern seismology).

"It's hard to make predictions - especially about the future." --Robert Storm Petersen

Do you know how big BP is? Its assets are worth 236B$ (according to wikipedia, as of 2009). This is going to be expensive, possibly in the billions of dollars, but I doubt they will have to sell anything, they had net income of 16.5B$ in 2009. As for the rest, I would say that legal action should be taken only after investigation, which is underway, and according to the actual evidence. The liability caps were not issued by the president (any president, by the way) but by the congress, and republicans there are currently blocking the attempt to remove them (claiming they should be increased, but not completely removed).

You did, so it makes sense.

Why would you want to duplicates their natural environment? This natural environment includes predators, scarcity of food, various diseases and injuries, etc. I certainly wouldn't like to live in anything like my "natural environment".

By the way, in the case of dairy farms (which have nothing to do with steaks, of course) good farmers must create a comfortable environment for the cows, stress greatly reduce both the quantity and quality (fat/protein levels, for start) of the milk.

That's obviously wrong, if this was the goal there was no connection between the time of death and expiration of copyright. There are probably two reasons:
1) copyright is conceived as actual property, so it should be inheritable.
2) some (possibly many, I don't want to make any statistical claim) artists create till they're dead, with some works even published after the author's death. It doesn't fit the general approach that those creations would not have any copyright protection.

This is the general justification, I believe, but it still makes more sense with a fixed period...

I admit one mistake, then, it's not _your_ straw man. You see, this article was written by reporters for the general public. Both of these groups are not known for grasp of technical matters, scientific ones or even numbers. If you'd apply your thinking to actual data, such as papers published by scientists (for example, this and this) you'll see the actual number is about 30kg of water per second per ship, and the proposed method is to use wind powered robotic vessels. The second article, by the way, is very informative.

Your arrogance doesn't improve your arguments, as you still attack your straw man. I have no idea where you came up with this "10 tons per ship per second" number, as it doesn't appear anywhere I could find and doesn't match the idea of the operation. The point is not to increase (not significantly) the amount of water in the air, just the distribution of droplets size.

You were modded troll and flamebait (probably) because of your assumption that this is clearly impossible without going into the details, as you still do. If you'll pose your doubts as doubts, giving some respects to the experts that suggested this solution, you'll be modded interesting instead...

I'm not going to continue this argument, as I lack the expertise in this area, but I see no reason to accept your expertise over this of, say Stephen Salter.

You can rant as much as you like, but this is a known approach (I won't say established, since nothing is established in geoengineering). I'm not going to argue about it, I'm only a mathematician, not an expert to anything but figments of the imagination, but I would recommend reading more about Cloud reflectivity enhancement before dismissing the idea.