The terrorists will take it that way, yes.

Sony should release, even in a limited way. Online would be great.

All they've done is taught attackers that they can force our media around.

Really disappointed in everyone involved here. Especially the cinemas. At least Sony *was* going to follow through.

It's a body of methane, not water, and it is chemically much more closely related to oil than water. So it arguably makes more sense to compare it to the amount of oil on earth than to the amount of water.

One important point that others above have alluded to but haven't outright stated:

While the exponential scaling of rocket equation is an important limiting issue when building larger and larger rockets, for any given rocket (or rocket configuration) the payload capacity is fixed. If you have a payload that is too large for a Falcon 1Pegasus, but doesn't need the full capacity of a Falcon 9, all that extra capacity goes to waste. It costs essentially the same amount to launch a Falcon 9 at 60% capacity as it does to launch it at 90% capacity. You can share payload with multiple customers, but that limits which orbits they can use.

Space X can calculate how much weight the recovery system and fuel requires and how much money they can save by reusing the first stage, and give a discount to customers who give up that additional payload capacity. If there is a market for those lower cost launches, then great. If not, then keep treating the 1st stage as disposable.

Running a business like this takes a lot of work, and for it to succeed well enough to actually get working rockets off the ground you need to attract top-notch engineers who believe that working for you isn't just a waste of their time (more than a billionaire's plaything), and management that can create the right environment for them to succeed without blowing through your money for nothing. It is much less expensive, less risky and less time consuming to just pay Russia for a thrill ride than to create your own rocket company. So I can understand why most would choose to go that route, and leave the latter for those who genuinely want to shake up the market.

That said, the total payload mass that the ship could support is roughly the same whether it is inside the airship or outside in a gondola, and the more space you want to make available for use, the more mass you would have to dedicate to structure rather than payload. So it would be less cramped than a tiny capsule, but you would still need large expanses of mostly empty space to provide the needed buoyancy.

In practice, it might be better to have a balloon filled with a less dense gas to decrease the total volume needed to support the desired payload, and then have an attached air-filled "gondola" that is nearly as large as the balloon.

This is not Third Industrial Revolution, this is still First Industrial Revolution: mechanize the production.

Not so long ago we had a discussion about the Third Industrial Revolution, and how it differs from the other two. And there, exactly the same issue was raised. Both industrial revolutions before were able to increase the productivity of the single worker. The first one, with the mechanic loom and the steam engine, increased the output of the factories and the farms, setting people free to do more sophisticated work that was already present, but not enough skilled people were there to take all the research, engineering and construction jobs, that were open before or opening because the First Industrial Revolution needed them. The Second Industrial Revolution, with trains, motor powered ships, cars and airplanes allowed to increase the amount of goods transferred and lowered the prices for trade, because now transportation after production was cheap too, and we got globalization and international division of labor. Ever larger plants could now produce more products which then could be delivered everywhere, resources could now be shipped from everywhere, still increasing productivity and setting people free who were until then occupied with necessary, but rather unproductive jobs.

But with the information revolution, the Third Industrial Revolution, the productivity increase didn't happen, or where it happened, it was only gradual. You can't mine iron much faster with more information at hand, crop yields don't increase with more information at hand. Travel times aren't reduced since several decades, and where they are indeed reduced, it's far away from what happened in the 19th and early 20th century. From a productivity point of view, the information revolution is a disappointment. Jobs get slashed, but there is no increase in the creation of actual wealth or value.

It does reduce travel. If it takes too long every day to get to work, people will look either for work more close to home, or they will look for a home more close to work, or they will look for a new workplace with affordable housing nearby.

It's easy to know and actually reported in the weather news. They give you the rainfall in inches per square foot (or in liters per square meter), and if you know the area affected by rain, you can calculate the volume of the rain.

thus the invention/"work around" of Translit and Volapuk encoding.

"Culture" is just a big cover we put over very different things. A physician and a physicist will have a big problem to read each other's scientific papers -- mostly they won't even know what the paper is about. And imagine someone from Switzerland and from Brasil try to talk to each other about their favorite outdoor activity during January, even if they find a language they both are fluent in!

Language is much more than just a communications protocol. Language has connotations, language is malleable by its speakers, language contains concepts of the world, language is even a tool to make a difference between insiders and outsiders. We will never be able to speak one common language. No physicist will ever be able to learn about all the terms a physician needs in his daily work, and most Brazilians will never learn anything about skiing in a certain valley of the Alps. Every generation comes up with new words for old facts just because the parents should not understand everything their children are talking about.

Each language has a big body of texts encoded in this language, which are unique to this language, and most of it was never translated into any other language (you don't believe it? How much of french TV programming was ever translated into English for instance?). The idea that most of the world's knowledge is available in English is completely misguided. It's just most of the knowledge you have that is available in English. But you are no benchmark of what knowledge is. If we switch to only one single language for everyone, all the text in all the other languages will be lost forever. How minuscule the english knowledge about non-english events is, can be easily demonstrated by asking you, how much you know about the events of the Summer of 1989 in Hungary. Nevertheless this is very important for the understanding of today's world, because the talks between Hungary's minister of Foreign Affairs Gyula Horn and his Austrian counterpart Alois Mock during the Pan-European Picnic lead to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain. There are hundreds of news paper articles and reports available in Hungarian and German, in Czech and in Romanian, there are scientific papers about the events in those languages, but how much are available in English? In the U.S. there is still the opinion prevalent that Ronald Reagan's speech at the Berlin Wall in 1988 had something to do with it. (Fun fact: It hasn't.)

The conditions species live in aren't constant. Advantages of A and/or B fluctuate over time. If an animal has A, and the environment suddenly favors B, those closer to B win. For a while some animals will have both.

However, every feature comes at an energy cost, so animals quickly let what they don't need atrophy. If in the current environment B beats out A+B minus extra energy to generate both, then they will settle at B only.

At any rate, every organism is a mixture of thousands of features, from A0 to Z99999, many of which get added and deleted all the time, so your whole argument is bogus to begin with.

Look at today's flying squirrels. It's not hard to figure out how you get from walking mammals to this species, nor from flying squirrels to fully winged creatures. Why would it be any harder for insects to follow the same path?

Making traffic flow better will bring more traffic, even if you use false analogies. Every trip has an associated cost, and if you lower the cost for each trip by better flowing traffic, more trips will become affordable, and yes, making traffic flow better will generate more traffic that was non-existant before because of being too expensive.