"Therefore, I contend that the most effective kinetic space weapons would be either flak shells or actively thrusting, guided missiles."

Right...because flak shells which emit hundreds or thousands of tiny projectiles are a great idea in orbit. Some will probably reach escape velocity, some will impact the orbited body, but a many will likely remain in orbit. I don't think it's in the aggressor's interest to generate a load of space junk.

"If launched from the ground, armor must be minimized to reduce the launch weight of the spacecraft. But if built and launched in space, it would make sense to plate over vital systems of the vehicle"

Until we have active mines on asteroids or the moon, space-based construction doesn't buy anything. If you still have to haul the raw materials out of Earth's gravity well, then you still have to pay the launch costs, sorry.

Technically speaking VASIMR, like ion propulsion, is electrically powered. For it to be constant thrust it would need to have that electricity generated by a nuclear reactor. Since solar power decreases as an inverse square law, a solar powered VASIMR would not be constant thrust.

Having each launch vehicle ferry tons of fuel would require the means to prevent it from boiling off on orbit, or using a more storable fuel and taking the hit in performance (lower Isp). There are technologies that look promising (Methane for one) but thats a ways off and we're not investing much in it at the moment. Plus you'd have to have the cost of launches come down a LOT to make dozens of rockets cheaper than one or two expensive ones. Much of the launch cost is not just the hardware but all of the logistics involved in setting the thing off. That overhead is not going to be trivial for an architecture requiring dozens of launches.

By all means, I'm cheering for SpaceX to have great success, but them doing so doesn't accelerate the timetable for manned Mars missions, IMHO.

I've been preaching the same exact path. Python + numpy + scipy + matplotlib is pretty damn powerful. It would be preferable if matplotlib included 3D visualization, but Mayavi is very good.

My group used to rely heavily on Excel and VBA. When Microsoft dropped VBA support on the OS X version of Office, we were left in a lurch. I'm hesitant to develop a similar dependency on MATLAB.

C and Fortran for anything requiring speed, Python for everything else.

Cyclist should never ride on the sidewalk. They are vehicles. Its more dangerous to ride on a sidwalk and proceed through a walk signal, getting clipped by a car turning right, than it is to ride as a vehicle on th road.

The law in Ohio was just recently revamped to make "share the road" the standard throughout the state. It wasn't decided when "cars drove at 15-20 mph".

Bicyclist that don't obey the law piss me off, but if they're obeying, you've got no complaint, sorry.

Yes but will I still be charged $100,000 for my engineering degree certification?

I don't dispute that there will still be a certification role, I just don't know if it will be as lucrative as the current system.

If everyone in the world has access to the information then why bother paying for the degree?

As long as I can prove my understanding of the knowledge then why should I pay a particular university to vouch for me?