Neal Stephenson and Keith Hjelmstad who is at Arizona State University have looked into this. The thought is to build a structure that reaches the stratosphere and then launch rockets from the top.

The Tall Tower

I have no idea if this is easier or harder then a fulls space elevator. I would guess not as hard. Sadly, the web site has little activity since I firsrt saw it. Still, it's interesting in the context of a space elevator.

First, I must thank you for letting me know that a Socialist had been elected to a public office in Seattle, I'll tell my Socialist friends about it and they will be very happy.

So on to your assertion that "The situation was made worse recently when we elected a socialist that is very anti-Internet.". I asked Mr. Google about it, and I could find nothing about the internet policy position of Kshama Sawant, the politician in question. It seems absurd that Socialist policy would be anti-Internet. I could see the Socialists position being to make internet access a free public utility, but that is not the same as being anti-Internet.

So if you have any "facts" you can refer to, as opposed to unsupported statements, let me know. Otherwise I'll assume that you are engaged in a typical Republican/Right Wing paranoid rant rooted in your irrational hatred of anyone with beliefs that you don't like.

You will be talking to a Federal Law Enforcement agent very soon

From the FIRST PAGE of the web site under Networking.

BSD compatible socket layer.

Networking utilities (DHCP server and client, SMTP client, TELNET client, FTP server and client, TFTP client, HTTP server and client). Inheritable TELNET sessions (as “controlling terminal”).

NFS Client. Client side support for a Network File System (NFS, version 3, UDP).

A NuttX port of Jeff Poskanzer's THTTPD HTTP server integrated with NXFLAT to provide embedded CGI. UDP Network Discvory, XML RPC Server.

You should stop posting stupid stuff and just hang around and lurk until you grow up.

Just ignore the pork and campaign contributions. It's DEFENSE, so we need it.

You are so wrong. The way that corporations use the patent system is a "scam". They extort money from each other as well as suppress innovation. Just look at the patent war between Apple and Samsung. It has nothing to do with capitalism. There is no public benefit in this vast world wide litigation. They fight to become the dominant monopoly so they can maximize profit without government oversight or competition. Then they make as much as they want.

Want another example? HDMI cables. All the HD patent holders are in a consortium and they all get a cut from the licensing fee for the cable. This is a tax, enforced by the legal system and collected by the patent holders. The cost of the cable has a floor, which is pure profit. If there was competition, the cable price would drop to a market derived value. The price of a cable is set by a monopoly, no actual capitalism is involved.

“I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.”

In case you haven't noticed, you are not sitting around at night in a house illuminated by candles, kerosine, whale oil or burning gas. This is because inventing new useful technology is hard, and takes many trials over a extended period of time.

There are at least two startups with new technology battery systems installing units in the next year or so: Ambri and Aquion .

Anyone with $0.05 shouldn't give it to you because it would be a waste of resources. They should invest it in one of these companies (or competitors) and take a chance on making money and making the future more sustainable.

Second, while Knights Landing can act as a bootable CPU, many applications will demand greater single threaded performance due to Amdahl’s Law. For these workloads, the optimal configuration is a Knights Landing (which provides high throughput) coupled to a mainstream Xeon server (which provides single threaded performance). In this scenario, latency is critical for communicating results between the Xeon and Knights Landing.

So there will be a useful mainstream CPU closely coupled with a bunch of vector oriented processors that will be hard to use effectively. (Also from TFA).

The rumors also state that the KNL core will replace each of the floating point pipelines in Silvermont with a full blown 512-bit AVX3 vector unit, doubling the FLOPs/clock to 32.

So unless there is a very high compute to memory access ratio this monster will spend most of it's time waiting for memory and converting electrical energy to heat. Plus writing software that uses 72 cores is such a walk in the park...

If you want to argue about the safety of oil transport then I'll have that argument. I'd then demonstrate the statistical safety, low cost, and minimal carbon output of nuclear power.

Nuclear power has an intrinsic government subsidy that you (and all nuclear advocates) ignore: disaster insurance

Insurance available to the operators of nuclear power plants varies by nation. The worst case nuclear accident costs are so large that it would be difficult for the private insurance industry to carry the size of the risk, and the premium cost of full insurance would make nuclear energy uneconomic.

The next paragraph says the same about installations like dams, but you made a blanket statement about nuclear power, and I'm addressing that topic.

For a real world example, what is the cost of the Fukushima disaster? I suspect that this question literally has no answer, since there are so many unknowns in dealing with the aftermath. One figure is $58 billion. I suspect this is wildly optimistic, since every evaluation to come out of official channels in Japan has been that way since the earthquake hit. Other values are $100 billion and $250 billion. Some of this variation may be due to what is considered a direct cost vs. what is being ignored.

To give some perspective of how things are being managed, consider this recent report on labor used for the cleanup

In January, October and November, Japanese gangsters were arrested on charges of infiltrating construction giant Obayashi Corp's network of decontamination subcontractors and illegally sending workers to the government-funded project.

In the October case, homeless men were rounded up at Sendai's train station by Sasa, then put to work clearing radioactive soil and debris in Fukushima City for less than minimum wage, according to police and accounts of those involved. The men reported up through a chain of three other companies to Obayashi, Japan's second-largest construction company.

Do you expect that homeless exploited workers who suffer from exposure to radiation and other environmental toxins will be accurately accounted for in the cost of the cleanup? Does this give you any confidence that the cleanup process itself is going to be done correctly, even with a multibillion dollar price tag?

And remember, the disaster isn't over yet. Of the four units that had explosions, two of them have not had a survey of reactor damage because no technology exists that can stand up to the radiation. They could be going through a process that could release more radiation and the only way we would find is is when it happens. Speaking of which: steam of unknown origin is coming out of Unit 3.

Fresh plumes of most probably radioactive steam have been detected rising from the reactor 3 building at the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant, said the facility’s operator company.

The steam has been detected by surveillance cameras and appeared to be coming from the fifth floor of the mostly-destroyed building housing crippled reactor 3, according to Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO), the plant’s operator.

This started on Dec 24, i.e. last week, and is continuing intermittently. It could be rain water contacting surfaces heated by radioactive decay, or an early warning of the damaged core or fuel pool becoming critical. The scary thing is nobody knows. They can't even say how radioactive the steam is. So like I said, the disaster is not finished.

And I won't even mention what could happen if another major earthquake hits and the fuel storage pools loose their water and there are additional meltdowns. (Note the plural: four spent fuel pools are vulnerable and they have already sustained an unknown amount of damage).

Happy new year...

Boeing lost a $4.5 billion fighter aircraft contract to Saab in Brazil because of the revelations about spying. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-12-19/nsa-spying-blowback-continues-boeing-loses-brazil-jet-order

Cisco has also seen major losses, and lots of other companies big and small are hurting as well.

The US Constitution may have been put in the shredder, the courts may be rubber stamps for the US version of the STASI, and the Congress may be brain dead along with the DOJ, but now it turns out that all this useless spying has hurt the bottom line of Big Corporate American. You screw these people over, and your government funding is going to be severely impacted.

The NSA and the other alphabet soup spying agencies have hurt the only group in the US with the clout to shut them down. The are going to be backing off big time.

On the individual level, government intelligence insiders are going to discover that they will have a much harder time finding those cushy high paying civilian jobs that they expect to be handed when they leave the government. That's what happens when you bite the hand that feeds you. This could have the biggest impact of all, because the revolving door is a major motivation for the entire system in the first place.

1. Meyer's is doomed. It's imploding and will fail.

2. They should have never tried to do have a post Christmas online sale in the first place. It was always going to fail.

3. The website failure is 100% conclusive evidence that post Christmas online sales are wrong.

4. The people who came up with the idea are evil and want to destroy their customers, but the website failure saved people from ruin. Now they need to heed the warning and make sure that Meyers fails to protect themselves in the future.

5. Even thought other commercial websites are working (just like some state run healthcare sites) all post Christmas web sites are just as intrinsically evil and bad for users and they should all be dismantled before they ruin everything.

All these, and all the other criticisms of Healthcare.gov, all sound really crazy when applied to this similar situation, don't they? This might be a clue that this kind of hysterical reaction is equally foolish when applied to the Healthcare.gov rollout problems.

Note how much hysterical reaction this receives and you can see the full process unfolds in miniature.

The percentage depletion allowance: This lets oil companies deduct about 15% of the money generated from a well from its taxes. Eliminating it would save about $1 billion a year.

The deduction essentially lets oil companies treat oil in the ground as capital equipment. For any industry, the value of that equipment can be written down each year.

But critics say oil in the ground is not capital equipment, but a national resource that the oil companies are simply using for their own profit.

The foreign tax credit: This provision gives companies a credit for any taxes they pay to other countries. Altering this tax credit would save about $850 million a year.

Foreign governments can collect money from oil companies through royalties -- fees for depleting their national resources -- and income taxes.

A royalty would be deducted as a cost of doing business, and would likely shave about 30% off a company's tax bill. Categorized as income tax, it is 100% deductible.

Foreign governments long ago grew wise to the U.S. tax code. To reduce costs for everyone involved and attract business, they agreed to call some royalties income taxes, allowing oil companies to take the 100% deduction on a bigger slice of their bill.

Intangible drilling costs: This lets the industry write off about $780 million a year for things like wages, fuel, repairs and hauling costs.

All industries get to write off the costs of doing business, but they must take it over the life of an investment. The oil industry gets to take the drilling credit in the first year.

Here's the practical outcome of these policies: http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/green/news/2013/12/20/81497/baucus-tax-reform-cuts-46-billion-in-oil-breaks/

The oil industry has prospered over the past decade, thanks to high oil and gasoline prices. The five largest companies—BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Shell—earned more than $1 trillion. In the first nine months of 2013, these five companies earned a combined $71 billion in profits. Certainly, these companies and other large oil companies will prosper without $40 billion in special tax breaks over the next decade.

The tax subsidies for renewable energy are dwarfed by the tax subsidies for oil and gas. The oil and gas production industry is hugely profitable. When an industry has the top five companies making a trillion dollars profit over ten years why do they need any tax breaks that other businesses don't get?

The real rich bastards are the oil company executives. You know how they spend that vast profit? Stock buybacks. About 25% of big oil company profit is going into stock buy back programs, which is more then they spend on exploration and acquisitions. Because of way that executive compensation is structured with stock options and deferred payouts, this ends up being a huge multiplier payout multiplier for the executives. They get their stock at a ridiculous discount, pump up the value and realize vast personal wealth.

All the investors are happy because they see their valuation go up as well so they don't complain. It's short term gain over long term profit. According to this 2007 Bloomberg article, the big oil companies are effectively liquidating themselves over the longer term.

If Chevron Corp. keeps buying back its stock at the current rate, the company will have liquidated all its shares by about 2023.

Chevron, the second-largest U.S. oil company after Exxon Mobil Corp., last week announced a plan to repurchase as much as $15 billion of its stock over three years. At today's prices, the buyback would retire about 7.5 percent of Chevron's outstanding shares. You can do the arithmetic from there.

...

In most cases, stock buybacks are suspect. Managements should ignore investors' call to repurchase their shares and invest money in ways that will increase profit, not just earnings per share. Still, if the oil industry is going to liquidate in this century, buybacks might be a reasonable way to begin.

That's not some left wing political source, it'sfreaking Bloomberg

So if the oil insiders are starting to cash out, a rational person would want to make sure that other forms of energy are starting to come online, because it takes decades to make these sorts of transitions. You, on the other hand, are sneering about "the greenies" while you cheer on tax breaks for overpaid executives who are perpetuating massive tax avoidance schemes. In short, you're an idiot.