I have a feeling that the mixing strategies are part of that IP talked about (or rather not talked about).

How do you follow up on "The Motion Picture" without vast improvement?

If you think it's easy to make (on an industrial scale for optical grade large pieces), I've got some real estate and investing advice to sell you, right after I switch out my polycarbonate lenses.

What's wrong with poly(methyl methacrylate)? That at least may be made from dead plants, dinosaurs, and whales - helps them feel more at home!

The only way to do that for me is if Spock was somehow made un-funny.

Yeah - single crystal aluminum oxide (sapphire) is also used on tank windows, missile radar domes, satellite parts, etc... Basically anything actually worth enough to pay for it. Smartphones and tablets may actually drive production of sapphire into "reasonable" price ranges for consumers. Spinnel is too soft to be "scratch proof" - resistant maybe, but proof? No. Lots of other good uses though.

Hey - go light on the ACs here. It's easy to mistake Netflix and network. They both start the same way and it's hard to imagine a media delivery service surviving which doesn't function like the first ;)

Now there's a loaded question. Which cause would you identify as "root"? I can see many causal factors: parental responsibility, cultural priority of education, teacher pay (i.e. competitive with industry/business talent pools), outcome based rewards/penalties, curriculum cost/availability, politicization of academia, fundamental conflict between 9th, 10th, amendments and DOE, etc... or something else?

Sure, but the pipeline has been declined in the past by people in WA for the simple reason that they've already declined to divert water for their own use (The Columbia Basin irrigation project has zones - and there's plenty of farmers who live in zones that aren't guaranteed water that would really like it). The residents of WA have already decided to limit their own consumption for ecological reasons - I don't see them sacrificing their streams, rivers, and ecology just because CA has poorly managed its own resources. If the drought doesn't break and CA doesn't get a handle on it's resources - we're about to see some modern ghost towns.

Encrypt everything! Bummer about the decryption man pages...

You mean like Sindarin or Quenya? Tengwar is aesthetically pleasing and I think it has a Unicode section already reserved for it.

Ever hear of a mutual fund, 401k, 403b, IRA, etc... When an auto-trade algorithm hits an action point - lots of people far removed from the system are affected. The effects can be quite serious when one trader's algorithm triggers another's... etc. There have been some very bad days on the stock market triggered by such events.

1% in a day is more than enough for a pump and dump! I'd love a portfolio which could make me 1% per day. Generally I'm happy with anything above 7% in a year. Good news here is that the increased volume didn't trigger additional artificial pumping by other auto-buyers.

Yeah - they'd have to skate between the government and investors, and I'd bet that's a razor edge. Subsidiaries wouldn't protect someone as they'd have to pay on their "gains" based off of the main corps. "loss". Off shore holdings wouldn't work either since that's still going to be reflected in the corporations market value. The main philosophical problem is taxing what's already been taxed, unless you only tax based on the change in market valuation (also possible, but more volatile).

Absolutely correct. Just like a good pecan pie, nobody lets a pile of money get stale on the counter - it all goes somewhere. Finance is zero sum - everything else if figuring out the optimal way of getting work out of that pie before it's processed and flushed. If you do it wrong you either have a situation where the baker doesn't have enough energy to make more pie or the baker gets fat while everyone else starves - at least until people can't afford pie anymore, then the baker starves too.