I was not talking about routers & servers at home - but the Internet backbones and the servers that people will be downloading stuff from and wanting to do so at higher speeds.

We are going to need to upgrade all of our servers and network routers!

I wonder what the latency will be ? (OK: to somewhere close in the UK)

Yeah, but we're already storing it, anyway. I might be nuts but from what I've seen if we were to take 10 or 15 square miles of land - totally insignificant when you look at the size of our country - and decide that it was going to be a nasty radioactive place but that we would work to keep it contained and do whatever we need there - seems like we could do it. But nobody wants that "in their back yard".

When I read about this stuff my only conclusion is that we're wasting a bunch of energy and should be looking at ways to harvest it.

Many banks in Germany have changed this now because many of these card readers had been modified for skimming purposes in the past. So our banks have now upgraded most ATM with antiskimming devices and they either leave the door open or have replaced the card reader with a simple "open doorf" push button.

Also it brings no security (any criminal who wants to enter will be able to present a working card and be it a prepaid credit card just bought at the gas station). I also believe the main reasoning for the requirement of a card to enter the lobby was to keep out homeless people.

You apparently have no left-wing friends on facebook.

This reminds me of a lot of Christian friends who say how great it is that Chick-Fil-A is closed on Sunday and that's so Christian of them and all that. These same people usually point this out while eating in another restaurant on Sunday.

And, yet, some guy named Elon Musk - who never worked at Ford, GM, Honda, the guy's a nobody - is the one who's making all the money in electric cars right now. Why?

Now and then industries that have been around for 100 years get so stuck in doing things the same way and simply scaling it can't get over the hump where you have to say "we can't scale this way of doing it, we have to start from scratch". They also have a huge patent catalog related to their current way of doing things, a huge number of engineers who know this method inside out, etc. There's considerable inertia to overcome, and few companies overcome it.

That's why when things change it's often the newcomers who do it.

Here's another one - Vizio. Ever heard of them 15 years ago? They never made a CRT-based television. The founders came from a monitor manufacturer and decided to start making TVs based on LCD technology. They went straight to Sam's and Costco to sell them. They pretty much own that market now.

Meanwhile, where's Westinghouse? Or RCA? They turned out a ton of tubes back in the day, but they're gone. Nobody wants a freaking X-ray generator in their house now.

Honestly, I think a shakeup like this is long overdue in the elevator business. You say there are so many moving parts to your caterpillar drive - do you have any idea of how many moving parts are in a standard elevator. Your idea cuts the moving parts down to perhaps 1/10th of what there is now. Getting rid of counterweights is a huge deal. You can even keep the counterweight and change the traction to your idea and there are still far fewer moving parts.

Elevators were first made when a tall building was 10 stories. The idea that a radical overhaul in design isn't needed for buildings that are 20 times that tall is laughable.

So, yes, I think you're absolutely wrong. An outsider is almost certainly what is needed to scale elevators up like this.

It is the seventh most abundant chemical element by mass in the universe, but most of what was on earth has evaporated away.

No, austerity didn't bring it. If anything, trying to spend within your limited means will postpone making things worse. Do it long enough and things might even get better.

But borrowing and spending isn't going to make it better, even if they can find someone from whom to borrow.

I don't know how folks like you can live in the real world and parrot these lines over and over again with nothing to show for it. When the left "borrows and spends", the "spending" side all goes to rich business partners. Every single time.

Why do you think that the "recovery" in the US has gone mostly to the top 10%? What do you think about Solyndra? Geeze. Get out of the partisan gutter and join us here in the real world.

It's a toy helicopter. We don't need the FAA to do anything about this - but nannies never let a good "crisis" go to waste...

Okay. How does the fact that water boils at 100C help you when you cook? Let me state this another way. Imagine that the inventor of the Celsius scale arbitrarily decided that the boiling point of water would be 1000C. What would you do differently when cooking?

In case you're scratching your head trying to figure out my awesome brain-bender the answer is "nothing".

Okay. So? All arbitrary numbers. Like 32 and 212.

Great. How does the fact that water boils at 100C help you when you cook?

That's actually what it's like at "Mojave Spaceport". Hangers of small aviation practicioners and their junk. Gary Hudson, Burt Rutan, etc. Old aircraft and parts strewn about. Left-over facilities from Rotary Rocket used by flight schools. A medium-sized facility for Orbital. Some big facilities for BAE, etc. An aircraft graveyard next door.