Well, without actually reading the article itself I'll venture an opinion of course. If you carried the fuel and lasers yourself it wouldn't be like the sailor blowing on his own sail at all; it's be like the sailor facing the stern and blowing his ship forward. That's because the ship would still be powered by the rearward expulsion of electrons.

The advantage of the system with an external laser is (I presume) that even though it is no doubt very energy inefficient, since all you're expelling is electrons the specific impulse would be quite high. This allows you to apply small amount of thrust, but continuously for a long time without the bulk of your payload being fuel. If you are going to carry the fuel needed to power the thrusters you might as well go with compact ion thrusters.

but the uber nerds are a small % of the people that go to movies. For instance I objected to Gravity being called SciFi because it was no more SciFi the the Poseidon Adventure was. Space stations and orbital space stations are real.

huhhh?
Star Wars is pure fantasy.
Sorry but the majority of people think sci-fi = shiny space ships and fantasy = elves and knights.

Actually I loved Tomarrowland. The extreme left hate it and says it is full of Ayn Rand references and the extreme right says it supports the global climate change hoax that alone makes it worth watching for me. Anything that drives those two groups into a tizzy must be good.
Actually it is a fun movie that is beautiful to look at and the story is pure fantasy. Of course it is hated by a lot of people because it actually attacks the current love of dark depressing "gritty" movies and frankly culture. It was also an ode to Walt Disney's dream of what EPCOT was supposed to be, his gift to mankind and not what it because a place to eat.

This is a rather silly argument. Money out is money out, whether it's paid in taxes or in salaries, or in capital expenditures. Companies are always going to seek to minimize their expenses to the degree possible, and the fact that increasing an employee's salary by $1 comes at a marginal cost of only 80 cents doesn't make the company any more anxious to spend that 80 cents, and more than it makes the company want to spend more on raw materials, or real estate, or property taxes, or paper clips.

There's no reason to expect wages to decline without corporate taxes. Most likely the new equilibrium point will be that wages will be slightly higher in the exact amount needed to cover the additional taxes paid by the employees.

But now the employee will know the tax they're paying.

You have that exactly backwards. Taxes are all ultimately paid by people, because only people actually produce or consume.

Wouldn't work. Any money you take out of the corporation to live on, or any money the corporation spends on you (housing, vehicle, food, etc.) is personal income, and would be taxed as such. About the only thing you could achieve this way is to defer taxes on savings. But they'd still get taxed eventually.

Similarly, there was no point in Galileo and Newton studying the way stuff falls because everyone has been watching stuff fall forever.

You don't seem to get science. Finding a way to systematically study a subject in a controlled environment is the first step to dramatically increasing knowledge in that subject, at a pace that non-systematic, anecdotal experience -- however broad and deep -- cannot touch. In the case of the psychology of crime this has been problematic for the reasons mentioned in the study. The discovery here is that simulation may offer mechanisms that enable previously impossible areas of study, not the lessons about how burglars search homes. It's no surprise that the findings of the initial tests didn't contradict law enforcement experience... in fact if they had contradicted that experience it would have been a bad thing, since odds are that the new methodology would have been at fault, not the old experience.

If they can manage to establish a solid research methodology, though, and outline clearly its strengths and weaknesses, then they can start using it to systematically explore the subject. Odds are that many initial findings will merely corroborate anecdotal evidence. That's fine, and contrary to common non-scientific wisdom, it does not mean that such confirmatory studies are a waste of time and money. It's worth effort to establish that what you believe to be true really is (or, more precisely, to increase your confidence that it really is; absolute "truth" isn't reachable). But it's also a near certainty that, given a good experimental methodology, researchers will quickly be able to learn things that traditional wisdom does not know.

But none of that can happen if the subject can't be effectively studied and, particularly in psychology, it's often the case that the real breakthrough is in devising a way to test and measure. After that, the rest is just grunt work.

Will this method really enable significantly better research into the psychology of crime? I don't know. But it seems promising, and noteworthy.

I like this as well, and for another reason that you didn't mention. I think government should be accountable to its people, including in the money it takes and spends on their behalf. This implies a need for transparency in taxation: People should know what taxes they're paying. The problem with corporate taxes is that although they are inevitably paid by the people -- in the form of higher prices to consumers, lower wages to employees and reduced return for investors -- washing them through the corporations effectively hides the taxes from the taxpayers. There's also a good argument (which I won't detail here) that corporate taxes are rather regressive, falling most heavily on the lower and lower middle classes.

Far and equitable taxation requires being open to taxpayers about what they're paying. Corporate taxes fail that test.

A truly brilliant riposte. The wit astounds!

I'm all for that "fancy cat" invention. Bring it on.

Or just delete them when you don't want them kept any more.

Meh.

Google shut down a raft of lightly-used and virtually unused services when Larry Page took over as CEO. Google has never shut down a widely-used service (no, Reader wasn't widely-used), and also has a habit of providing plenty of notice and options for getting your data out of every service, especially those that are being shut down.

So what's the worst case? You get a nice service for a few years and then have to download your photos and move them elsewhere. On the other hand, if this really does end up doing to on-line photo storage and sharing what Gmail did for e-mail, it will go the way of Gmail -- become a core product that is not ever going away.