Drone strikes alone would probably eliminate most of the resistance very quickly, no matter how many small handguns they have,

One should note that if every handgun owner were to target member of the military, as long as the failure rate is not more then 98% or so, the US Military would run out of soldiers before the civilians ran out of handguns.

And this ignores that not every soldier would go along with fighting against American civilians....

It's a lot harder to do that with a spacecraft if you know you need the Oberth effect of your destination to make it home.

It's called an "Earth Return Trajectory".

Basically, it's a two-year long transition orbit to Mars. More deltaV to enter the orbit, quite a bit more to enter Mars orbit at the other end, but if you have a problem along the way, you'll be back to Earth eventually (or your bodies will be, in any case) assuming no action on your part.

I have read TFA.

The assumption for reduced profit due to increased PV usage was 8% for a specific northeastern utility company, 15% for a specific southwestern one.

That "up to 41%" number came from "using certain other assumptions" for the southwestern utility.

In other words, TFS is, at best, misleading as hell.

It IS true, law enforcement agencies will REJECT you for having a high I.Q. They , of course, have in mind, that smart people think for themselves

No, they have in mind that they'll spend a metric buttload of money and time training you, and then you'll get bored and go looking for a more challenging job.

Personally, I think even that rationale is suspect. But what do I know, I'm just a guy who was too bright to ever consider law enforcement as a career....

In fact, this concept of "elite" is changing more and more into what we currently call "politicians".

Once upon a time, we had governments that consisted of the "elite" - nobility, usually, but once we figured out this whole "election" thing, the elite became the guys we elected.

What these various "elites" have had in common throughout history is that they feel themselves to be entitled to tell the rest of us what to do.

And since, in general, they controlled law enforcement and the military (not always distinct entities), if only by the power of the pursestrings and the ability to define law (by, well, passing laws), they were pretty much right.

In the USA, at least, the Constitution was meant to be a limiter on government, so as to fend off the "elite" who wanted to tell us what to do. Alas, we've long since managed to convince ourselves that anything we want has to be Constitutional somehow (which leads us inevitably to "shall not be infringed" being translated as "shall be infringed", and "Congress shall make no laws abridging..." being translated as "Of course Congress can make laws abridging...").

And so, the politicians have once again assumed their historical roles, and "civil servants" have once again become "civil masters".

In other words, things are returning to their historical norms. And will continue to do so absent a revolution or two.

Obama vowed to improve government transparency and protecting whistle blowers.

Obama has also prosecuted more whistleblowers than all other Administrations combined. Last count I saw was seven by Obama, three by all previous Presidents.

Yes, I know that Obama isn't the one issuing the orders to prosecute. But he IS the one who can issue the order to stop prosecuting them....

*sighs* yes, it produces 1600 CUBIC LITERS of it.

To explain (for the slow), liters are cubic decimeters. A cubic liter would be decimeters raised to the 27th power.

Note that we don't actually have twenty-seven spatial dimensions available to produce cubic liters in....

Hmm, TFA also says the collector can produce "1600 cubic liters per day" of H2O.

So I suspect very strongly that the author hasn't a clue what he's talking about as regards this device....

Actually, as soon as the garbage men show up, it's the governemnt's trash. I don't see why they shouldn't be free to do whatever they want with their property.

If it's the government's trash, why are they threatening ME with a fine if THEIR trash has too much food waste in it?

Seems to me that this new rule is heaven-sent for harassing the neighbor you don't like. Not like anyone can tell WHO put the food waste into a particular trash bin....

So, is the 10% limit by weight or volume?

And how are the trash collectors supposed to determine whether it's 9% or 11%?

Oh, and are they going to be opening plastic garbage bags to check the contents? Or are plastic garbage bags already illegal in Seattle?

Tell them that, and they'll point out that they only reason we went was because the Soviet Union was way ahead in the space race for several years and it took many years for us to catch up.

Many years to catch up? Seems to me we managed to pass them in just eight years.

As to "way ahead for several years", if you look at the details, they were about a year ahead for several years. They stopped being ahead considerably before the aforementioned eight years were up.

And what's with the Russians taking 16+ years to do this? It's not like they're doing it from scratch, since they saw how we did it 45 years ago. And it's not like they don't already have large rockets operational....

I don't think those figures demonstrate what you think they demonstrate. They still show that the average American produces twice as much carbon as the average Chinese.

Oddly, that's pretty much what I thought those figures shows.

Alas, OP (who I was responding to) was trying to suggest that the average American produced FOUR times the carbon of the average Chinese....