Wut? Unless that set period is so short it needs building additional facilities, the price for repeated launches will only go down, never up.

Imagine the time period is the same you need for building a 1 GW power plant using any traditional technology. That will be a few years. Meaning you could do a launch every couple of days and complete a thousand launches in the same period. You could do that from a single launchpad.

The reason why they don't do launches day after day right now is because there is no demand for so many launches, but they certainly could adapt the procedures for that.

For a single launch. Ask them about their discount for a thousand.

In the geostationary orbits there are two periods each year, around March and September, when the satellites are eclipsed by the earth. That's why geostationary satellites need batteries, which are among the heaviest parts of a satellite. And, unfortunately for the power generation idea, these eclipses occur at night for a satellite located above the point it's beaming at.

As for the cost, launching 10,000 tons could be done for something like $50 billion or so. We are talking about a thousand launches, so it would pay to build your own rockets, which would bring the price down.

The exact costs of the launchers today is a closely guarded trade secret, but it's certainly less than the price you pay. Certainly, with a private company with development costs amortized over a thousand units, they could bring the launch costs to a less prohibitive level.

Hint: by the time science discovers more about the mechanism of aging, it won't be a 100 year old body anymore.

All of her white blood cells were being produced by just two stem cells. Imagine if they could replicate stem cells indefinitely, her body would become 20 years old forever, not 100.

I took a philosophy course and an engineering degree. After working 30 years in engineering, I can tell for sure that philosophy is NOT the answer to engineering problems.

If too many people working on IT are under trained, you may blame the education system for failing to provide them with enough training in that field, not for failing to provide them education in totally unrelated fields.

Unfortunately, philosophy is very far from coming with the right argument. I took a philosophy course in college, to "broaden" my outlook, and it had the exact opposite effect. Read any text by a philosopher, and in the end you'll get to the conclusion that perhaps there could be one or two good ideas there, if it had been written in a hundred words instead of a hundred pages. That's why sometimes a philosopher seems so smart to the uninitiated, they have read only the aphorisms and quotations, they have never had to pore through a full book written by a philosopher.

IT is a field for many different specialists. In the most common forms, what is needed is an expertise in human interfaces, we need graphics designers to create the screens and writers to create the documentation. In that sense, yes, it's all about expertise in the humanities. The vast majority of IT work in development is about personal and corporate software, of which data input and presentation is the bulk of the thing.

Logic and mathematics, although it's behind every software, is a very small part of the development job. However, it cannot be totally disregarded, because it's an essential part.

There's the dilemma we face. We cannot just exempt people working in IT from training in the essential parts most of them will never use, because we never know when those skills will be needed.

Those programmers who say "I've never used a differential equation" are people who slept through their calculus courses and cheated at the exams. If you are simulating pitching a ball or you are calculating the profits from an investment fund you are using differential equations, and you should know how to do the job. Unless you work for a big company, you cannot be assured that the only things you'll ever need to do is drawing screens and writing manuals.

I guess the memo had a misspelling. The wheel wells seem to be a good place for terrorists, not for tourists.

If someone can sneak up to the plane and climb in, it should be equally easy to put a bomb there. If a 16-year-old can find a way to squeeze into that space, it wouldn't be too difficult to fit in a couple hundred pounds of explosives.

Interesting that the OP is so deeply concerned with tech companies' lobbying against Keystone XL, but not concerned with the Koch brothers, whose organizations have spent a nine-digit amount of dollars on campaigns and advertisements (often misleading or just plain false) to influence campaigns, with an eye toward issues of interest to the Koch brothers themselves, like getting limits on campaign donations removed and, just to pick a random example, getting the Keystone XL pipeline approved.

You really think that with Saddam it was even remotely possible, under severe sanctions and no WMD, that he could have caused more deaths and cost more than the Iraq war started by W?

Instead of "containment" and no threat really besides the starving of kids in Iraq, we borrowed money from China to make Iran stronger. Do you like how that turned out?

One helluva mistake. But my mind was made up years ago. Its called war mongering by hook and crook, with the ends justifying the means. Scott Ritter may be a pedophile, but read what he said before the war. He was right on the money - there was no WMD and it was obvious to everyone who had been there. So W lied - there is no doubt about that to me.

This article by a USA general in 1935 makes me skeptical of your argument:

http://www.ratical.org/ratvill...

People are judged on their credit reports and criminal history, why should using her past history in government to predict future behavior be any different? In this case that means questionable behavior on private data, as she has shown in the past. if its legal then anything goes and the ends justifies the means. And yes, I don't want to associate with people like that.

She is a very high profile lightning rod - unlike most board of directors - and hiring her shows very poor judgement, rightly or wrongly, on Dropbox's part. I expect they will go the way of MySpace. Therefore I'd be making a poor choice imho on betting on their future.

Have a nice evening!

Um, the war is what we are talking about and it and most people now think it was a mistake. Bush owns that legacy. There would have been no Obama and Affordable health care act without it, so you can thank the Iraq war supporters for that. And it was Bush who signed the law. I'm a libertarian and I was against all that from day one.

And the stock market was lower when he left than when he came in - the only president in history to accomplish that. The crash at the end of his term was do to his "ownership society" and hostile actions to regulation, and that will be his legacy too.

Your knowledge, respectfully, on these matters are on shaky ground.

Google for "Rice approved CIA waterboarding" . In her memoir she states " ''I do not regret the decisions we made. I would never have engaged in - or encouraged the President to undertake - activities that I thought to be illegal.''

Alright then, I guess she was never bothered by mere moral questions, so I hesitate to give her my data.

Also, Human Rights Watch has higher numbers than 3. How many were tortured by Jordan, Egypt etc under extraordinary rendition may never be known.

Google is not perfect and the lesser of two evils is still evil. However, it is possible to opt out of most of the privacy invading data collection. There are legal challenges to them on privacy and that is a good thing. There are other options besides Google too if you are so inclined.

You seem happy that we borrowed money from China to make Iran stronger, but the 90% who supported the war at the time is smarter now.

The Iraq war is estimated to have already cost over $1 trillion, and will likely cost $3 trillion when the vets are taken care of over their lifetime.

The increase of debt so far under Obama is around 6.5 trillion. I expect it to drop as the economy improves, but that is admittedly speculation.

Bush increased the debt by about 5 trillion in his two terms.

Use whatever reasonable sources you like for these numbers.

The more important issue is that over 100K Iraqis died, with 4486 US soldiers dead and 32,223 wounded. And for what? We now have another dictator and Badgad is #1 on the most violent city list. There were no WMD so I fail to see what we really gained that was worth the costs in blood and treasure.

There is a difference, at least in appearance, from have your poster girl as some one who thinks water boarding is a nifty idea.

And Google is suing the NSA, rather than announcing that a former National Security Advisor who was part of the problem, is now controlling your data. So instead of fighting the governments worst practices, the actions of Dropbox suggest that the NSA raiding your data is just fine by them.

I am well aware that Google will hand over to the NSA whatever they have to per USA law. And the USA government is one of their biggest check writers. But I doubt they think handing over data in violation of the 4th amendment is a good business practice. And if you are not a USA citizen or an expat, you have no standing at all - not nice for the rest of the world.

Rather, the NSA is likely causing them to lose business overall. Google's lawsuits may be just for show, but like I said, appearances matter. Would you trust RSA at this point?

Have great day likewise!