No, you could use a conductive rail, like a subway, and rack and pinion system to move the elevator. The rack and rail would add a fair bit more total weight to the building compared to a cable. But more importantly, the motors would have to be much much more powerful! Modern elevator systems have a counter-weight balanced on the other side of that cable, which means the motor only has to overcome friction and the small difference in weight between the elevator and counterweight (which varies depending on current payload). The motor on an elevator like Noah is suggesting would have to provide enough force to counteract the entire weight of the elevator + payload + motor + friction, which is at least an order of magnitude more than a traditional elevator.

You seem to have taken this very personal, resorting to personal insults for a post that had nothing whatsoever to do with you.
I suggest you change the relationship and automatically score mod my posts so you don't see them, because I will keep on ranting about things I feel like ranting about, out of the blue, without taking your feelings and opinions into consideration. They're worth exactly nothing to me - sorry.

The telescope body, free flying tens to hundreds of miles away, can adjust ti stay in the focus.

Apps not freezing or crashing or becoming unusable by the customers aren't features.
They're side effects of programmers (among other things) actually understanding the underlying system and what happens when you poke the beast.

Neither does it give them a right to burn my book.

The problem here is that you don't buy a game. You buy a license to use a game. They revoke the license, which is their right, but by doing so, you are no longer bound by the license terms either, which includes the payment you made. Depending on the jurisdiction, you might have a good case for winning a small courts claim or similar, covering the purchase price and reasonable legal expenses.

I'm not talking about messing with IO requests. I'm talking about understanding what happens when they're issued, whether it's by you or a library you use, so you don't lock up a system for no good reason.
But these days, this is considered "arcane knowledge" and is ignored, in favor of blindly using magic toolkits and libs, and blaming the system for not performing when it's the app that is badly designed out of ignorance.

I disagree. You don't hire poets to design a space ship - it may be pretty, but it won't work. You don't hire sci-fi writers either - it may look workable to the masses, but the pesky laws of physics and economics will have their say.

Programming is more like engineering. As in being able to construct something that actually works.
Coding, on the other hand, is more like manufacturing, where you produce something based on what the engineers have come up with.
But too often these days, it's not engineers that came up with it, but bloody poets, and the poor coders have to steal bits and pieces they don't understand from people they have no reason to trust in order to make a workable mess out of it.

That's happening more and more. I find myself going to web sites looking for manuals and specs, and all they have these days are videos. I don't want videos, I want text, with orders of magnitudes higher information density, searchable and editable.

Dumbing down seems to be across the board. User interfaces, recipes, clothing, handwriting, ability to add and subtract without a cash register or calculator, you name it.

And yes, "coding". Which has taken over for programming. The typical modern "coder" builds houses out of Lego. They may look colorful and shiny, but at the end of the day it's still Lego.

Gone are the days of programmers who actually devised algorithms and discussed them, instead of Googling for something that might be pressured into service. People who would understand what an OS call actually did, instead of treating it as magic. Something as simple as describing what happens behind the scenes when doing an IO request is beyond many newer coders (some of which I work with).
Programmers, they aren't.

We have to start expecting more, and stop rewarding and kowtowing to incompetence.

Solar sail can achieve 25% light speed, according to NASA, and Alpha Centauri is 4 light years away.

You want a manned mission (with robots doing all the actual work) to determine if the conventional wisdom that a manned mission to the outer planets is physically impossible is correct. Even if the pilot dies, you learn the furthest a manned mission can reach. There's seven billion people, you can afford to expend one or two. Ideally, they'd be volunteers and there'll be no shortage of them, but if you're concerned about valuable life, send members of the Tea Party.

No big surprise. The military are willing to invest what it takes for what they need. Military entities are, by necessity, pitifully naive when it comes to anything useful, but once they specify what they think they want, they don't shirk at the cost, they get the job done. A pointless job, perhaps, but nonetheless a completed job.

The corporate sector wants money. Things don't ever have to get done, the interest on monies paid is good enough and there hasn't been meaningful competition in living memory. Because one size never fits all, it's not clear competition is even what you want. Economic theory says it isn't.

The only other sector, as I have said many times before, that is remotely in the space race is the hobbyist/open source community. In other words, the background behind virtually all the X-Prize contestants, the background behind the modern waverider era, the background that the next generation of space enthusiasts will come from (Kerbel Space Program and Elite: Dangerous will have a similar effect on the next generation of scientists and engineers as Star Trek the old series and Doctor Who did in the 1960s, except this time it's hands-on).

I never thought the private sector would do bugger all, it's not in their blood. They're incapable of innovation on this kind of scale. It's not clear they're capable of innovation at all, all the major progress is bought or stolen from researchers and inventors.

No, with civilian government essentially walking away, there's only two players in the field and whilst the hobbyists might be able to crowdsource a launch technology, it'll be a long time before they get to space themselves. The military won't get there at all, nobody to fight, so the hobbyists will still be first with manned space missions, but it's going to take 40-50 years at best.

We have the technology today to get a manned mission to Alpha Centauri and back. It would take 15-20 years for the journey and the probability of survival is poor, but we could do it. By my calculations, it would take 12 years to build the components and assemble them in space. Only a little longer than it took for America to get the means to go to the moon and back. We could actually have hand-held camera photos taken in another solar system and chunks of rocky debris from the asteroid belt there back on Earth before Mars One launches its first rocket AND before crowdfunded space missions break the atmosphere.

All it takes is putting personal egos and right wing politics on the shelf, locking the cupboard and then lowering it into an abandoned mineshaft, which should then be sealed with concrete.

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.

SS2 has not completed testing and it is probable that there will be a need for redesign of one or more components. So, this is a really bad time to have the hand-off. Publicity isn't a good reason.

There is no reason that we have to pick one and abandon work on the others. I don't see that the same resources go into solving more than one, except that the meteor and volcano problem have one solution in common - be on another planet when it happens.

The clathrate problem and nuclear war have the potential to end the human race while it is still on one planet, so we need to solve both of them ASAP.