Ahh, but say the ballast asteroid cut loose, or the cable was severed above the center of mass, the remainder of the cable would still be attached to the earth. The rotation of the earth would impart some lateral velocity to what was left. The end of the cable would immediately begin to accelerate and would either burn up in the atmosphere (which shouldn't happen at the strengths of materials needed to build such a cable) or hit the ground at hyper velocity speeds devastating anything within kilometers around the line of impact. On the positive side, we would get a nice line on the equator, kinda like what we have on maps now :)

Site doesn't seem to be accepting any connections to download this so here's a magnet uri:

Magnet Link

There's this program called bitsync: http://getsync.com/ which you each have a client on your computers. Share hashes with each other, and you get a distributed, synced in real time copy on each client running the software. It's free, secure, and no servers required. You each have a copy locally, and any modifications are replicated to each client.

Along the same lines, how about the "metadata" is put up on a public website immediately. For example, as soon as one of the police cameras start recording, there would be a log entry on a public website which would show activation time, officer who activated the camera, and termination time, plus a checksum for the newly completed video. That way, when evidence is needed, we can tell if the video has been edited/altered, and there is also a public record of who and when the camera was used. Then the officer can't simply say "we weren't recording during the altercation" or whatnot. You would also be able to see if the camera was activated while approaching someone, then switched off for 5 minutes, and then reactivated and now there is a guy bleeding on the ground. Any arrest made without a complete record, could be tossed out.

But. What could the costs really be other than what they paid for the site? Subtract that, and you got what? 5 "editors" at say $80,000/yr (which is insane for how little they do, should be $30,000) So $80k x 5 is 400k/year total. Hosting should be in house. Bandwidth costs are practically non-existent, and server maintenance should be done by the editors cause they're "geeky". If they couldn't handle something as simple as that, they shouldn't even be here. I don't see the issue. I ran a site that got millions of unique users per month for damn near nothing but my personal time and the cost of an internet connection (~$80/mo). If they're losing millions, they're doing it wrong. Way wrong.

Wow.. I totally forgot about those. And I HAD one. Timex Datalink. Talk about a walk down memory lane... Thanks! :)

Interesting:

Grover Cleveland "Cleve" Backster, Jr. (February 27, 1924 – June 24, 2013) was an interrogation specialist for the Central Investigation Agency (CIA), best known for his experiments with plants using a polygraph instrument in the 1960s which led to his theory of "primary perception" where he claimed that plants "feel pain" and have extrasensory perception (ESP), which was widely reported in the media but was rejected by the scientific community.

Rejected by the scientific community. Seems pretty definitive to me.

Yah you know me!

Yah, except for my Western Digital Green which failed 3 days after the warranty expired. And similar accounts on newegg...

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/06/27/0530254/