I used to support this sort of thing wholeheartedly, but then one niggling detail stuck its head up and now I'm not so sure.

What happens to the dust?

It's one thing to shatter a rock to bits out in the asteroid belt and leave a million microscopic orbiting bodies in the plane of the ecliptic. We could always just bank shot around the asteroid belt to avoid the worst. It's another to have a million microscopic orbiting bodies around earth. People are already biting their nails about the number of satellite fragments we already have.

Have they figured out how to avoid this, or will this be another industry that pollutes first and apologizes later (if at all)?

In cryptography you're looking for a problem that is asymmetric. NP is your ideal, but as a lot of other people have pointed out, practical cryptographic algorithms are a not ideal. IBM actually had a cryptography algorithm based on the TSP once, but they must have found a flaw because it was never popularized.

A lot of people confuse NP and/or 'intractable' with 'impossible'. They do not mean the same thing. Intractable problems are often practically impossible, if for instance it would require more mass than the entire universe to calculate the answer. But since our understanding of physics is incomplete, we can't say for sure how big a 'perfect' computer you'd need to solve a certain problem, so you can't categorically say that it's impossible. All you can say is "we can't do it today." or "That's a problem for my grandchildren to deal with... hopefully."

Remember that for certain inputs an NP-Complete problem can be solved on the back of an envelope. If I tell you to place a dot in the middle of the envelope, and one more or less near each corner, you can find the shortest path in a few minutes. It's an NP complete problem, but it's still trivial to solve. NP is not a magic wall. It all depends on the context (ie, the inputs).

Look, if we're going to use Science, then we have to stop using bullshit like this. Are you familiar with the solar maximum?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_maximum

They are. Notice anything about 1997 on that graph? The longer term trends are what matter.

It's one thing to say, "water can't be a problem because there's no water in the design". It's quite another to say, "water can't be a problem because no water can ever get into the reactor".

Earthquake + tsunami = water in reactor
Catastrophic flooding = water in reactor

(do these things have sprinkler systems in them? Disaster + fire = water in reactor)

I'm curious how these things behave when water does find its way in...

I was replying to your assertion that islands couldn't make a suitable terminus. As I pointed out, the cable will tear long before that.

And even if we made the cable out of diamond, we don't know how to make an anchor so strong that it can lift an island. So if the cable didn't tear, you'd just rip the anchor out of the ground and it would float away...

This is my favorite but now old joke about FF: FF doesn't have memory leaks! Well, except for the four we fixed in the new version. I've been hearing that story since 2.0, and I appreciated it about as much as you obviously do (which is not at all).

However, this is not entirely true anymore. There's a few sharp people working on improving both the high and the low water mark memory usage in Firefox. You should read this guy's whole blog, but this entry in particular stands out:

http://gregor-wagner.com/?p=36

There was substantial page fragmentation mis-feature, which was improved for FF 7. When you closed a tab, most of the pages allocated for that tab still had live objects in them. That's bad for memory usage.

I don't say this often. Hell, I never say this: this is one place where the military has the right idea about how to manage people. Or at least, my poor, second-hand understanding of military chain of command suggests that is so.

Non-Commissioned officers are on a separate career path. They are expected to continue managing 'the workers' in some capacity for their whole career. They both know what has to be done and can sympathize with the poor bastards who'll get stuck doing it. They are not expected to seek a C level position. That's not their job. Getting shit done is their job, and no assignment or promotion will ever completely hamper that goal.

Meanwhile, the commissioned officers never manage the workers. Occasionally junior COs will try get things done that are a Bad Idea, and an NCO (eg, a warrant officer) will tell them to "Kindly fuck off, sir.". These people ARE expected to seek a C level position. Perhaps most importantly, if you demonstrate an inability to eventually achieve a C-level position, you may find yourself unwelcome, and encouraged to leave. "Up or Out"

I think where this breaks down when applied to civilians is that we don't distinguish people who DO from people who manage. If you can get things done, we should let you do that until the world ends. If you can't get things done, but you can kinda sorta interact with some people who do, should we really keep you around forever? It seems to me like maybe that's not such a good idea.

Not so sure about the anchor point bit, but the rest seems true.

One of the proposals terminates the cable at a boat. I dunno how they keep the thing from being pulled downwind (other than "because it's in the doldrums"), but the tension on the cable only needs to exceed the weight of the cars, the freight, and the safety margin. If you put too much tension on the cable, you'll snap it. If you're trying to hoist an island off its foundations, that would definitely be 'too much tension'.

... and a material of the necessary tensile strength. If we had that, then the money probably wouldn't be that hard to get.

But as someone else replied, apparently this ain't it. Or at least, not yet. A pity, really. I was hoping the same thing.