the taxpayer likes air travel, they will want the government to step in and keep it afloat.

40 bucks for a short haul european flight ?, its cheap i grant you but its not 99 cents cheap. if it doubled i suspect the airlines would notice falling sales.

how much is domestic air travel in the USA anyway ?

because air travel will become insanely expensive if the airlines go bankrupt. it would also seriously effect tourism and the global economy. Governments will subsidise the airline industry before they let it fail.

Not that i think it is right that the taxpayer has to pay for this.

I am not sure that calling the airlines greedy is really fair, the airline industry has been having a very tough time in various different ways since 9/11.

BA in particular have had lots of problems with strikes leading to a negative effect on their already poor finances.

Now I am not saying that they should be compensated, or that it was right for the airlines to want to fly when the conditions could have been dangerous, but "greedy airlines" is probably a little too simplistic.

the isp logs will still be able to identify individual customers, in this case there would be basically no change at all

the ipod is pretty successful hardware

Wow this story is almost as crazy as my idea to build a giant water tower in the ocean to lower sea levels, see http://izit.org/content/all-water-earth for more details.

In all seriousness the poster seems to be interested in using the laser to communicate, is that such a big problem ?. The world is a much smaller place than it used be, I suspect that simply activating the laser would take some time, possibly calling the local officials would be almost as effective.

I thought children was better than the first mini series, I didn't like the way paul was portrayed in the first one, but for some reason he didn't bother me in the second even though its the same actor.

The second one was a lot less theatrical as well, presumably because they had a bigger budget.

agreed, lynch's version is visually stunning, the problems with the film are mainly to do with the fact that the original lynch cut was 4 hours long, its a difficult story translate to other mediums. I also thought some of the acting was poor, but I still love the film anyway, its an ambitious attempt that doesn't hit all its intended marks but is still an incredible experience (especially if you have read the book, the narrative is a lot easier to follow).

not trolling, and I wasn't suggesting we just take a traditional water tower and scale it up.

build a huge enclosure, walls as high as you can go, and fill it up, you could do this in the ocean where its likely to have less ecological impact.

so build walls around them

Why can't we build huge water towers to lower the sea level ?, there really isn't that much water on the earth its just very thinly spread out.

We could build them at the poles and the water would freeze making it much safer (from terrorism, quakes, etc).

Any reason why this wouldn't work ?.

the genesis stuff was semi-hard (fnar fnar) sci fi, trek was always about villains as well though and khan remains the greatest

its no more socialist than the police force is, even if you never need to use haelthcare (which is extremely unlikely) most rational people are happy to contribute in case they do need it.

at least thats how it works over here in europe.

depends on the goverment, see peter mandelsons (uk politician) relationship with david geffen and his subsequent hard on for clamping down on filesharing