But what if I had been a terrorist, fully aware of the knife?

You're buying into the security theater paradigm. Before 9/11, hijackings were kidnapping and ransom situations in the US. If you wanted to survive, you kept a low profile and didn't rock the boat, and odds were everything would be fine. Out of 200 people they might kill one or two, so your odds of being that one were low enough that resistance was not a good idea. 9/11 changed all that. Now the possibility that everyone might be killed is very very real, so terrorists are likely to see an overwhelming resistance if all they could get on board were knives or possibly even a couple small firearms.

I honestly think that a modest knife, say 3" or less, presents no substantial hijack threat.

And how do you call someone who tells you "I don't care whether there are any gods or not, because I don't have a need to believe in a deity"? Isn't this atheism, too?

An atheist actively believes there are no gods. An agnostic believes that, in essence, whether or not there is a god is not knowable or testable, and is therefore merely a point of theological discussion with no useful result. Your posited person would probably fall into nontheism. Personally, I'm an apathetic agnostic most of the time.

A business partner did this, and a month later he had $6k of bogus charges on his credit card.

That's what third party escrow is for. Never give out your credit card info to a private party like that, and use a trusted escrow source so you can confirm the transfer actually occurred before they see any money.

Does that mean that to get a clear view we need space crafts beyond the boundry?

Not necessarily, we just need glasses. Knowing our observations are being altered by what is in effect a lens is the first step. Once we know the actual shape and properties of that lens we can mathematically apply alterations to our observations to correct for the distortion and end up with representations of our galaxy, other galaxies, and the background photons and radiation of the universe with much more accuracy than ever before.

Of course, stationing observatories beyond the field would be the best option, much like observatories like Hubble that are outside our atmosphere are better than ground-based telescopes. It is possible that not everything is actually making it through this lens, so even applying corrections won't yield a 100% perfect picture.

If it were my friend, I'd be happy to. If they mentioned it to me before going off and just doing it and then mentioning it in passing a few months later.

You're again presuming the consumer has the slightest clue. The salesperson might well give them the cost of fixing their current computer with the services they want to try and sell them, without the consumer fully comprehending what the costs entail. This is not at all unusual. In the end, the consumer will have two computers and probably ask a friend how to get their old files over, since they don't actually care about most of the files on their old box. I've had to deal with this myself on more than one occasion. Relatives that bought new computers because their old ones didn't work well any more and they need help getting their 'my documents' and 'desktop' folders moved over and that's pretty much it.

Haha what!? You build up an entire argument based on the fact that his only choice is to actually buy another PC and then shit on your own face in the end? Why!? Of course he should pay someone to fix it, if it's a perfectly functioning PC with a missing hard drive, why wouldn't he!? You're weird man.

Because this friend knows so little about computers that they're going to end up asking the Geek Squad, or a similar outfit, to do it for them. They're going to need their hard drive swapped out ($100 for the part, $50 for the labor), data mirrored ($160), they'll probably get convinced they need their operating system reinstalled ($130), primary office suite reinstalled ($50), and antivirus software ($30). Of course, all these numbers are presuming they still hold the disks and license keys the various software started with. At a cost of $520 for a machine that's probably at least 2 years old, they might notice in the store that they could just get a brand new system for less than that.

Which means we seem to have even less data that it at first appeared. 110MW means something, but we have no idea what. My best guess is that they either need 110MW to run as many trains as they want on all tracks (4 tracks could probably support 10 trains with switching), OR they need 110MWH per train per day.

I'm not saying don't make the train electric, just that generating the electricity with thermal solar is more efficient than solar panels in this application.

Oh noes! And the architectural drawings are so much less pretty!

The article wasn't clear to me whether the operation of the track required 110 MW continuously for all trains, or 110MW per train while the trains were running. I've also seen a lot of articles that lose things, like writing MW when they mean MWH. Also, GWH/day (or MWH/day) is an important number when converting to solar because you don't get a continuous feed of energy, you have to take the energy you get for the day and spread it out to meet your needs. If you're consuming 110MW for 11 hours per day, you'll need 12100MWH/day, which you can then convert into the size of your solar installation by dividing by your region's solar insolation.

The real key to all of this is exactly how much they intend on consuming. Throwing 110MW out there isn't very helpful without more conditions. How long is that drain for, how many times per day does that drain exist, etc. With two tracks running express and a 30 minute run consuming power at 110MW, the express trains alone could consume upwards of 3080GWH/day if they run continuously for 14 hours (6am-8pm). They'll need a wider footprint than I specified to keep up with that (70 feet for plain solar panels), and would certainly be better off with a thermal solar installation than solar panels.

I'm a little unclear on the requirements of the train, it says it needs 110 megawatts but not for how long, how many trains, etc. At its most conservative, I'll specify that the trains will each require 110 megawatts per run, and 11 runs are made per day. (Because that means I get to work with the magic 1.21 gigawatts number, which is just funny.) Ok, so, we need 1.21 GWH/day. Solar insolation in the Phoenix area averages 5.78 at its minimum, so we'll need about 210 MW of solar panels.

Taking a reasonably competitive Kyocera KD180GX-LP 180W panel as an example, at $688 each, retail, we'd need about 1.2 million of them. They're 52.8"x39", stringing them 6 wide on their long length we need a swath of land 27 feet wide, and we have a swath to work with 116 miles long. That will fit 1.13 million panels, generating a total of 1.18 GWH/day, at a cost of $778 million.

Though, I should point out, if you're already building the infrastructure to suspend the panels and you have a swath of land like that, you're probably much better off going with a thermal solar system. Incidentally I don't see the point in suspending the panels in the air. They should just be on the ground, and the tracks should poke up between them. You're not going to get much loss from the train going over the panel because the train is tiny compared to the size of your aggregate panels. Much less installation cost, too. For the thermal solar design, you can make mirror strips in a fresnel arrangement all aimed at a common heat sink containing your circulating fluid. You'd only need to suspend your heat sink, then.

Optimist. They want Blu-Ray and all physical media to become obsolete, so they can implement a strong DRM regime where you have to pay for the movie every 10 times you view it, or every 6 months just to keep it around (or both).

Optimist. ... where you have to pay for the movie EVERY time you see it. And, as icing, your device tells them who watched it so they can send them marketing to get them to watch more things you have to pay for.

Optimist... they want you to have to pay and get ABSOLUTELY NOTHING in return

Optimist... (Yeah, I'm calling myself an optimist too)... they want the government to enforce a tax on you so you pay them no matter what you do and they can give you whatever they feel like, up to and including nothing, in return.

Optimist. They want Blu-Ray and all physical media to become obsolete, so they can implement a strong DRM regime where you have to pay for the movie every 10 times you view it, or every 6 months just to keep it around (or both).

Optimist. ... where you have to pay for the movie EVERY time you see it. And, as icing, your device tells them who watched it so they can send them marketing to get them to watch more things you have to pay for.

(Splitting this comment into two, and reversing them, since one follows from the other.)

• The Kelvin crew should have reported an attack by a strange ship populated by Vulcans with tattoos and emotions.

It is established elsewhere in the movie that the Romulan transmissions were unique, as Uhura had to decode their transmissions later. (I'd expect the transmission protocols of any race to be essentially unique, at least until they've been integrated with other races for ease of communication.) Thus, the fact that they were being attacked by Romulans would have been obvious by their transmissions, which they were already aware of from the Earth-Romulan war, some 75 years earlier.

• The fact that Starfleet knew that Romulans were related to Vulcans before Stardate 1709.2

It appeared to me that the transmissions to Starfleet from the Kelvin were video and audio. We're in an alternate timeline now, and they've had 25 years to ferret out the relationship between Romulans and Vulcans.