It's a pressor beam. It doesn't attract anything.

Remember that light energy can't be converted to electricity and also transmitted through the window; whatever percentage gets converted to electricity must be subtracted from the percentage that is transmitted. A window that converts 100% of solar energy to electricity would transmit 0% of the light; i.e. it would be opaque.

Let's do the math. To travel from San Francisco to Los Angeles in an hour requires an average speed of 166 m/s. Accelerating at 1 G (9.8 m/s), it would take 17 seconds to reach that speed. If that's too much acceleration for you, do half the acceleration for 34 seconds. Either way, no puree.

Isn't that exactly how cell phones are sold?

Actually, 0.1 newton, or 10 grams - the weight of 2 nickels.

So, the weight of this 100 kg lander would be about 1 newton, or the equivalent of 100 grams on Earth. That's a little more than 2 golf balls. It's a wonder they can land that without it bouncing off.

Of course they do, and we've known about it for years. The Canadian government started an investigation into the issue last year. Even cars manufactured in Canada are cheaper to buy in the U.S. than in Canada.

I spent several summers working in a fish processing plant - which was bad enough - but one day, the boss came up to me with an evil smirk on his face and said he had a "special job" for me.

Now the parts of the fish that don't get eaten - the heads, tails, blood and guts, collectively known as gurry - get collected in a large bin and are periodically trucked off (to who knows where) to be disposed of. But this particular day, someone had left the lid off the gurry bin and allowed a whole flock of gulls to land in the bin. Gurry being an oily substance with the consistency of quicksand, the gulls were now stuck there. My job was to get them out.

So I climbed up to the top of the gurry bin with a dip net, balanced on the edge trying not to fall in myself while I netted the birds. I counted about 80 of them in total, in various stages of distress. About a third of them had gotten completely covered with gurry and drowned. Another third of them had climbed onto the backs of the drowned ones and were in relatively good condition (good enough to bite me, the ingrates!) The rest were somewhere in between. I don't remember how long it took me to fish them all out of the gurry bin, but after than, I was happy to return to the menial labour that was my regular job.