Haha. Well, now they know that nerds are not only crappy team players despite being good at problem solving, they also don't lie.

Honestly, I can't see why they even considered hiring someone who isn't good at being in a team. Everyone knows thats essential in the workplace these days and is usually easy to spot those questions and answer them correctly.

No, what he's describing is the centripetal force, and that is not gravity. Sure, it's moving in a straight line, but that line forces the cable up from the earth. That is the force that acts as correction.

The thing with space elevators is that they can be built on any body in space. Its a silly idea for earth, but for Mars its theoretically possible, for the moon it might be practically possible for a high cost, and for some asteroid, it might be better than rockets even if its built for only one take-off.

So while it's usually presented as a crack pot vision, it's not at all worthless to do research into this field. It will without a doubt have some application, what that application might be depends on how effective we can make this stuff.

Uh...

Yeah, if it increases global temperatures, it's part of global warming. If it doesn't, it's not. There's not much to consider here.

Hmm, I can't see anyone pointing out the obvious thing here:

Amazon has sold a lot because their stuff happens to be really cheap right now, which it is because amazon is not trying to make a profit. They're just trying to get rid of the stuff they have already bought. I bet they've take a huge loss, but will argue that thats better than being stuck with a lot of stuff you can't sell.

Oh come on! This "American't"-attitude always amazes me when it comes to rail.

The washington-new york area is THE metropolitan area of the world! I don't know what the population density is in that corridor, but its way above the average of most european countries and it has a population of something like 30 million people with very high incomes, thats like a large western european country right there. Yet your rail sysmtem there is utter crap. Its identical to the rail system Sweden uses between its two largest cities, that system serves something like 3 million people and a region with much lower pop density.

So don't tell me america isn't made for rail. No one's talking about building high speed rail in north dakota. We're talking about building decent rail in the most populous regions of the earth.

As a side note, I don't think passenger rail is truly profitable in any country, atleast not when you consider the costs of actually building the rail needed.

But in europe and other places where passenger rail is popular, the government supports its use in various ways because for the community as whole, rail is cheaper than cars. Its just very difficult for "railroad service providers" (better word for that, please?) to actually capitalize on the full service provided. The service is so much more than providing trips to customers, it has much more to do with shaping the city into something cheaper and more efficient.

With that said, I don't see what amtraks profitability has to do with anything. It's government owned, and the advantage of that is that it doesn't HAVE to make a profit. Sure, the people working at amtrak should obviously strive for profit, but I don't see why the profitability of amtrak should dictate when to expand passenger rail in America.

Yeah, you're missing something.

What you need to realize that all the energy humans produce is completely and utterly insignificant to the amount of energy the sun brings to the earth. Now, the thing with global warming and all that is that CO2 captures a very slight percentage of the energy from the sun, and that tiny percentage is also huge compared to all the energy humans produce. Even though it's huge, it only has a slight impact on global temperatures.

The solar panels in space would, in turn, amount to only a tiny fraction of the energy we produce, and as such, the heating from them could not even be compared to the heating that CO2 makes. It would not have any measurable effect on global temperatures.

Obviously, this is just an experiment, but to get some perspective, how much drag does ISS experience?

From wikipedia:
"Assuming expected ion boosting efficiently of 80%, at low end of the throttle VX-200 will be capable of producing 9.24 N of thrust (at an Isp of 3,000 seconds) and in high efficiency mode it can be expected to produce less than 1 N of thrust (at 30,000 s)."

Would that be in the same magnitude as the drag? If so, could this be used for altitude control?