Google offers a free version of many applications, but their paid version has more features and storage. The more Google gets its users to rely on the applications it provides, the greater the likelihood that more users will convert to a paid version when they need more features. Providing free applications also takes away market share from Microsoft, one of Google's biggest rivals in the workplace app space.

Because it is so huge, you can't really get a close up of OM - you must be far away to take it all in, and at those distances it loses all sense of scale, especially because there's nothing much around to compare it to. It's sort of like trying to take a photo of the Empire State Building from one block away - all you'll get in the frame is the lower floors, or if you tilt the camera upward to get the top in the shot, most of the lower section will be out of the picture. You need to get halfway across the city to get the entire building in frame, and you'll get a sense of size because there's lots of things around to compare it to and because it is much taller than it is wide. OM is really big around - pretty much the size of Arizona - so it just doesn't look that tall compared to how big it is around.

That said, there are many great shots that give some idea of scale (just google "close up of picture of Olympic Mons), and you'll also see side by side comparisons of Everest and OM.

Design and development of alternative logos and branding materials, including complete mock up of products, stores/restaurants, ads, etc. Focus groups, surveys, polling. Psychological studies, etc. When you're a multi-billion dollar brand with established worldwide recognition, you dot every I twice and cross every T three times when assessing any significant changes to your branding and image. Does it need to cost millions? Certainly not, but they're given a big budget and they're going to use all of it in case things don't go smoothly - those in charge of developing a new look want to be able to say they turned over every possible rock, explored every possible idea, etc.

Could be a number of things. One significant consideration is whether we want the government to more fully fund certain things versus potentially limited funding where a tax credit is capped at taxes owed. The Earned Income Tax Credit for example is fully refundable, and in many situations, there's the potential for not only paying zero federal taxes, but getting additional funds from the government as well. The EITC is a welfare program of sorts, and while it's hard to get into the minds of policymakers, it's likely far more efficient to distribute all these funds directly as part of the tax filing and refund process rather than knocking tax liability down to zero and then having a second program to process the remainder of the "unused" funding that the government is willing to pay to EITC filers.

A non-refundable tax credit however, serves as an incentive to spend (or do whatever is necessary to earn the credit) only insofar as you have tax liabilities that equal or exceed the credit. While we can try to attribute some rationale to how policy and rule makers determine which are refundable and which aren't, it likely comes down to lobbying and the need to meet projections.

Aborigines is Latin for "original inhabitants" and was adopted into mid-17th century English as aborigine. The English named the native people living in Australia aborigines because they were he original inhabitants of Australia (or at least they were there when the British colonized the place).

You're jumping to conclusions and making assertions way beyond what I'm saying. We're not ADDING salt to the oceans, we're just putting back what we took out. That has nothing to do with dumping plastics or other wastes in the ocean. Things would be very different if we mined salt from Mars and dumped that into our oceans - that would be adding things that didn't come from it just a few days or weeks ago. And understand that all the freshwater we removed would make its way back to the oceans too - that's how the water cycle works. That's the beauty of desalinization - we're just borrowing the freshwater from the ocean for a brief period of time again and again and again, which is what the normal process of evaporation, rainfall/snowfall, and runoff does constantly. The reason desalinization isn't practiced more often is because its energy intensive and expensive, but it's far less energy intensive and expensive as building a fleet of interplanetary mining and transfer ships.

The answer is dump it back in the ocean. I get you don't like that answer, but that's the answer.

And you can pull a practically unlimited amount of water out of the oceans. Any amount humans can conceivably need.

You've hit the nail right on the head in your response. What we need to do is get water to El Salvador. If you don't want people leaving El Salvador, it is much much much much much much much much easier and cheaper to get water from the Atlantic Ocean or the pacific Ocean or even the Indian Ocean or the Arctic Ocean, desalinate it, and pipe it or ship it to El Salvador then it could ever be to get that water from a planet hundreds of millions of miles away. The water on earth isn't disappearing or running out. It just moves around. There's no place for it to go other than somewhere else on the planet. Solutions like urban indoor farming, reduce water consumption locally and have a role in solving this problem. But trying to build some sort of infrastructure to transport trillions and trillions and trillions of gallons of water over months or years long journeys from other planets do not. I'm not understanding where you're coming from. You have a solution in search of a problem, and honestly, it's not much of a solution.

Sure, stick enough new straws in an ancient aquifer that takes decades to centuries to recharge and you'll drain it dry. Nothing noteworthy there. But so what? That just means there's not enough water to go around in your part of the world, it doesn't mean the amount of water in the world has decreased. It's just not going downstream in the river like it used to. The fix there is not to drag water in from outer space and drop it upstream from you and all the other houses. The fix is in recognizing that in your area, there's not enough resources to go around and some sort of restrictions are called for. If the community is unwilling to do that, they may face a choice between spending millions to get water from somewhere within a few hundred miles or spending trillions to get water from a few hundred million miles away. That's the difference between making a deal with some Canadian water authority and building canals or pipes to increase supply, or building and launching hundreds of spacecraft on some decades long mission to drop a bunch of icebergs upriver (that will eventually flow downstream and then you'll need to repeat the cycle again and again).

As far as salt goes - there's about 321 million cubic miles of ocean water in the world. There's about 14 million cubic miles of all other water combined - fresh water, water locked in glaciers and ice sheets, and groundwater. That's a 23:1 ratio of ocean water to all other water combined. At most, there's about 2.2 million cubic miles of non-ice locked freshwater, a 146:1 ratio of ocean water to fresh water. If we desalinated enough ocean water to double the amount of available freshwater, we'd have extracted salt from only 0.68% of the ocean. Drop that back in the ocean - it won't even be noticed (expect the immediate areas where the salt goes back in). And then keep in mind that all this additional freshwater we extracted through desalinization just gets back to the oceans in the normal water cycle, so it very quickly "rebalances" and is unchanged from before the desalinization.

Population growth, aquifer exhaustion, etc. - those are resource allocation issues, not "bring water in from Mars" issues. Drought in one area or another isn't due to not having enough water on the planet, it's due to regional weather (climate), land use, and resource use, planning and conservation. There's plenty of places that deal with too much water for their needs, but it's super expensive to get that water from there to you (but still far cheaper than space harvesting).

There's no amount of space ice-gathering or ocean desalinization that will help your river, well and aquifer issues without transporting that water upstream from you (and then upstream from whoever is upstream from them, etc.). You're not suffering from a lack of water generally, you're suffering from uncontrolled growth overwhelming an ecosystem (specifically an aquifer) that has existed without issues for likely millions and millions of years. It's past the time to stop building houses along that river and dropping wells, at least if the water flow in the river is important.

Can't catapult people into space - the forces generated by the catapult system exceed 10,000g. People can usually handle about 9g before bad things start to happen and will become mush well before hitting 10,000g. Pretty much restricted to non-compressible things if we're going to launch them via catapult.

And then there's the return trip, deceleration, landing or splashdown, etc. All of these things require energy and are replete with opportunities for catastrophic failure. And you'd need thousands of ships returning each day to get any meaningful amount of water (see below).

As far as where to put the salt, back in the ocean is fine. It's simply not possible to remove so much fresh water from the oceans that putting the salt removed back into the oceans will make a significant (or really even noticeable) difference. Sure, the actual dumping points will be impacted, but the oceans generally will not be.

Here's the basic math:

The average person used 3,800 liters per day of water. Let's say that we learn to reduce that by 75% (which is highly unlikely). That takes it down to about 1,000 liters per day per person, or 8 trillion liters per day worldwide. Now let's assume we want to get 10% of that from extraterrestrial sources - that's 8 hundred-million liters of water a day, every day, which is 8 hundred million kgs brought in each day every day (or 8 hundred thousand metric tons). The largest payload we can launch currently from Earth in one launch is about 17 metric tons. Granted, we're not launching from Earth is we're harvesting ice off-planet, so let's assume we can (somehow) launch 100 times the amount from somewhere else (a silly assumption, but we'll doit anyway). So now we can lift (from Mars or wherever) 1,700 metric tons of ice/water on one launch. To supply just 10% of the GREATLY reduced water consumption needs of the Earth under these incredibly favorable and ridiculous assumptions, we'd need about 500 unbelievably huge ships (each one carrying a payload measuring 1,700m x 1,700m x 1,700m, or nearly 5 billion cubic meters) delivering ice/water each day, every day. The Astrodome - a huge stadium that fits 68,000 people, is only 1.2 million cubic meters in volume, meaning we'd need to bring over 4,166 Astrodomes worth of water just to meet 10% of the needs (again assuming great reduction from current usage). And somehow we'd need to launch enough ships, parts, people, fuel, etc. to carry on this mission.

And even if this was a one-time project to just add to the water supply on Earth, the new water would immediately join the same water cycle as the existing water, so we'd have to be desalinizing and or decontaminating the newly arrived water as well.

Nothing changes the bottom line - it will always be easier and cheaper and more environmental friendly to deal with the water already on Earth than to try to get a meaningful amount from elsewhere.

It will never be better environmentally or economically to harvest ice from extraterrestrial sources to provide fresh water on Earth. The carbon footprint from space flight is enormous, and the sheer number of ships that would be required to obtain any meaningful amount of water from hundreds of millions of miles away make local desalinization a hugely better option from any perspective no matter what conditions become on Earth. Put the salt anywhere - doesn't matter, it's a drop in the proverbial bucket. There's plenty of rain and snowfall, it's just in different places than we're used to seeing it. And melting glaciers and ice fields just add to the amount of liquid water available. Getting water from 100 or 1,000 miles away because that's where the rain falls now or that's where the desalinization plants are is still much cheaper and more environmentally sound than launching thousands and thousands of spacecraft constantly.

Could we do it? Sure. But why? It would be far, far less energy intensive and more cost effective to desalinate/decontaminate water already on Earth than go millions of miles to harvest a few spaceships worth of ice.

It's not that we can't figure out the center of the universe, it's that there is no center of the universe. The big bang didn't explode out from a single point, it happened everywhere at the same time. It's difficult to picture intuitively, but think of it like an infinite elastic sheet with every point on the sheet one plank length away from every neighboring point (or just think of them as really, really, really, really close together). Then stretch the sheet in all directions so that the distance between the points doubles, then doubles again, then again, etc. Now imagine the sheet as a three-dimensional infinite object (or just infinite sheets one on top of the other starting a plank length apart), and now stretch that stack of infinite sheets in all directions so that the distance between any point and its neighbors doubles, then doubles again, and again, etc. This is kinda sorta what the big bang was. It happened everywhere and distances between points in the universe just kept getting bigger ad bigger and bigger (and they still are). There's no single place where that expansion started (i.e., no center). The expansion happened everywhere.

Add a third item for comparison - a 1 kg bottle of water. That weighs more than either the Snickers bar or cabbage, but it's clear why you won't gain any weight from drinking the water (assuming you weren't dehydrated and you've had a chance to piss it out) - there's nothing in the water your body can use for energy now or convert to something it can store and use for energy later. The water just passes through you.

The bulk of the cabbage passes through you too because it's over 90% water. Most of the rest is insoluble fiber that just passes through our digestive system unused. Take away the water and the insoluble fiber, and you're left with a tiny bit of actual usable nutrients, and only some of that is potentially storable by the body.

A Snickers bar is about 6% water, and the bulk of the remaining 94% is calorie dense fat and carbohydrates (with a bit of protein). The body uses some of that for immediate energy and stores almost all of the rest, resulting in weight gain.

This is the general reason why vegetables seldom lead to weight gain - they're mostly water and whatever is left isn't terribly calorie dense(ignoring starchy veggies like potatoes and fatty veggies like avocado for the moment). Doesn't mean you can't gain weight eating only veggies, but it's much harder to do compared to eating more calorically-dense foods.

Those systems are possible, but they add weight and complexity to launch vehicles that strive to minimize weight and complexity. There's a cost to build and launch such a system, there's risk of failure of that system itself, and there's risk that that system could be the cause of catastrophic failure of the entire launch vehicle, especially if an ejection system uses any sort of explosive device to achieve ejection. Simply put, those who design and launch satellites have determined it is better to risk the loss of a satellite here and there than to try to reduce that risk with an ejection sytem.

Short answer, yes but not really.

Long answer, nothing affects the speed of light. Light always travels at the speed of light, and at no other speed. However, the path light travels is affected by any massive body. From the perspective of a distant observer, a massive body may seem to slow light down, but that's not what's happening. Instead, the massive object is literally bending space in such a way that the path that light takes - the shortest distance between two points (actually the shortest time between two points) - seems longer and hence the light seems to take longer to travel between those two points.

With a black hole, space is bent so extremely that all straight paths between any two points below the event horizon never point out of the event horizon. In other words, light inside a black hole is constantly traveling at the speed of light, but space itself wraps back around on itself. So the light has nowhere to go but inside black hole. In fact, all paths beneath the event horizon lead only to the singularity at its center. For the purposes of this, I'm ignoring rotating black holes, which work almost the same way.

A massive body that isn't as dense as a black hole will similarly bend space so that light travels what seems like a longer and slower path when viewed from a distance. Unlike a black hole, however, the straight paths ultimately point away from the massive body.

Another way to think of this is to imagine that space itself is literally flowing into a black hole, and at the event horizon, that space is flowing towards the center of the black hole at light speed. So anything traveling in that space, no matter how fast it's moving, is being pulled along with that space toward the center of the black hole. It's like a fish swimming against a very rapid current - at a certain point, no matter how hard the fish swims upriver, it's going to end up downriver as it's being carried by the current.

>The universe is expanding from the central point of the Big Bang.

There is (or rather was) no central point of the Big Bang. The BB happened EVERYWHERE - your house, my house, Mars, the Crab Nebulae and every other single point in the universe. All of it - every single place - and all at once.

Conceptually this is almost impossible for humans to picture. Our everyday experience restricts our ability to see "expansion" apart from some sort of object growing larger from around a central point (like blowing up a balloon). But that's not how the universe expands (now and during the BB). Instead of thinking of an object growing larger, think about all the parts that make up the object spreading apart from every other part at the same time. You can even have an infinitely large thing expand in this way - everything in the infinitely large thing just moves away from every other thing.

Picture an infinitely large sheet of graph paper marked with a grid. Each point that marks the intersection of lines on the paper is exactly one centimeter away from each neighboring point of intersection. Then stretch the paper until all points of intersection are now two centimeters from each neighboring point of intersection. You've expanded the infinitely large sheet by adding space between all the already existing points. The expansion happened everywhere on the sheet - it doesn't have a central point (it's actually more correct to say that every point is the central point of expansion because every point looks like the central point since an observer at each point would see the entire sheet stretch away from the observer in all directions).

You cannot plot ANY number with perfect precision on a number line. Each number is represented by only a single point on the line. A point is zero dimensional - it has no length, no width and no depth. We can mathematically determine where a point belongs on a number line, but we cannot actually plot such a point with perfect precision. This is true whether the number is rational or irrational.

Plotting a number on a number line (or any set of axes) is always an approximation. No matter how precise the tools we use to mark the spot, and no matter how fine the point of the actual marking device, the mark will always be infinitely larger than the actual point at issue. That is, there will always be an infinite number of points within the mark that are not the point that's intended to be marked.

That said, for just about any human endeavors, we can plot points with "good enough" accuracy.