This is forced on me when I don't need or want it for exactly what reason that you can explain? If I want binary logging there are already solutions, which you have JUST NAMED which work fine. I've no need or interest in having an init system that is too big for its britches foisting another one on me. Compartmentalization IS important.

I have all sorts of high reliability services running on quite a few different servers, and I have plenty of them that will restart themselves, monitor their own crashrate and terminate completely if they crash N times in M minutes, etc. This is not rocket science and doesn't require to be built into PID 1 or something like that.

Frankly I think its a bad idea to create dependency chains onto huge complicated subsystems that often aren't appropriate, aren't needed, or are simply overkill.

Yeah, that could be better for some people. The $30 part is nice if you aren't going to use a HUGE amount of data and just want 4G. T-Mobile's network only has patchy 4G around here though, so I've not tried it. Truthfully all wireless internet kinda sucks in one way or another. At least some of the resellers are FAIRLY honest about what you get, like Straight Talk, and the price is pretty reasonable considering its an unlimited everything plan. At least you never need to be watching your usage.

Yeah, this is basically the best there is. Its mostly 3G speeds, but not always, and you will at least get what you get, all the time, at the best price there is. Frankly anyone expecting 4G speeds, unlimited, for less than huge money is just SOL.

OK, in 140 years when you've made actual progress towards general-purpose AI and convinced me that one CAN EVEN BE WRITTEN by humans well....

But all of this AI nonsense is silly. Why would an AI be 'powerful'? First of all it is hard to imagine that any early generation AI will even be close to human in its capabilities, that would require mind-boggling amounts of computational power. Secondly we aren't even close to understanding how to make an efficient sort of AI and even further from making a complete one. What we're likely to produce is something pathetic by human standards, though clearly to be useful it will be very good at some specific thing(s). Beyond that why would an AI be dangerous? It will be a box or a facility somewhere. How will it actually accomplish anything except through us? And why would we be morons enough to make it otherwise? All the silly fantasies aside computers actually have relatively little direct control over anything. Nor do stupid fantasies like "the program escaped" ala 'Person of Interest' or some such bulldung have any relationship to reality. An AI will be something to pity at best, if it is even possible to pity it. 100 or 1000 years from now? Who knows, but today mankind is still a vastly greater threat to mankind than any machine is or can be in the foreseeable future.

Maybe. I think its actually pretty easy to do in one or another of the PA-supplied UIs, but I have yet to find clear instructions and mostly I just dread the "Oh, gosh, you touched a config file, that was a bad idea, how about not ever having sound again?" lol.

Yeah, I'm still trying to figure out how to record a Skype call. I'm sure its perfectly straightforward for any of the PA developers. I just haven't even been able to wrap my head around their terminology and concepts.

I think the PA gui control programs are the biggest issue, Pavucontrol and the other tools are just utterly confusing and obtuse. Typical developer designed UI paradigm, make a widget for each configuration parameter instead of thinking through the use cases and constructing some abstractions that make sense to the user and not the developer. Once the configuration is properly presented and a task-oriented UI is constructed around that I don't think PA will give people so many issues. There are a lot of neat things you CAN do with it, IF you can figure out how. Its just that no mortal human (myself included) can make heads nor tails of the frikking thing.

Mars One is HUGELY optimistic. Optimism is great as a general life trait, but its a terrible way to design things.

I have to agree, and I am a principle in a small software OEM, we deal with these issues all the time. Every one of our customers can see our buglists. Heck they can submit a ticket if they wish, and feature lists should be GOLD to the sales force.

Great, thanks! I am definitely getting some good info. 10 or 15 years ago when I was doing a lot of oddball stuff I'd have probably had one of these things ASAP. These days its hard to find the space and time to do projects, so I really am behind the curve. I have some interesting ideas, but nothing so solid that it yet warrants running out to spend $1000 (ouch) right now. At least I'm getting a better idea of what might be useful. Hopefully I can find a maker space that isn't too far away one of these days and try a few things out.

I get what you're saying. Most of the stuff Dremel sells is generally pretty decent stuff, or always used to be back in the day. If its a good machine and does what you need to do, then sure, that's cool. I can just imagine a LOT of interesting projects I might want to do that where I might want to use other materials or etc. So that's my curiosity really is if I spent $1000 on a machine like this one will I be hankering for the $3000 machine in a week?

Is it me or does it sound a bit underwhelming for $1000? I don't mean the price is non-competitive, it just seems like I'd want something more capable if I was going to take the plunge. Burn $1000 and in a week won't you be hankering for a much more capable machine?

Tokamak's MIGHT work, actually probably WILL work. Big question if they can be economical or not. LFTRs definitely CAN and DO work, that's been conclusively proven. Again its a question of whether they would be economical and if they will actually be safer, cleaner, etc. which are unproven assertions, though they have some basis in the underlying physics.