. . . the rest of humanity can't give two shits to protect other species from going extinct.

sounds like there will be no "pause" in "investing" in lobbying and influencing policymakers.

yeah. Actually, I was hoping that they'd offload all processing to a mainframe somewhere, so I can pay a per-clock-cycle fee for my batch jobs. Also can't wait for the integrated punch-card reader support!

"financially worthless subjects" . . . because I sure think that the MBA's and spreadsheet jockeys of the world are best qualified to determine what is and is not good for all of human civilization.

It is my fondest wish and desire that 300 years from now, any and all history books will name specific names of people, who will be reviled for centuries, as being the main perpetrators and promotors of the denialist movement. Their relatives and descendants will be hunted down, and relentlessly persecuted. This is my only positive thought for the future of our civilization.

I do not disagree with you.

This is largely Orbital's *schtick*: they are basically in the business of repurposing old, obsolete hardware, and using them for launch vehicles. Antares is the follow-on to Taurus, and Pegasus and Minotaur are repurposed Peacekeeper stages. They're cheap. But they're really not in competition with SpaceX, because Orbital launches mainly smaller payloads.

You help your landlady take out her garbage?

Last plane trip I took (United) had individual monitors which I could pay to watch a movie on. If I didn't pay extra, I was forced to watch a 10 minute advertising loop. (this is the future, for you driverless-car fans, by the way).

If there isn't a well-documented, repeatable build process, then it's not "engineering" AT ALL.

You seem to have nailed on the head, pretty much all the "big problems" in OS X. Where I work, there was a huge migration from PC's to OS X, probably starting around 2003-2004-ish. The hardware (macbook pro) is actually among the best in the industry. Especially right now (omitting the 2011 models that had the NVidia defect, and Apple's appallingly bad handling of that). (Yeah - apple is really bad at acknowledging hardware defects, for a company that charges exceedingly "premium" price-points). Many of our developers switched, and they all pretty much have the same complaints.

The biggest gripe for me is the window (and tab) switching. Holy crap, it's terrible - compared to any other OS out there. Another big one is that there's no "home" or "page up" "page down" keys, and you have to use the fn-arrow key combinations.

A lot of the keybindings for terminal makes sense; but for some reason, you can't ctrl+a in minicom. That sucks, because you basically have to kill the program to exit. (and it's also useless, because you can't get into the config menu).

Anyway: If you really hate Mac OS, then you can simply install Windows 7, or Ubuntu. (Fedora also works, but I haven't figured out how to get the drivers for fan and cpu scaling to work right, so. . . heat, fans, crappy battery-life). The hardware makes an excellent platform for either Windows 7 or Ubuntu. (I don't think that there's another laptop in the world right now, on which, you can get a 6+ hr battery life, with Windows or Ubuntu).

I think the worst-case here, is someone who's a KDE nut, going to OS X. They are polar-opposites, in terms of customiseability.

The only reason I continue to use OS X, is because I'm invested in VMWare Fusion. It's a pretty nice product, and I use it a lot in my work.

When a black-mark can remain on your record forever, there's huge consequences.

I know a guy who was an engineer, FPGA specialist. Has 4 patents. Worked for 15 years, and his company imploded. I tried to get him a job where I work, but because he had a dishonorable discharge from the navy, no dice. (apparently, when he was 19, before he went to college, he failed to return from shore-leave for 24-hours, because he went on a bender, passed-out, and was basically kept incognito by a bunch of "bad people" with whom he had been drinking. Got in trouble for that, and it resulted in the dishonorable.) Bad judgement, for sure, but it was a small mistake. He went on to college, and go in at his first job through a professor. But now he's been unemployed basically since 2004.

If you consider the concept floated (briefly) in the movie: Aliens, the company simply dropped a large atmospheric processing installation on the planet (LV 426, at that time) and began the terraforming process. That's not substantially different than "sending autonomous robots to various locations in space to create infrastructure using local resources with advanced manufacturing technology, such as 3D printing"

If the hospital had admitted every uninsured foreigner who showed up with a fever, and then broke out the best protective equipment and procedures, well, then, that would be bad for the shareholders.

Yeah - when pharmaceutical companies are spending twice as much on Marketing as they do on R&D. . . I'll believe that they're frustrated by lack of progress on the "big" problems of medical science.

LOL - the biggest innovation to come out of the pharmaceutical industry in the past 20 years is to patent the analogs of existing chemicals whose patents are about to expire. Double the profit! Oh yeah. That, and boner pills.