OP was not saying it would help reduce population, they were making the point that we have enough humans that a few could choose to go to Mars and we'd get on fine here. There are plenty of humans, we are not a scarce resource.

As to the argument to solve Earth's problems first, that's silly. There are over 7 billion humans on the planet, we can work on more that one thing at a time. And a few people leaving doesn't change the motivation or desire of those that are staying to take care of the environment. When a family moves out of an apartment building, do all the other families say "screw it, lets trash the place!"

Same as it always was.

You are right that it's Orwellian, but wrong about how. This is not a tantrum against the masses, it's a tantrum against reality. The libraries in question are scientific libraries. Specifically libraries that contain environmental records related to pollution, biodiversity and climate. This is an attempt to continue the hamstringing of any science that shows the dark side of the so called free market. Intentional environmental ignorance is financial bliss for the oligarchy.

How do you know he didn't do a dry run? He may have fumbled the the buy the milk line, he could have meant "remember the milk" which is an actual company and an actual app. But I bet he tried "Show me my most at-risk opportunities" before the demo and it worked. Or something really close worked and he choked.

Seriously, demos fail all the time for "obvious in hindsight" reasons. But we are not Merlin, so our hindsight comes after the fact. Besides gross incompetence on his part, which is of course possible. Maybe the acoustics of the environment confused the voice recognition. Or maybe someone else made a rookie mistake and rolled out an "upgrade" at a really inopportune time. All sorts of wonderful stuff can make a demo go wrong. I'm sure that when Bill Gates crashed Windows 98 live at Comdex it was not the first time he had plugged a USB device into a Windows 98 system.

Before any heads roll, maybe they should figure out what went wrong. And frankly to the OP, the whole "fire anyone that makes a mistake" attitude is pretty lame.

Because the ads presumably pay for all the infrastructure. The publishers are mad because they need to pay for bandwidth and whatever staff it takes to generate content. The ad companies are made because they don't get their clicks. I feel for the publishers, I want quality content. The ad companies can go pound sand, they are middlemen that are part of a bad solution to a real problem (how to fund worthwhile, but largely "drive by," content.)

I have no idea how this will play out. Paywalls don't really work for the distributed reality we live in. No one is going to subscribe to every paper and blog. But ads suck when they try hard to get people's attention. Hopefully someone clever will find a better way.

SLS/Orion's primary mission is deep space not LEO. But SLS/Orion tends to take money from Commercial Crew (which is the set of contracts for LEO human space flight.) SpaceX's Dragon/F9 and Boeing's Starliner/Atlas will be flying astronauts to ISS in 2017 (or 2018 if Congress keeps syphoning money from Commercial Crew to SLS).

1. The goal is still 2021.
2. The summary's original target of 2010 is a reflection on Slashdot, not NASA.
3. The projected, potential slip from 2021 to 2023 is to account for budget uncertainties.
4. The President (evil democrat at the moment) always proposes funding commercial crew (which gives competitive bids to private companies to solve the problem as they see fit) to return LEO launch capabilities ASAP.
5. A congressional committee (mix of evil democrats and slightly more evil republicans) always moves funding from commercial crew to SLS/Orion (deep space/exploration built with multiple contractors based in their congressional districts as a way to "spread the wealth.")
6. Too be fair, there are evil congressmen that support commercial crew and evil congressmen that oppose all spaceflight. But the evil congressmen with the most influence on the relevant committees currently prefer the wealth is spread to their own districts which sadly are not commercial space hotbeds.

Yes, I am biased, I like commercial crew and I like having more than one commercial crew provider because I think it leads to a more sustainable future in spaceflight. That said, I'm OK with big long range government programs in theory. Unfortunately it's virtually impossible to do sustained government projects (like put humans on Mars) because the people that fund those projects have to worry more about where the money is spent rather than the actual outcome of the project. And the person that chooses the project changes every 4 or 8 years and usually doesn't want to look like they support anything the last guy did. Meanwhile the guy(s) that decide where the money goes hang around forever, so the money goes to the same people, just for a moving target of a goal. Which is why we are going back to the Moon, no Mars, I mean capturing an asteroid but still giving lip service to Mars, but not really. Or something like that.

Actually we have horrible hyper-sensitve pattern recognition. That may keep us safe, but it also has us seeing faces in toast, believing in ghosts, and generally imagining that there is a tiger behind every bush and boogieman under every bed.

In a way, I am an Islamophobe. In general, I don't like religion. I really don't like holy texts that are inflexible and ever promote violence. Even if there are flowery versus, once there is a rule to shun, maim, stone, or behead someone - I am not a fan of that text. So all the Abrahamic religions are less than awesome in my book.

That said, people have this crazy ability to interpret these texts and cherry pick from them. So while I'm a bit of an Islamaphobe, I am not a Muslimaphobe. At least not any more than I am a Christianaphobe or a Hebrewaphobe.

So, believe it or not, you can dislike religion but not assume that all religious people are evil, stupid or insane. Though honestly, why anyone bothers with religion is a complete mystery to me.

In other, other words. You're both wrong.

By lumping all men together you are doing nothing to make the world a better place. Blanket statements about gender and race are the problem, not the solution.

And of course, as pointed out elsewhere, you are wrong. A female teacher turned him in. But that is irrelevant.

The internet is full of men and women of every race that are scared and angry. They are going to lash out. I know I've done it.

The fact that some people go overboard does not mean there is not a problem. It just means that humans are tribal and tend to split into "us and them" when they are angry and afraid. In some ways the fact that women feel the right to be an "us" is a sign of progress.

It helps not to pretend to know what it's like to be something we are not. Don't assume that something you have experienced is common, nor that something you have not is not. That's simple conformation bias.

Look into why professional orchestras have people audition behind a screen. Look into the offers made to Ph.D applicants based on the name on the resume. Same resume, different name, men get offered more money. They get rated higher. Bias is real and we are all guilty of it. And to get back on the topic of this article, bias against race and religion is real too. (And I say this as a person that is not fond of any religion. But I have to acknowledge there is prejudice if I'm going to be intellectually honest. And I have to try to sort through my own prejudice if I want to live in a more just world.)

Don't bring facts to an ideological fight.

Wherever you got your education and wherever you get your "information," you have been seriously let you down. You don't know what socialism is. It's your boogieman. I'm not even arguing for it, just that you have no fucking clue what it is.

But here is a hint, passing a law that you have to have medical insurance is not socialism. Passing a law that medical insurance must meet certain minimum standards is not socialism. Passing a law that will "redistribute" some tax money from the the wealthy to the poor to help them pay for mandatory health insurance is not socialism.

The ACA may be a disastrous hodgepodge of the compromises required when the government is owned by lobbyist and half the legislature is butt hurt and won't participate in a constructive manner because the other party won the presidential election. But it's not socialism. It's pure "American Exceptionalism."

Funny thing. The same people that want to require voter ID don't want a national ID. They want it to be hard for poor people to vote. It's a feature, not a bug.

It's really classist. The racist part is a side effect that a greater portion of African Americans and Latinos are poor. In the US while just under 10% of whites are poor, both African Americans and Hispanics have poverty rates over 25%. Poverty creates quite a feedback loop that tends to make everything more difficult and expensive. Anyway, if you look into it you will find that voter id laws typically act as a filter that removes poor citizens (actual citizens) that are having a rough time all in the name of solving a problem that does not exist.

This is an article about Porsche making an electric sports car. Porsche knows a thing or two about sports cars.