Didn't that end up turning nearly everyone in the world into murderous, light-shunning monsters in the movie?

Pretty much all of the experiments done on the ISS show the opposite. The plants tested so far don't care about "up". Or, rather, to them "up" is towards the light source and "down" is towards moisture.

What are you smoking there exactly? .01% efficiency for electric lighting? You did put in in your calculation as 1%, but even that's ridiculously low. Even the earliest electric arc lights weren't that inefficient. For modern electric lighting, you're looking at more like at least 30% efficiency, if not more. I have no idea why you included the "light to carbohydrate" efficiency in your calculations. I'm assuming it was to compare against "artificial chemical mini-reactors", but you didn't really give any numbers or description of those processes, so it's not exactly a reasonable comparison, especially since you can get a lot more from plants than just simple sugars. Efficiency of generated light is also a bit harder to figure out because grow lights tend to be tuned for maximally efficient photosynthesis and don't "waste" as much energy as natural sunlight. Your .01% (although you put it in your final calculation as 1%) efficiency for photosynthesis is typically more like 3 to 6% for plants with real sunlight and would probably be at least upwards of 5% for "tuned" artificial light. It's theoretically possible with efficient enough solar cells and artificial lights to take sunlight in through solar cells and produce artificial light from the electricity which actually is more effective at growing plants than the original sunlight. It would require higher efficiencies than are likely to ever become available, however. Still solar powered grow lights don't actually fare as terribly against direct sunlight as you make it out. Also when comparing with Earth, don't forget that space stations beyond LEO (or even in LEO with certain orbits) will tend to have greater insolation than Earth.

In any case, the actual efficiency is going to end up being something more like .15x.3= .045 or 4.5% conservatively, but probably higher. At the same stage of the game, the power available to a chemical mini-reactor is going to be .15, or 15%, since it's getting its power from the same solar cells as the greenhouse. So, then it's a question of how efficient the artificial reactor is versus the plant at converting its input power source to final product. This is of course ignoring the fact that an assortment of plants (and fungi, algae, etc.) is an incredibly complex chemical factory that can produce everything a human needs to survive, whereas a chemical reactor that produces simple carbohydrates... produces simple carbohydrates.

Whoops, submitted too soon. I was just going to add about your secret evidence scenario (yes, yes, it's only the provenance of the evidence that's secret, not the evidence itself) that Franz Kafka wrote a lovely little story about just such a court system.

The expression used was "who's to say" that they didn't. It seems pretty unlikely now, but the people who said that the three letter agencies were doing some of the things that we now know for a fact that they have actually been doing were called crazy and paranoid before. After a certain level of complete betrayal, there isn't much reason to give the benefit of the doubt. As for the effort required, who would have thought (except for sane, logical people, who can reasonably extrapolate future trends) that the DMCA and other such laws would lead to automated takedown bots searching for video, audio, etc. acting with very little human supervision?

Which does tend

Yet another baseless conspiracy theory from the tinfoil brigade.

Umm, actual reality backs this up pretty well. Look up "parallel construction".

Underground habitats are required not only due to the radiation threat but also due to the cold temperatures.

Temperature on Mars does not translate to temperature on Earth. The very thin atmosphere means that there's much less actual heat involved than the same temperature on Earth and also that a low temperature on Mars doesn't draw heat away as fast as a low temperature on Earth. Building underground is probably neccessary due to radiation concerns, but heat might actually be more of a problem below ground where the temperature is going to tend towards the average air temperature, so it's not actually going to be any warmer, but will suck heat from the compressed atmosphere in your tunnels.

Mars has an atmosphere. It's very thin, so radiation and meteorites are a concern. Micrometeorites are not, however. They burn up or lose momentum in the atmosphere, thin as it is.

Mars has lower insolation than Earth due to distance from the sun, but it's not as bad as you think. Not least because you're exactly wrong about the murkiness/dustiness of the atmosphere. The Martian atmosphere is spectacularly clear. Even during the worst dust storms (which aren't really all that common) the amount of light reaching the ground is barely affected. So, although the average insolation on Earth is 250W/m^2 and the average on Mars is 150W/m^2, more of that power is actually usable on Mars. Based on the numbers I could find for Spirit and Opportunities 1.3 m^2 solar arrays, which average about 24 Watts electrical(that's an average, bear in mind), that's an average of something like 18.5 Watts per m^2. It's a peak of maybe something like 60 Watts.

It doesn't seem like all that much. You would need a 6m X 6m array just to run a heavy duty consumer microwave at midday. Whether it would be reasonable or not depends on how light the panels can be made compared to other power sources.

We actually don't know that at all. We know that there is deterioration in microgravity/freefall, but we don't know that ~1/3 Earth gravity or even ~1/6th will lead to any deterioration at all. We won't know until we've either had astronauts on an extended trip to Mars or the moon, or until we've tried some other experiment like centrifigul "artificial gravity" in orbit. It may very well be the case that there's no deterioration, or that it can be avoided by wearing weights or just maintaining a higher level of activity.

Not exactly the case. They "had" to be carried due to an abundance of caution. Every last one of them was able to walk in much less time than they could have possibly recovered lost muscle mass. That makes it pretty clear that, while they were weaker than when they went up, the only problem most of them had was with remembering how to balance and walk.

I've looked into this a bit myself. I consider it unlikely to be neccessary on Mars and probably the moon as well. One important consideration is human comfort. In any rotating system with rpm higher than about 2, some humans experience Coriolis forces that make them feel sick. Above 7 rpm is unbearable for pretty much everyone. I believe I calculated it as requiring something around a 230 meter radius to get 1 G with coriolis forces kept low enough that no-one would be uncomfortable. I envisioned it as a high speed train running on a sloped wall at a bit under 180 kph. Once again though, it's highly unlikely that it would be neccessary.

A space elevator made of a simple mechanical cable may very well be impossible with normal matter. Of course, it often turns out that there are plenty of ways to cheat. I've had a nearly lifelong aversion to authoritative statements that "X is obviously absolutely impossible because of physical law Y" (you said "could" so you seem to understand). I remember reading an article back when I was 7 or 8 "proving" through math and physics that it would be impossible for a dragon (of a given size) to fly. Of course, the person who wrote the article understood math and physics, but not aerodynamics, so they started with the assumption that a heavier than air flying animal must produce downward thrust equal or greater than its own weight.
As an example, consider the launch loop concept. There are physics problems still to be worked out in getting it to work, but there's nothing wrong with the basic idea of the powered structure. Now, if you take, for example, a 200 mile long steel cable (on an infinite, frictionless plane with normal Earth gravity, blah, blah, etc.) connected to an infinitely strong post at either end and stretched so that it is lifted off the plane along the entire length. It can't happen, the cable will snap. Double (plus a little extra) the cable length and replace the posts with devices that catch the incoming side of the loop and throw the outgoing side. Now the cable can form a rigid arc, suspended in the air without snapping and it may be possible by mucking around with electromagnetic effects to build on top of the arc. It requires power to keep it up, but not ridiculous levels. It doesn't ignore the physical limits, it's just a different arrangement of the same matter (plus some extra) that is restricted by the same physical laws, but in different ways. It might be possible to build a sort of space elevator on the same principles with a loop with a very high arc.You could build a series of them reaching to different elevations and support a space elevator cable every 60 miles or so. Once you're up a few thousand miles, gravity drops low enough that you can string a traditional style space elevator cable from the apex of the highest loop to geosynchronous orbit. You could do the same thing with orbital loops as the elevator supports.

Of course, if you can build a working space loop, it's hard to see what you would need a space elevator for, but this is just a thought experiment. It demonstrates that there probably (almost certainly) is a way to cheat and string a cable that high. It's almost certainly not the only way. Lots of half-baked ideas spring to mind. Electrostatic jets along the lower parts of the cable, powered from the ground either through conduction along the cable or microwave beams. Cable supports held aloft by ground based lasers. There may be all sorts of ways to power the cable internally to make it effectively stronger than any possible static material. I can't really think of anything offhand that wouldn't be likely to vaporise the cable, but that doesn't mean there isn't a way. It may turn out, of course, that any method of making the space elevator work would be self defeating - that, like the launch loop idea, would render the space elevator obsolete - but some variation on the idea is probably possible.

Other people have commented on the lousy "size of Texas"-style "2.3 times larger than Earth" bit, but there's so much more wrong with this. There's the now standard "artists representation" header artwork/slideshow teaser that doesn't even have any sort of disclaimer that it's not a representation of any kind of this planet. There's also an appalling lack of any of the figures people really want to know such as what the surface gravity would be on this planet. I'm getting about 3.3 G based on the diameter and mass they give. Surface area is about 5 times that of Earth. The year is about 1 and a half Earth months. The temperature is over 200 degrees celcius, close to the melting point of tin.

The cupola on the ISS is sort of a space patio. Also do ISS and space shuttle decks count?

I think you're ignoring that the university generally profits directly from the textbook sales.

Good grief. If you can't see how these kind of tying arrangements limit consumer choice and create monopolies, it's probably hopeless to try to explain it to you.

People like me? :) You mean people who realize that making optimal choices when faced with many interdependent factors is very hard. Oh, and also that people are generally not acting with perfect information about all aspects of such an arrangement beforehand.