Actually the window for Earth closes a lot earlier than that. In about one billion years, the Sun's steadily increasing luminosity will grow to the point that no amount of Gaian adjustment can compensate for, and Earth will join Venus in the Runaway Greenhouse club.

This is not an unfounded concern. America has had periods where every now and then it became fashionable for whackos to gather in para-military groups put together frequently in reaction to progressive strides the country had made. In the post Civil War period it was the Klu Klux Klan drawn originally from Ex-Confederate troops. In more modern times there were Fascist and Nazi-Sympathizer BUNDS that would form for pretty much the same motivation only with anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism spiced with a good deal of anti-immigrant hatred. When you put this together that the largest recent surge in gun ownership was not driven by a reasonable fear of crime, but the unreasoned fear by the election of a Black President, lots of things tend to add up. These studies aren't targeting the Tea Party, they are a recognition that the Tea Party DOES draw in a lot of the extreme whacko type among it's members. Gun ownership and crime are harder things to track, but what we are seeing in a new wave of shootings is a rise of impulse shootings, which have no real clear end to them... not even the survival of the shooters. So when it comes to trying to correlate trends in gun ownership, the real question to be asked is who's now buying guns in greater quantities than before. If the rise is that of the impulse, especially fear or angst-driven buyer than the decrease in crime is DESPITE the increase in gun ownership, not because of it.

This is pretty much at the lowest of the low category, Someone who takes up taxpayer funded computer time to mine Bitcoin, should essentially be barred for life form the facility... and that's for starters.

The problem with all of you is that you all are hung up on the word "theory". Which science really doesn't use that much any more. The aim of science is to produce a predictive model. Over time models get replaced or refined by later models as they get subjected to greater and refined tests. Newton's Model was replaced by Einstein's which was further refined by Hawking which is now in the process of being refined by whatever version of string theory, if any works out. (A very simplistic and nickel analysis of the process.

Don't forget there's also the atmosphere to contend with. Not thick enough to breathe or shield you against anything space throws at the surface, but enough to contend with when it comes to landing AND liftoff.

Profitable in what sense? What exactly is waiting to be mined at a Lagrange Point? It may be a good place to anchor a space telescope, but what beyond that?

Technical spinoffs occur when you have any major effort in research and applied technology. There's a popular myth that the space program is the major, perhaps only source of "spinoffs". That's simply not true.

The Apollo Mission wasn't driven by the lure of exploration, but by the massive Cold War fear of the Soviet Union getting there first. As bad as Putin might be barking now, we're not nearly as afraid of them as we once were.

Google maps wants you to sign in so that you can access your personal lists of bookmarks and places. It's a very useful feature for quickly plotting travel times and routes to frequent places you want to go. I make heavy use of it for public transit. Your personal paranoia is barring your own access to a handy utility. Are they using this data to keep track of your shopping preferences, probably. Do I give a flipping damm? No.

The "highly outdated android phone" is running KitKat. The hardware spec difference between the 3 and the 5 and especially the 4 is hardly enough to qualify as "highly outdated", and the software is identical to that running on the 5.

Vandalism, malicious mischief, and greater crimes are the crimes they are no matter what means they produced by. If the means is by computer hacking, that doesn't make the harm any less severe.

You don't get a pass for sticking a spear in someone's chest, just because they exposed their belly.

.... they have a point. The interdependence of and increasingly wide spread use of computer controlled systems means that it's not a matter of if but when some malicious hacker is going to commit an act which brings widespread devastation, financial damage, perhaps even death. It's no longer just phreaking with the blue boxes any more kiddies. That's why I want to seriously know how Google is going to guard it's self driving cars against deliberate acts of malice. And I'm hoping that the U.S. military is keeping a similarly paranoid look at the possibility of remote drone hijacking. I still don't believe in the death penalty, but crimes committed through computer hacking should be punished on a scale that fits the damage they do, both intentional and collateral.

My quote was in response to the poster that claimed IOS8 was going to obsolete present phones.

You haven't begun to imagine the worst. see my post above.