There are plenty of rational reasons to go there. Not all of them are economically rational. None of them are without some amount of danger. But the notion that there is no rational reason to go into space is easily and demonstrably false. Off the top of my head:

1) Scientific discovery, particularly as it relates to the human body in hostile environments
2) Technology development
3) Preserving the species (the Earth will cease to be habitable at some point)
4) Curiosity (simple curiosity is rational if risky)
5) Economic development (space R&D has a multi-fold economic payback)
6) Because the experience of standing on another planet is as different as standing on a mountain versus looking at a post card

Untrue. The oceanographer is simply being candid. Sure they are not completely ignorant but they also know enough to know their is a lot more to be discovered. They are simply stating the obvious fact that there is a lot of territory to be explored and we haven't explored very much of it in any great detail. They are saying they are like Christopher Columbus who has learned some fascinating things about this new continent while standing on the beach but there is a lot more to be learned. If they claimed they understood it perfectly that would be false because they've barely gotten off the beach (literally).

The differences are vast. It's the same difference as standing on a mountain versus looking at a post card. Sometimes machines are necessary but more often they are a poor proxy.

There is some exploration that has to be done in person. There are some questions that cannot be answered without sending people to answer them. Questions like "are we stuck on this planet"?

The cost of space exploration has paid itself back economically multi-fold. The spinoff technologies alone are worth billions to trillions of dollars. Even the most conservative estimates of economic benefit of NASA and other space exploration research has a 3X-8X return on investment. The question isn't why should we be investing in space travel. The question is why aren't we investing more?

Earth has vast amounts of mostly unexplored territory. The 3/4 of the Earth's surface that is covered by water has only barely been explored. Sure, there are bits and pieces of dry land that haven't been explored yet though those are disappearing quickly. But right now we really don't have the technology to explore the oceans comprehensively. I think people tend to forget about the oceans and how vast they really are.

Please note this isn't an argument against going into space. We absolutely should. I'm merely pointing out that there is actually quite a bit of the Earth that we don't know very much about.

The main change is that when I hear people say "You're more likely to get hit by lightning than to have X happen" I can say "I've already been hit by lightning."

Back around 2000, I was with a group of people at an observatory up in the mountains, which we'd reached by ski-lift-gondola, after some discussion about whether the weather was turning thundery and we should cancel it because we might get stuck there for the day which would mess up our schedule. The thunderstorm decided to show up, and I was outside the observatory looking at the mountains. A few raindrops started to fall, and a bolt of lightning bounced off the building and hit me on the head. The impact wasn't very hard, maybe like dropping a pen onto a hard floor from 5 feet. My wife yelled at me to get in out of the rain. And we did in fact get stuck up there for a few hours - the gondola system shut down when the lightning struck, leaving a gondola full of kids hanging about 100 feet from the observatory for a while before they could restart it, and once they had them safely unloaded they left it stopped until the storm was over.

The other effect was that I had to tell my wife about the previous time when the group I'd with had almost been hit by lightning, hiking at the top of Colorado mountains when the early-afternoon thunderstorm set in. We'd sat down in a low rock shelter, and some of the folks were having sparks from their fingers to the wet rocks, which were making a bit of a sizzling noise.

The original court decisions that allowed wiretaps did so on the basis that telephone companies were third parties in the cases (so they didn't have standing to make 5th Amendment refuse-to-incriminate-yourself complaints, because they wouldn't be incriminated), and were corporations (so the government has the power to audit their business records, and phone bills are business records.) It was basically a loophole that was allowed because it was new technology and the government's lawyers could make some plausible arguments.

That's totally different from any supposed obligation to continue to provide services in a way that makes wiretaps useful. If Apple and Google want to provide good secure end-to-end encryption, they're allowed to. If they want to provide encryption with backdoors in it, the police can subpoena information they collect through those backdoors (though the FTC may have opinions about whether they're making honest claims about security of their products.)

No problem, but I'm not Merlin, or affiliated with him at all - just have had positive experiences with the firmware.

So a known group of people both stole a tablet from you and modified your router? That sounds rather interesting, to say the least.

Well, for it to be an actual security risk, the thieves would have to have not only your tablet, but your address. Now that could make sense if you had a break-in where it was stolen, but it again seems to be a rather unique set of fugitives who would break-and-enter, steal your tablet, root it in order to extract your wi-fi passwords, and then use that to plant data on your hard disk via a LAN and reconfigure your router.

Yes, but given the cost of an actual SWAT team, the cops would have to know you've got data, and feel that sending a set of garden variety police officers is too hazardous...which again would lend credence to the thought that it should have actually happened already; if you're a threat requiring a SWAT team, waiting for months seems like a bad idea.

Whether the Geek Squad is a quality service or not is not the reason Charter recommended them to you. The guy at Charter telling you to have the Geek Squad take a look at your computer is less of a risk to his job than "have the random neighborhood computer guy take care of it for you".

What does a tazer have to do with anything at all?

So let me get this straight...your router was hacked, a tablet was stolen, illicit data was planted on your hard disk and...your video card is broken? I must be missing something.

So your existing computer had a video card fail, but it was a dual head video card, and it failed, so instead of adding a new video card to a computer that was handling two screens just fine, you needed a new one because it "almost demands a dual vid computer"? Or, you didn't have a dual head video card, and you were worried that your computer couldn't handle two monitors? I've got 15 year old computers that are capable of that. No matter how I try to make this sentence work, I cannot. Now don't get me wrong, if you just wanted a new computer, then rock on; I'm glad you purchased one. Blaming the purchase of a new computer on the fact that the video card in the old one died, however, still doesn't make much sense to me.

Ultimately yes, but just letting time pass you by isn't the greatest method, either. Don't rush into something, but to be completely frank, there's still plenty of your story that I can't make sense out of.

I'll assume that when you use the term 'laptop' here you meant 'tablet', since you referred to a Xoom earlier. That being said, I don't think it matters. Either your assessment of what happened wasn't quite on base, or if it was, changing the wi-fi password wouldn't have helped you much anyway.

So to take that argument to its conclusion, then it is OK to place a hidden camera in a bathroom where babysitter might be bathing, changing, or other state of partial undress?

two-phase commit

I'd say just to be safe, you should be using 3- or 4-phase commit.

I'm afraid you were still semi-wooshed. I was actually making a reference to this.

Because Postgres isn't web-scale. I want web-scale.

These days people ban it because one of the characters is called by the N-word. Used to be it got banned because N----- Jim was a sympathetic and three-dimensional character, and racists didn't like that.

Dude, best quote of the day!

My dad was a chemist and chemical engineer, but he mainly worked on synthetic rubber, so while it was interesting as a kid to know that he worked on debugging new chloroprene plants, blowing stuff up wasn't part of his trade. (It was useful in college when I needed to replace some gaskets in my car with stuff that wouldn't rot as fast.) So if my friends and I wanted to blow stuff up in high school, we had to do it on our own.

Early in the video, the narrator said "our eyes just know that these (shown on the screen) videos are real", with the point being that later on he was going to surprise us that they were in fact renditions by his product.

But when I was looking at those images, I was actually thinking that they didn't look real to me. For some reason, I found myself thinking of Half-life 2.

Yes, with this new product, you the fashion and cosmetic industry will be able to make videos with models whose waist is thinner than their ankes.

I think Walmart has already solved that design problem. They're called "cankles".