When sample-based hip-hop is only legal on Mars, only Mars will have... wait, what was the down side again?

Less, actually. There were no telegraph lines on the Antarctic expedition, and I don't know how effective radio was (not very in the late 19th century obviously). Aside from when the two planets are on opposite sides of the sun, communication will merely have high latency. We'll be back to sending podcasts and video messages, not chatting on Skype, but it's still quite a bit better than what those early explorers faced without even leaving the planet.

When the two planets are on opposite sides of the sun (which is what, a period of less than a week happening less than once a year?), a third point will have to be used to "go around", reducing bandwidth and adding to latency, but it's still better than nothing.

You'll note I specified monolingual Americans, which are the bulk of the country and thus the bulk of the target market for entertainment. I admit this logic may not hold in other countries, where English is a common second (or third or fourth) language.

This is all set up so they can rake over the richer countries without entirely locking themselves out of the less wealthy countries.

In a world with region locking: "Let's charge $50 in Burgerland and Poutineville, because they'll pay it. But we also want to make some money off their neighbors to the south, who won't pay $50. (Maybe they can't, maybe it's the burned DVDs for sale on the street for $2.) But now we have to stop the people we want $50 from, from importing the $10 copies. Region locking!"

In a world without region locking: "Let's charge $50 in Burgerland and Poutineville, because they'll pay it in order to have the content right now. We'll wait until the popularity goes down so that it's worth no more than $10 anywhere, and only then will we send it to places they'll only pay $10." By that time, those $2 burned DVD vendors have saturated the market so it's not even worth $10 there any longer.

However, it seems to me there is a form of "region locking" that follows the same general divisions. It's called a "language". Don't ship discs with all languages, just the one relevant to the buyer. Monolingual Americans are not going to watch Game of Thrones in Spanish just to get it cheaper.

The dominance of Mayan and Aztec culture is long gone, but empires rise and fall. Tho populations themselves, however, largely survived and are still the genetic backbone of the region. Have you actually been to southeastern Mexico or Central America? If you have, you'd know the Mayan bloodlines are still exceptionally common. There may be (almost certainly is) a level of economic oppression going on due to race, but as a race, Mayans are aanything but dead. I can't speak for Aztecs (although many people identify themselves as such) because I haven't been to the areas where they might claim dominance. In any case, not even the members of the class themselves claim to be endangered. They are not. Their culture is another matter.

The problem with this is a simple matter of time. The stars thus created don't have the luxury of billions of years, or tens of billions of years in the case of lower-mass stars than our sun, to evolve complex life. It would also be a problem that, if they were to survive long enough to evolve a space-faring civilization, they would need to find a way to carry the escape velocity from the black hole in addition to all of the other energy necessary just to get away from their home planet.

You also get products for which satirical reviews are themselves a meme, such as Three Wolf Moon shirts.

(or are they fake?)

Are they going to start suing over that as well?

Collisions with someone's little sister -- a series of carefully controlled and mutually pleasurable collisions -- often produce new bodies. Why should planet-fuckers be any different?

Nagasaki wasn't a strike against Japan, it was a strike by proxy against the Soviet Union.

The first bomb was dropped to intimidate Japan into a surrender. It was working. The plan was already being drawn up, and this fact was not kept secret.

The second bomb was dropped to give the Soviets second thoughts about trying to invade eastern Europe, and it is this second bomb that many living Japanese consider excessive and unforgivable, not the first -- because they had to live with the consequences even though they weren't the real target.

Switzerland is not an EU member, and in many ways goes out of its way to have laws that would be deemed unacceptable in the EU.

Then they're doing it too much.

It takes about 45 seconds for my desktop to come up from a cold boot to login screen, and I have not yet sprung for an SSD. This is long enough to be mildly annoying, but not nearly long enough to get up and do something else. My laptop takes more like three minutes, but it's a 1.6 GHz E-350 (2 cores). It's still not a huge problem because the desktop just gets put in Sleep mode and the laptop runs continuously (I have several services running on it 24/7 in addition to using it to drive a TV). The laptop typically gets rebooted once or twice a month, and the desktop about once a week unless I'm screwing with it in some manner.

Admittedly painful is the startup time of my Aspire One (especially on battery power), but that is almost relegated to the level of "toy PC" these days.

I don't window-shop Newegg to buy from Amazon. I use Amazon to sanity-check Newegg's prices, true, but Newegg doesn't have to be the absolute cheapest option. (There is quite a bit of stuff Newegg simply doesn't have, though.)

Of course, it helps that I live less than thirty miles from two Newegg warehouses, and stuff I order usually shows up in two days (and without having the crap beaten out of it as sometimes happens with cross-country shipments).

Apparently the problems always seem to arise when one of the cockpit crew steps out to use the restroom.

What if they never had to do that again?

Add another lavatory accessible only from inside the cockpit. Fit it with a negative pressure design so air continually flows into it, never out, and there won't be an odor problem.

Thank you greatly. I'd been going nuts trying to figure out why I couldn't find it anywhere!