You may want to look into uBar (ubarapp.com)--I've heard good things about it. I'm considering it myself, though I've never had problems with the dock.

Different systems have different control paradigms. The fact that things don't work the way you expect doesn't mean they're bad, just that they're different.

For instance, cycling through open applications makes a lot more sense to me. I really like that I can raise a single window without bringing the entire application to the front. This is something that consistently infuriates me in Windows with certain applications. I also like that an inactive window that you have your cursor in will still respond to the scroll wheel. (I know that's something that works in most XWindows window managers, but it doesn't in my Windows work environment.)

Anyway, a lot of the functionality can be hidden, but that's why Macs are popular among us that are buying computers for other people. Most of what you want is available in some form or another. You may have to learn some new tricks, just as I'd have to relearn a bunch of tricks if I went back to Linux or OpenBSD. Context switches are never free.

I totally disagree. A dusty fission fragment reactor has been demonstrated using a non-nuclear substitute fuel, which demonstrated proper containment and thermal management. And modelling shows that such a configuration should produce a collimated fission fragment beam. So what's so grossly impractical? Have you come across a paper indicating that it's impractical? Because I sure haven't.

My previous comments apply to NEP

I'm not talking about NEP. I'm talking about generating a RF plasma and funnelling it through a nozzle, like in VASIMR, but with primary heating being from an IR nuclear lightbulb. And even if I wasn't, commentary on conventional nuclear reactors vs. solar is inapplicable when one is talking about totally different type of reactor.

Hmm... I'm not sure what you're thinking about doing with CAD, but a Sim that handles real inorganic (and potentially simple organic) chemistry and materials properties could be incredible for enabling the crowd-sourcing of simplifying the tech chains of refining and production, which on earth are just ridiculously long and totally impractical to just migrate to Mars. The users would be given a realistic distribution of raw Martian minerals, and would have to feed the 3d printers / molders / CNC machines / lithography / robotic assembly that makes products. These products would include a (long) fixed set of needs to keep colonists alive and comfortable, as well as spare parts for your refining / mining equipment and the manufacturing hardware's equipment. Users could then try to produce as much of a colony's needs as possible with as little imported hardware as possible.

Simulating wear and corrosion on the refining, transport, and mining hardware would be a must. I think requiring the users to design the full details of the 3d printing and other manufacturing hardware would be overkill, but they should be able to choose what materials different "major parts" for them are made out of and what they want to supply as raw materials, which would affect wear / corrosion rates / efficiency / etc. Game consultants should include a wide range of people with real-world experience in different industries to make sure it's realistic, and the game should be launched with a variety of real-world pieces of Earth mining and refining hardware so that new players have something to start out with and tweak (albeit starting out heavily reliant on imports from Earth). As each person designs a new piece of hardware and tries it out, it should be saved to a global database, along with a history of what it's been taking in (raw materials, parts, etc) and producing as an outputs. Others could then search through the global database for equipment that does a function that they need to incorporate into their hardware.

The game could run in a MMO mode or single-user sandbox mode. In MMO mode there would be multiple users each with their own mine, refining center, manufacturing center, or whatever they want to build) on Mars, while in single-user mode a user would have their own whole planet to play with on their own. Once they get a production line running they can dispatch transport to carry materials or goods to where they're needed, there can be mishaps along the way, etc - all of the elements of your typical enjoyable Sim game - except with real-world chemistry and mechanical properties underlying key aspects. The victory condition would be total manufacturing indepence from Earth. The loss condition would be overstraining Earth's ability to supply you, leading to shortages and colonist deaths.

I think something like that could, if well designed, be both potentially fun for users and useful for engineers designing real-world infrastructure.

Great! Now you just need to invent an actually functional confinement method for the absurdly-hot gaseous/plasma nuclear fuel to stop it from destroying its containment vessel or leaking out its fuel in short order. And while you're at it, you should probably go ahead and invent a way to stop the quartz / fused silica bulb from undergoing blackening when exposed to a neutron flux, something it's so prone to doing that people deliberately expose quartz to nuclear reactors to make opaque black quartz for jewelry. And of course, a way to start the whole thing, a process that's been so problematic that they've been investigating bombardment by sizeable amounts of bloody antimatter as a potential solution.

Easy as pie, surely! Riiight around the corner.

What isotope are you thinking of as fuel? Unicorn-235?

The shuttle wasn't thrown away, nor were the boosters - only the (rather simple) ET. How did that work out, price-wise?

It's simply not fair to pretend that launch costs are a minor issue. They are the limiting factor, and progress in reducing costs has been lethargic over the past decades. "in orbit operations" are expensive precisely because launch costs are so high. Bargain basement, pay-out-the-nose-for-insurance launch rates are $4-5k a kilogram. More typical Russian rates are about $6-7k, while typical US and European rates run about $10k. And that's for large payloads, for small payloads expect in the (very) rough ballpark of $20k. How do you expect to live affordably in space if launch costs are even within an order of magnitude of that?

That's not to say that rockets fundamentally can't provide cheap access to space. But today's rockets certainly can't.

Presently working or theoretical? If you want "presently working", then that would defeat the point of asking for suggestions, would it not? If you want theoretical, there's tons. I kind of like the Launch Loop concept - sort of like a space elevator except that it doesn't require unobtanium, avoids or reduces the countless other problems with space elevators (micrometeorite damage, oscillation modes, power transfer, lightning and ionospheric discharge, and about 50 other things), and it gives you much more ideal/customizable orbital momentum, plus is 1-2 orders of magnitude more energy efficient at lifting cargo (space elevator climbers have to rely on beamed power, there's no practical way to send it through the cable, and beamed power over great distances where one receiver is only a few square meters at best is very low efficiency) AND offers a far higher launch rate.

Earth-based space elevators, the stuff of sci-fi nerd dreams, really are an awful solution when you start looking at the details. There's far better solutions out there.

Space has resources. They're called asteroids. Often quite valuable resources, actually - although learning to mine in microgravity will be a trial-and-error process.

Let's be honest, the main sellable goods of a Martian colony would be martian minerals for the jewelry / collector industry (which would sell for many times their weight in gold... a fundamental requirement of martian exports, given the cost of return payload deliveries) and tourist trips for the few multi-billionaires obsessed with space. It's hard to envision in even the medium term much more coming from a Mars colony than that which could pay for itself. And these things wouldn't come close to paying for the cost of the colony, in any regard. I certainly don't expect to see, say, industrial minerals exports in the medium term; a "creative economy" means people which means ridiculously high upkeep costs; and the concept of martian manufacturing being competitive with Earth's is just laughable. And science is much more cheaply done with disposable robots. One could probably factory-produce a hundred Curiosity rovers and mass launch/land them in every corner of Mars for the cost of one manned mission (let alone a "colony"). One could probably launch an automated nuclear submersible-drillship into the oceans of Europa for less than the price of one manned Mars mission.

If you thermalize your fission fragments. Sure, that's what all current fission reactors do, but it's not a fundamental requirement. About 80% of a nuclear reaction's energy is in the form of fission fragments - high energy heavy ions - which can be decelerated for power without Carnot losses, without a thermodynamic sink. The key is that you can't use fuel elements with any serious thickness to them (otherwise most fragments will thermalize) - the fuel elements have to be wires, sheets, dust, things of that nature, with magnetic fields to separate the fragments from the fuel.

On the other hand, when it comes to propulsion, nukes are the bees knees. No form of currently-achievable propulsion yields a higher Isp than a fission fragment rocket, with the exception of photonic / magnetic sails, which are impractically low thrust for interplanetary travel. Some day I'd love to run some simulations as to whether you could have a spallation-driven subcritical dusty fission reactor get rid of much if not all of the moderator mass (power to drive the accelerator should be copious from a fission fragment reactor), and whether you could run one in an infrared nuclear lightbulb mode (making use of the electrostatically-contained dust's extreme surface area and low IR absorption spectrum to get high output, rather than using extreme, unmanageable temperatures to get high output as in a traditional nuclear lightbulb concept), thus opening up non-dirty high thrust power modes for surface operation (airbreathing, simple fuel heating, etc, including using electricity from fragment deceleration to run a microwave beam to help ionize the air/fuel and make it more opaque to IR) and a few other space options (such as a nuclear VASIMR-like mode)

Yeah, you're right. I was distracted and I didn't complete my thought.

It basically boils down to this: large accumulations of wealth are effectively outside of the economy, and inheritors of wealth wield outsized influence with respect to the contributions they've made to society.

These massive disparities in wealth would be fine if there were reason to believe that we really are all equal under the law, but I've seen more evidence against that than for it. The Waltons are effectively a new form of landed gentry, contributing little, but manipulating the system to be favourable to them and to keep other people from displacing them. We can see that money effectively creates a new tier of citizen that exists beyond the normal confines of the legal system--not only can they pay for legislation favourable to them, the super-rich generally get lighter sentences than everyone else, and can afford to buy better lawyers to begin with.

Hmmm ... You seem to have missed the even more "interesting" followup studies. I was a grad student working with some of those reasearchers, so I heard a bit about it. They took their adult solo-raised monkeys, who were highly asocial, and caged them for a while with infant monkeys. After a few months, they took those individuals and put them in the "social" cages with established groups of their own species -- and they behaved like normal, socialized monkeys.

So maybe we could try this with our "deprived" human children. Put them into a social setting (perhaps schools) with younger children, and watch their interactions. They aren't monkeys, of course, but we are all close relatives, so maybe it would work with them, and they'd become at least somewhat better-socialized humans after a while.

Or maybe humans are hopeless. We don't really know until we do such experiments on ourselves. But we do seem to have a population of good test subjects, and the results couldn't be much worse than what we've been doing. Imprisoning such young adults in response to minor mischief would seem to be exactly the wrong thing to do, if those monkey experiments apply to our species, too.

Inequality is harmful when it persists without merit.

That is, the Walton family has made a lot of money from Wal-Mart, but the wealth of the youngest Waltons isn't money that they earned, it's money that came to them because of how they were born.

Sounds like a landed gentry, to me. I have zero problems with Warren Buffet being rich, but it seems unreasonable that his children would also be multi-multi-billionaires just because he made a lot of good decisions. And Buffet agrees with me, since he's giving away most of his money and leaving his children with a lot, but not much in comparison to the total value of his fortune.

The vastly wealthy horde money over generations, and the fact is that money begets money. If you have a million dollars and invest it in something that returns 7% a year, you can live off of that forever if you're careful. You don't have to work or do anything at all--money and markets do all the work for you. If you're a multi-millionaire, you've made some money by your efforts but far more because after you have a lot, the rest is easier to come by.

I dunno, it might make up for all the things they've used to kill people over the years. If they can make more money producing reactors than selling missiles that blow up people that have oil that we're fighting over, they'll save more people than they ever killed. Available fusion power suddenly makes all sorts of other problems moot because it suddenly doesn't matter how energetically expensive the process is, we'll just throw more reactors at it, and that solves a lot of resource issues in the world.

That's not true, the mAh levels of batteries keep rising as the batteries themselves shrink. And while there have indeed been some improvements in electronics efficiencies, these have been largely offset by increased demands in various roles.