If fact, it does. Being outside of the atmosphere means visible light telescopes are tremendously more useful. Radio telescopes on the far side of the moon would be far more effective. Studying each of the planets is far more effective if you're actually on or near them.

Yes we can create robots that go out there and study very specific things. They are planned well in advance, do only very limited things, and frequently fail because they're not totally autonomous and adapt poorly to the unexpected.... case and point: Rosetta's Philae lander....or any number of probes that have malfunctioned or been lost. If you put a single human out there, they can fix the problem. A person can conduct hundreds of experiments where a machine is limited to a few. A person can analyze and interpret results onsite, even design new experiments. A person can build things, onsite.

Robots have their uses. But they're not a replacement for humans. Not yet anyway.

Do you ever tire of assuming that minor spelling mistakes in an informal forum does not mean the author doesn't know the difference between the two?

I don't agree with it...but a lot of people feel freedom is good as long as it's freedom censored by them. Of course, that's not really freedom, but try to tell them that.

Because there are enough of these people to have government representation and therefore have the ability to impose their values on you, just as you have representation and have your "freedoms" imposed on them.

This is actually good compared to most self published work.

I always thought the en-dash and hyphen were the same thing and the em-dash was the long one. Apparently there's hyphen, en-dash, and em-dash and the text of the book does indeed use the en-dash...and looks a little weird.

Yes, but without anybody buying your art, or doing anything useful with your code, I think you'd probably end of feeling like your efforts are futile and lose interest.

Then legalizing and age restricting it will probably make it harder to acquire. As I recall, when I was in highschool in the early 90's--with the "War on Drugs" in full force--it was far easier to acquire pot, LSD, and cocaine than it was to get beer. Now that's just sad.

Give them a taste for free, then when they're hooked, gouge them.... Visual Studio and .Net do tend to be well received by everyone. The consensus is that it's a good product and a pleasure to use. The only problem with it is that you have to run it on Windows. So, perhaps the plan is to support .Net on Linux for a while, then yank the support for Linux away and force everyone back to Windows and SQL Server or rewrite their application for another platform.

Venus will never be inhabitable until we can radically alter the atmosphere. Colonizing the atmosphere is pointless. Where are you going to get raw materials? It would be far easier to hollow out an asteroid and colonize the interior than it ever would be to establish a presence on Venus.

Well it's clear you don't want to be part of the group. You can probably take your lunch tray from our little social microcosm and sit at your own table all alone and nobody will care. At least until you come back and shoot up the school because your self inflicted ostracization fucked you up mentally.

Any sort of sapient artificially intelligent program we "create" is almost certainly not going to be designed from the ground up. It will most likely be designed with the ability to learn, and it will teach itself.

Sand trout make the desert. Then they turn into worms. Amateur.

Well, now that you got your rant out, I'm going to tell you that you missed my point.

I don't really care too much about making social commentaries or judgements. I just think it would be interesting to see how it affects you psychologically when you are a treated differently by society. I suspect that you'll quickly become a different person and behave and perceive the world like that other person. You might ever see yourself behaving in a manner that you despise in others. It would be quite an effective way make everyone a lot more tolerant of everyone else (not just black and white Americans) because everyone can empathize with everyone else. But more importantly....what an excellent trip toy.

The point is to experience it, not just be told what it's like. We've all been told. It's a different thing entirely to experience it. And frankly, I don't have a black neighbors.