When are you going to finally write a proper microkernel, which everyone, including you secretly, knows is far superior?

So other than your paranoia, there is no actual advantage.

And before you start talking about "staying on the device", I had to go and actively disable all the Skydrive crap on my notebook, so they're all playing that game.

Nothing wrong with a piece of fiction with laughably bad science on almost every page. If someone gets a kick out of the book, then it's met its purpose. But when the author gets treated as a "Mars expert" due to his his "hard sci fi" novel, that's where I start having a problem.

We should colonize Jupiter by resurrecting the dead there.

Why would you build a moonbase for a radiotelescope or gravity wave detector? What's the argument for dropping it into a gravity well (where it can be exposed to moonquakes and moon dust) and having people operate it when you can just have it unmanned and in space (Earth-Moon L2 for a radiotelescope, Earth-Sun L5 for a gravity wave detector) at orders of magnitude less cost and far greater effectiveness?

Every one of these sort of proposals just screams "I'm an excuse that was made up solely to give us a reason to go back to the moon". The most glaring is surely 3He mining, of course ;)

We see the propulsion breakthroughs right now - there's a wide range of propulsion systems possible with current technology. Unfortunately, the turnaround on these sort of things is measured in decades (generally with a number well over "1"). And if it has any form of the word "nuclear" in the title, multiply the average time from conception to deployment by a large number.

Nobody of course is requiring rockets to be our long-term future. I have a soft spot for the Loftstrom loop concept, for example (aka, a track that holds itself up via the centrifugal force of a rapidly spinning rotor magnetically suspended in a vacuum inside it). Way more efficient and high throughput than a space elevator and requiring no unobtanium.

It would of course not make fuel cheap until we can learn to mine cheaply in space. And we're not even 1% to that stage. You have to pretty much relearn how to do everything you take for granted on Earth in space. Look at Philae just attempting to softly touch down at very low speeds - it had four different ways to try to stop it from bouncing (shock absorbers, ice screws, harpoon, counter-force rocket), and it still bounced way off and ended up in some rocks somewhere. And you're picturing setting up a whole refinery there? Yes, some day. But that day is not close.

The radiation issue is a big one that a lot of people downplay (they forget that the only reason the Apollo astronauts got away with as little shielding as they did was that their missions were on the order of a week or so long - and even still, they would have been in bad shape if a solar storm had hit. As it was they reported seeing regular flashes of light from cosmic rays impacting their retinas.

There've been a number of proposals for how to deal with shielding. One is to build a mini-magnetosphere around the spacecraft; my last reading on the subject was that it would be a realistic way to deflect most solar radiation but not GCR. You still really need physical shielding (which is a complex topic... beta and gamma are blocked by heavy metals far better than they are by light materials, but neutrons need to be moderated down to be stopped effectively, which means light, high scattering cross section elements like hydrogen; heavy ions tend to multiply high energy neutrons. And to make matters worse, forms of radiation switch around - betas kick off gammas due to bremmstrahlung, gammas can kick off photoneutrons or betas, betas can kick off neutrons too, neutron capture kicks off gammas, transmuted elements decay releasing gamma, beta, positrons, alphas, sometimes neutrons... It's really tough.

Most proposals call for using fuel, water, oxygen, etc as part (but not all) of the shielding - it's particularly good against neutrons, as all of these things are generally composed of CHON, all of which are good moderators (especially the hydrogen). A common proposal is to have the heaviest shielding around the beds, as you get better bang for your kilogram that way. I've pondered a more advanced version of that, having significantly more fuel / water / etc tankage space than you need (the extra mass would be part of your shielding anyway, so it's not really a "penalty") and having a computer system intelligently pump it around to where people are at any given point in time and where the sun is / what the current solar radiation flux is / etc. I wouldn't be surprised if you could cut the radiation dose to less than half in that manner, possibly a lot less. You'd need durable, reliable pumps, of course.

Are you kidding? I can't help but picture the MST3K characters ribbing it the whole time.

The main character is a "scientist" who doesn't use a single scientific term, instead using 50s pop-sci-fi style terms like "Oxygenator". I mean, here we have a botanist on Mars who doesn't even know the word "regolith" or understand why you'd have solar panels tilted at a particular angle. But don't worry, the book is full of such award-winning prose as phrases like "My asshole is doing as much to keep me alive as my brain". Seriously, it reads like a 13 year old boy.

But that's minor compared to how on pretty much every page we have Weir demonstrating his complete lack of knowledge of even the most basic aspects of every field of science he covers. Here, let's just pull up a random one:

Not because of the perfect landing, but because he left so much fuel behind. Hundreds of liters of unused Hydrazine. Each molecule of Hydrazine has four hydrogen atoms in it. So each liter of Hydrazine has enough hydrogen for *two* liters of water

High school chemistry, anyone? (Morbo Voice) Stoichiometry Does Not Work That Way! Weir again and again mixes up volume, mass, and moles. (For anyone not seeing it yet: hydrazine is 1,021g/cm^3, hydrogen makes up 12,5% of the mass, or 0,128 g/cm^3; water under STP conditions is 1 g/cm^3 and hydrogen makes up 11% of its mass, or 0,11 g/cm^3. 1 liter of hydrazine gives you 1,16 liters of water under STP conditions, not 2).

Here, let's grab another one of these from just a couple pages earlier:

"Once I get that hooked up to the Hab's power, it'll give me half a liter of liquid CO2 per hour, indefinitely. After 5 days it'll have made 125L of CO2, which will make 125L of O2 after I feed it through the Oxygenator."

Brilliant - not only do we have him once again confusing volume and moles, but we also have "liquid CO2", meaning that for some reason on a planet where a mere shiny bucket will hold frozen CO2 indefinitely, they've decided for no apparent reason to store it as a superfluid in heavy pressurized tanks at dozens to hundreds of atmospheres and elevated temperatures.

Oh, here's a great one: at one point he starts a diary entry by noting that he's now hiding out in a rover because he screwed up and didn't notice that his hydrogen levels in his habitat were climbing and his oxygen levels were dropping over the course of many days until he checked a meter. How much? The hydrogen went up to 64% and the oxygen levels to 9%. Really, the high squeaky voice didn't clue you in? The anoxic unconsciousness didn't clue you in? *Facepalm* Did this guy not get *anyone* to proofread?

The most mind-bogglingly glaringly bad stuff is of course the plants. As we all know, the sun is an incredibly energetic source. Look at the light in your living room for a few seconds. Notice how you're not blind. Now try it with the sun. Yeah, there's a bit of a difference. WIth the sun high overhead on a clear day the ground on Earth receives about 1000 W/m^2 of light energy. Now picture the brightest CFL you can find on the market - maybe one of those giant 40-watters? To match the light output of the noon sun would take 150 to 200 of them per square meter. Even taking into account angles, night, clouds, etc, it's a ton of energy. To grow the couple hundred meters of potatoes to feed a person? Well, you do the math.

So how does our hero plan to grow his plants? Here's Wier's entire justification

Also, the internal lights will provide plenty of 'sunlight''.

That's it. That's his entire justification on how he plans to provide enough light for his potatoes - normal interior lighting powered by a little solar farm on a dusty planet that receives half the light of Earth. Not even normal yields of potatoes, but super yields of potatoes! In regolith that he does nothing to remove the perchlorates or salts from (never mind that he does nothing to shield his electronics in his 100% ventilation-free canister from the humidity which he describes as raining down). And with Weir's humorously bad misunderstanding understanding of gardening we get his interpretation of potato mounding (aka, packing up soil around potatoes once they get to a large enough size to keep them focused on storing starch rather than going to flower):

Also, as their flowering bodies breach the surface, I can replant them deeper, then plant younger plants above them.

You see, the entire part of the potato plant that breaches the surface is merely a "flowering body". You can reuse space just by planting plants successively on top of each other like cordwood! Trust me, I'm a botanist!

Seriously, this thing is MST3K in book form. Hopefully the movie won't be this terrible. Or maybe it'd be best if it was...

I'm an idiot proclaiming the current rend is the new reality, you insensitive clod!

That's odd. I can use Google Drive, create documents and spreadsheets on all the above platforms, download them in multiple formats and edit them on other platforms.

Why would I pay Microsoft money for that which I can already do?

Why would I want to use either on a phone or smaller tablet?

That's really the point here. Full-pop word processors are not only going to take up huge amounts of limited flash storage and RAM, but they aren't even necessary.

I use Google's document, spreadsheet and slideshow offerings on my Nexus 5 and Nexus 7. They don't render every aspect of an Office document, though they are getting a lot better (Excel charts display pretty well in Sheets), but I'm really just looking for "good enough", in this case mainly reading, and maybe a very small amount of notation or editing. I'll go to my PC or notebook if I actually want to full blown spreadsheet work or composition. Even with a fully functional version of Word available for my smart devices, I wouldn't pay for the functionality because I'm not a masochist.

Thank God! Can you imagine how big the binary would have to be with all those statically linked .NET libraries?

Or Office for that matter.

I have an Asus laptop that the harddrive crapped out on. I had the displeasure of having to try to find the SATA drivers for the machine, since the generic IDE drivers were just hideous performance wise. The official download site did not have SATA drivers, or even chipset drivers (where storage drivers can often be found). In the end I did find some x64 Vista drivers from the weirdo Korean manufacturer (that was a fun website to navigate), though I still felt the performance wasn't what it had been, despite having put a faster replacement HD in.

There's some really weird hardware out there, and it can be an absolute nightmare to try to find drivers for it.