You can put greenhouses above ground. Just make sure you have an underground failsafe and enough emergency reserves to make it through a disaster.

Even then it's probably not feasible. Look how expensive it is to go underground on earth, now consider how tough it will be on Mars when you're walking around in spacesuits and have to transport heavy duty excavation and construction equipment from earth.

More likely just put everything above ground and distributed. If an asteroid takes out a greenhouse or a house it's tragic, but it doesn't kill the colony.

Didn't tethering fees get clobbered by the FCC? The IDE is pretty light on bandwidth, the initial pageload is about 2 MB and it's just shuffling text around during use. It has a keep-alive ping, but otherwise you're only going to use bandwidth while saving changes or using the terminal. How much bandwidth does a terminal use? I recently signed up with PTel, which uses T-mobile's towers and gives you unlimited 3g / 1 GB 4g for $35/mo, no contract. I think a month's worth of coding would run substantially under 1 GB of bandwidth but I don't really have the time to do a rigorous test.

I found interpreters for Python and Brainfuck on the Chrome Store, and of course you have a JS interpreter, and any interpreters written in JS should probably work. There are rather a large number of those for some reason. There's some sort of git app too, FWIW. Beyond that there are a few Android apps that will run natively on ChromeOS without any fussing, and most Android apps can be made to run with minimal effort.

I don't know what you're coding in, but unless it's fairly obscure I'd say it's possible to code and test, offline, using a Chromebook. Either way I hope no one is twisting your arm to get you to buy one.

If a quick Google search can be believed, you can actually get a free VPS. For an IDE I'm using Cloud9, but there are equally good or better alternatives. However, I am already paying for mobile data and a VPS for other reasons. Even so, I'd still probably get out my laptop on a bus only if it was a Google bus. Or maybe Greyhound, if it had wifi. I very rarely find myself without an Internet connection, even in rural Central America. When I don't have an Internet connection, generally I'm not doing anything where I care about having one.

It's not even that I couldn't code without the Internet; there are code editors for Chrome/ChromeOS. However, not having access to API documentation would be a huge issue (for my work), and that would make OS deficiencies a moot point.

I need the Internet for work. Having to have a net connection in order to use a decent IDE is not ideal, but it's a low bar even in rural Central America, or rural Alaska. I don't really understand what it is about the idea of an Internet-only device that bothers you so much, but I am actually pretty sure that you would be less inconvenienced than you imagine.

Google also has more than 10 times the market cap (15 currently but probably closer to 10 when the report came out).

My first impression was, "WTF?! Why would anyone want to do that?" Keep in mind that not only am I typing this on a Chromebook, I basically live on this thing. For what I use it for, it works well. With a web based IDE and an SSH client, you can accomplish almost anything. Entertainment is not a pleasant situation but that's what we have gaming PCs for, right?

ChromeOS does actually have some nice features. It's nice to have updates that only take fifteen seconds, including a full reboot. The battery life is great, and it's really cool to be able to sit down at a brand-new Chromebook, type your google username and password in, and have all of your bookmarks, apps, and files available within 30 seconds. The thing is, I really don't think you're going to be able to get those same features with any other combination of hardware and software. As you point out, the boot speeds are likely not going to be any faster, and I would be surprised to learn that the non-Google versions of ChromeOS had the same, ah, vendor lock-in.

I'm very ambivalent about ChromeOS. It looks nice, it's very secure, it has a number of good features, and I feel like it is particularly good for schools. I've been able to make my Chromebook do what I want, and having a pair of them was really great for wandering around Central America for a year or so doing freelance web development. They're cheap enough to be more-or-less disposable. On the other hand, it's very much not a replacement for a real operating system. The good thing is that it sounds like the OP doesn't need a real operating system. The bad thing is that he probably isn't going to get what he likes about ChromeOS out of this either, no matter what he does. A stripped-down distro is probably the better option.

As an aside, I also share your sentiments with regards to the swapping issue. I've had a bunch of netbooks in addition to this Chromebook, and I've had real Linux running on this machine via both crouton and a direct install. With ChromeOS, I can only have 30-40 tabs open before it starts killing tabs to free up memory, and fewer than that if the pages are resource-heavy like gmail, disqus threads, or videos. In my experience ChromeOS has far more memory issues than other distos on the same or worse hardware. However, I will say that ChromeOS's failure mode of killing pages early and often works very well to prevent the machine from ever becoming unresponsive due to memory/swap issues. It's kinda hard to pick between those two problems, to be honest.

It's might be simpler than that.

Part of it might just be trade secrets, your ability to frack profitably is based on your ability to be more efficient than your competitors. Telling them your secret sauce makes that harder to do.

The other part is PR, when people want to criticize you it's easier for them if they have specific compounds to criticize. It doesn't matter if it's as innocuous as dihydrogen monoxide or as toxic as plutonium, if they have a specific label to attach to it they can make it sound bad.

There does seem to be people who are permanently clueless but I suspect you're also seeing a limitation/feature of the academic setting.

If you are in fact teaching them something then things that were difficult at the start of the course will become easy at the end, in some cases you could even take a student who finished the course one semester and have them TA the next. But when you get into industry you've filtered out everyone who can't, at that point I find a lot of the remaining variance has to do with experience and motivation.

/me quickly skims the comment

Awesome! NASA invented a warp drive!!!

They'll step out of their spacecraft and inform us that our newly invented warp drive was invented 324,123 years ago and we cannot use it without paying the license fees of approximately 2.3 earth planets per earth year.

Otherwise we will need to wait another 14,675,877 years until it enters the public domain.

I don't see what Al Gore has to do with it.

The problem with focusing on air and water quality is CO2 only becomes a major concern in the context of climate change. You could try talking about ocean acidification which is another side effect but I don't think ignoring the elephant smashing everything in the room that is climate change is the best strategy.

It's not like she's running to captain a space station, it's the Republican Primary, they dream of finding someone qualified to manage an Arby's.

It's the Tea Party, they destroy any candidate who isn't an ideologue. The only reason Romney survived last primary was he had a crapload of money and a huge existing profile, the only two potential candidates in that position this time are Jeb Bush and Chris Christy, any other moderate candidate will get destroyed as a RINO.

Your post suggested that 12/7 could mean anything and associating it with Pearl Harbor was a stretch on the part of the reader.

By contrast the mention of a 4.16 moment to the Virginia tech community is intentional and the association obvious.

Also no one thinks that an anonymous poster is going to reproduce Pearl Harbor by carrying out an air raid on a military base. But an anonymous poster can carry out a school shooting.

It's nothing to do with being "too soon" or "free speech", it's a credible threat to carry out mass murder.

If you really think that's necessary then fine, weird them out.

But why do you have to do it in the CS class in a way the re-enforces the perception that girls aren't welcome?