Crossing the ocean was a dangerous and hostile ordeal. On the other hand, once across the ocean, conditions were far more hospitable. Humans can generally live off the land if they have to, and build some sort of civilization.

Now, consider any place in the solar system outside Earth. There is no breathable atmosphere. Temperatures are way outside what is survivable. In most cases, there's no available water. In other words, there has to be complex life support apparatus, and this cannot be allowed to fail. If the remaining humans are to build a new civilization, they not only have to keep their life support going indefinitely, they've got to be able to expand it. They've got to be able to maintain and expand power plants of significant size. They have to be able to manufacture each and every part required. They have to be able to mine or otherwise acquire each and every resource needed.

Consider a permanent self-sustaining Martian colony. It needs pressurization, so people can breathe. It needs to be able to replenish air. It needs to be able to produce food, and recycle water. It needs to be able to maintain a livable temperature. This implies some high tech and complicated machines. It also implies a sizable source of power. It probably has to be tens of thousands of people, to allow for necessary specialization.

This might well happen eventually. It can't happen right now, and I don't see that sending a few people to Mars about now is going to help. Once we have all the tech we need lined up, and realistic plans of how to get it there, sending a few people to make preparations will make a lot of sense.

Speaking as a die-hard liberal, Obama has screwed up a fair number of things. He was also handed a really bad situation, with the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the subsequent botching of the occupation, and the collapse of the mortgage industry and effects across the whole economy. I'm not sure a president since Lincoln has stepped into a worse situation.

Actually, I was disappointed in Obama for not pulling out earlier.

How long were we supposed to be sending US soldiers to prop up a weak Iraqi regime? What would have changed if we'd decided to stay as occupiers for another five years?

Iraq, like the economy, is a real mess that he inherited from the Bush administration. I'm not real impressed with some of the things he's done, but he really stepped into a bad situation.

And this would be different from other administrations in what way? Or private industry? Is there some large organization you can point to that doesn't try to cover up its mistakes?

Actually, private sector projects of this magnitude tend to not entirely succeed. From what I've read, the ACA website is actually coming in a bit better than average.

It is fair. Being "hard on crime" is popular in the US, despite the fact that it's really expensive and doesn't particularly discourage crime. If the electorate as a whole started reasoning intelligently on the justice system, candidates would advocate much less expensive and equally effective ways of dealing with criminals. I'm not saying there would be a significant choice between asshole#1 and asshole#2, but neither asshole would be pushing for more prisons and more punitive measures.

Weird exceptions such as explicitly leaving foreigners living abroad free of US warrants? The idea that a US court could order Microsoft US to have Microsoft Ireland pass on data hosted in Spain about a German guy who's never been to the US seems the weird thing to me.

The US does consistently require warrants for searches, except in specific limited situations. It's arguable that US courts issue too many warrants, and the NSA's definition of a "search" differs from mine, but warrantless searches aren't the main problem here.

How would simplifying the tax code reduce online searches? No matter what the tax code, it will require that certain financial things be tracked (the IRS really does have to be able to know how much money I made last year), and some people will try to hide some of these things (for example, I theoretically could have been running an underground economy sort of thing, selling drugs or DMCA-violating software for cash). Simplifying the tax code might reduce the burden on US courts and have other desirable effects, but I don't see it reducing the need for searches.

Similarly, while I'd like to see the War on (some) Drugs stopped, people will still insist on doing some illegal things. For example, there's an unfortunate amount of human sex trafficking going on, and I'd like to see that remain criminal behavior. The big problem with things like the War on Drugs and War on Terror isn't the amount of online searches done.

I don't understand. The courts pay attention to the statutes, not just the Constitution. The Fourth Amendment doesn't say "the government can always get warrants under certain restrictions" but "the government can't get warrants that violate these restrictions". Congress is free to limit warrants further, but Congress can't make a warrant not based on probable cause legal.

Congress cannot indeed pass a law that says the Executive Branch doesn't have the powers granted by Article 2 of the US Constitution (as amended), but there's really not a whole lot there about specific executive powers. In particular, there's no mention of search warrants. In the meantime, the President and Executive Branch are supposed to uphold the law of the land, which does include Congressional acts (if signed by the President, vetoed but veto overridden, or ignored for ten days while Congress is in session).

Courts can always screw up, but in general they don't act arbitrarily, and there are avenues to appeal to higher courts. If Yahoo says "but this law says this search warrant is invalid", that's a good defense against having to execute it.

In my case, I don't want to use my personal phone as a company phone. Much as I like my employer, I like keeping a division between "mine" and "theirs". It seems to me that, if IT here had to secure my phone, it would impede my ability to use it freely.

What does the mandatory 24-month warranty cover? My iPhone 4 worked just fine from the day I got it to when I replaced it with a 5S. I didn't bother with the last iOS upgrade, and that wasn't a problem that I could notice. There may have been apps that I'd have to upgrade to use, but the apps I had kept working. In other words, my iPhone 4 worked well for about 36 months, which would seem to me to satisfy the warranty. It just didn't necessarily get the enhancements of the newer models.

Spending for the general welfare (and the passage I quoted appears to cover spending only) is indeed a very sweeping clause, but it's there, and I'm interpreting it as the Supreme Court does. The opinions of the Supreme Court are more important than the opinion of a guy who helped write it. This does not cover (and the Supreme Court agrees) anything but spending. For example, when the Feds wanted to impose a 55 mph speed limit, they couldn't legislate it. They had to threaten to withhold funding for states that didn't go along. The "general welfare" clause does not permit other actions; the NSA claims (however speciously) that their surveillance is legal and conforms with the Fourth Amendment.

This wasn't as significant a clause when the Feds didn't have much money, and became much more significant when the income tax became Constitutional. On the other hand, there are situations when the Federal government badly needs loads of money, such as when fighting a war.

Could be. I don't know about piping seawater around; the stuff is corrosive. It might be better to desalinate at the sea and pipe fresh water.

What part is untested? How about the whole thing? Theoretically, it's not that difficult. We won't know about practical difficulties until we actually try it.

You think Project Orion is the solution to interstellar travel? Look, guy, space is big. Mind-bogglingly big.. You may think it's a long way to the chemist's/drug store, but.... If we can get a spaceship going at three thousand kilometers/second, it'd take centuries to reach the nearest star. You may want to calculate how much energy it would take to get something going that fast, and consider the size of a self-contained habitat that will function for centuries.

The characteristic of most deserts is not that there's a lot of salt water, but that there's not a lot of water no matter what. Granted, there are deserts that run into oceans or seas, but there's a whole lot of desert terrain that isn't. The reason why they tend to get an unusual amount of solar power is that they don't get the clouds or precipitation. So, why would we want desert-based desalinization plants?