In the past several hundred million years, we've had a few major strikes resulting in extinction events. Humanity would survive such an event. We're not localized and we're incredibly adaptable. Earth is going to become uninhabitable sometime before another billion years is up. Odds are we have hundreds of millions of years before we have to get off-planet, which is not "fairly soon in terms of our evolutionary history".

And, after such an impact, Earth would still be more hospitable than Mars. If we could set up a self-sustaining Martian colony, we could set up preparations for a much larger self-sustaining colony here.

Your points 1, 2, 4, and 5 can be satisfied by robotic missions. Your point 6 is of limited importance, because it's an experience that cannot be properly shared that would be available to vanishingly few of us. Point 3 is going to be impossible to do anything about for quite some time, and I don't see that sending humans to Mars now is going to help anything.

Modern subs carry a lot of consumables, and also have to go back to port every so often for maintenance. They are not designed for habitation for years on end. They are not designed to replace their own consumables and fabricate their own replacement equipment. We've tried creating self-sustaining environments, and haven't succeeded all that well yet.

I actually don't think the ocean-vacuum comparison is bad. Both are hostile environments that we need the proper technology to get through.

The problem I see is what's on the other side. People trying to colonize places on Earth arrived at spots with air, water, available food, tolerable temperatures and usually arable land. It was possible to fit pretty much everything needed into a cargo hold. No place in the solar system off-planet matches those criteria.

Not arguing with Munroe on this one, but I'm not at all sure that sending people to Mars at this time is going to help keep a presence off-planet. What we need for off-Earth colonization is so mind-bogglingly large that we're not going to make a dent this century. I'd rather see improved robotics and robot explorations for now, probably to be followed by heavily roboticized colonies at least partly built before the humans arrive.

Leasing and financing are two different things, similar in effect.

If I lease a vehicle, it really isn't mine, and I have to pay attention to the terms of the lease. If I finance a vehicle, I'm buying it outright with a loan secured by the vehicle. (I bought my first car with an unsecured loan, to add to the variety.) Obviously, I have to pay off the loan, but other than that I can do pretty much as I please with the car.

Are there places where you lease a cell phone? I haven't seen one.

I don't think you have the legalities right here. The phone isn't a lease, it's a sale, frequently (in the US) partially subsidized by a contract (with fees for terminating it early). AT&T doesn't really care what I do with my phone, just as long as I keep making the contract payments.

If you can swap batteries easily, you have some sort of battery bay. The bay has an internal cover and an external cover, doubling the covers. Moreover, I suspect that one of those batteries requires a case, meaning that the cross-section through the battery compartment has battery bay cover, outside battery cover, inside battery cover, and battery bay inside before you get to the back of the screen, as opposed to a phone skin. This means that the nonremovable battery can be larger than the removable one. Like many design decisions, it's a tradeoff.

Moreover, you can indeed buy external iPhone batteries. It won't be as convenient to use, but if you want to extend the battery charge you certainly can do so. So, there's the large battery and external recharge way, or the smaller battery and internal recharge way. Both work.

Can you provide a cite? I've read all the xkcd cartoons, What If? columns, and the recent book multiple times. I'm not remembering anything about not orbiting the moon.

Also, Munroe was a robotics engineer, and in a fairly recent cartoon claimed that the bulk of his knowledge of orbital mechanics was from Kerbal Space Program.

In order to evaluate this, we really need to know how many times the engineers advised against launch, and how serious they were. If there were engineers advising against most launches, this protest is much less significant.

BTW, the engineers were not advising replacing the O-rings. They were saying that the O-rings were not rated for launches at the temperature predicted for launch time. Delaying the launch for warmer weather would presumably have averted the disaster.

Does this holy Steier have words of wisdom on other topics that we might learn from him?

Or, for that matter, what is his judicial appointment? State supreme court? County court? Something else? That would qualify him to speak on what the law means.

In the absence of divine enlightenment or judicial appointment, it would appear that Steier was making a statement about the law that is as authoritative as one I (or mark-t) might make.

That law is of questionable constitutionality. Has the Supreme Court ever ruled on this?

IANAL, and this might be painfully obvious, but it seems to me that a state trying to block a transaction between a resident of that state and a resident of another state is on shaky legal ground.

I fell in love with CP/M when I started working with it, after being familiar with several different OSes (mostly on mainframes). Here was an OS that got in my way no more than any other I'd tried, and it used few resources in doing it. (Later, MacOS became my favorite, since it actually seemed to help me, and then I encountered Unix. I haven't found anything I like better than Unix/Linux.)