I wouldn't go to another place to live unless the odds were better than even that I could live my natural lifespan if I'm careful. I don't care if that's across town or across the Solar System. I would not go to Mars without at least a decent chance that a colony could survive. After all, going without that expectation is literally accomplishing nothing.

It always amazes me how so many proponents of 3d printing have no concepts of the centuries of technological developments and infrastructure necessary to support the culture that wants to use a 3d printer.

A colony on Mars that strives for at degree of self-sufficiency will involve lots of nasty jobs, like mining, ore processing, large-scale smelting, chemical refining, basic terrain grading and construction, along with all of the other dangerous aspects of being on Mars, like that the planet not being suitable for life as we know it.

If you want to know who to to talk to when designing your infrastructure for supporting a colony, speak with Caterpillar, or Komatsu, or Hyundai, or Honda, or John Deere. If you want to know how to deal with mineral extraction contact Freeport McMoRan or 3M or any of a large number of other mining conglomerates, or look to any of the universities that specialize in mining engineering.

And that isn't even getting to manufacturing or to food production, both of which would be required for a colony to succeed.

Shopping through a catalog is still shopping.

They're both retailers. OF COURSE they're going to sellout. THAT'S WHAT retail IS.

Well, depending on how committed you are, there could be exactly one available now...

It'll all depend on how much overlap they attempt to force. If they leave the 'alternative' an emo/goth counterculture stuff mostly out of Thinkgeek and don't try to waste retail space in Hot Topic and Torrid with stuff that doesn't appeal to their customers then they might be fine. If they turn Thinkgeek into a bastion of Nightmare Before Christmas merchandise and attempt to use the modern not-geek fad of the term geek with a bunch of plastic junk that doesn't appeal then we might have a problem.

I've shopped from both businesses, but not for the same reasons. If they keep them mostly separate and then it may work well, otherwise it could turn into a crappier version of Spencer's Gifts.

It's called amortizing the cost of an investment. Before setting-out for a business venture, the potential business needs to evaluate costs and how those costs will be managed. If the license, once obtained, is the holder's for life, then spending $100,000 for the license could be lucrative if the financing can be found to afford it. I also expect that if Italian tax law is anything at all like American tax law, that the cost of the license and other business expenses could be written-off to at least an extent depending on how the financing is structured.

Changing a MAC once won't do any good, as once the new MAC is learned, if it's seen again then it'll be recognized again.

I'm guessing that most people think that they're secure in their privacy unless they're forced into a confrontation that proves they aren't. Look at all of the corporate officers that get busted with e-mail and text messages that document their white-collar crimes. Those people are supposed to be pretty smart and even they still don't understand how the technology or the law actually work.

Uh, because then the computer voice would have to change?

The example I think of is actress Camille Coduri, whom I first saw in King Ralph in 1991, where she played a stripper-turned-consort. Admittedly was almost fifteen years between that role and her starring as Rose Tyler's mother on Doctor Who, but the change was almost startling. I really hope that they intentionally made her look worse and more chav-like.

And suddenly extremely low-cost proxy services would be offered, so that people wouldn't have to register with the government to see pictures of naked people.

I'm still waiting for the definition of pornography. Does William Adolphe Bouguereau's A Young Girl Defending Herself Against Eros qualify? How about the work of Spencer Tunick? How about Tennis Girl by Martin Elliott?

Eeeegh. That's a terrible thought...

I think it's hilarious when Windows 95 icons are more intuitive than an OS that'll literally be twenty years later from the same company. That was with icons that only had the basic sixteen ANSI colors available to them at-launch. It required an update to enable 256-color icons. If anything, limiting designers to those sixteen colors and requiring a common faux-3d paradigm ensured that all of the icons had a design consistency about them that made it difficult for others to copy, so one could usually tell if a program was a Microsoft one versus a third-party.

There's been a lot to dislike about Microsoft over the years, but historically their user interfaces were legitimately not on that list. These 'advances' are changing that.

Heh. Given how the icons are looking more like icons did in the days of Windows 3.1, maybe having a low-res screen is next. The Hipsters will love it!