Robots can do all the work we need to do and do it for many many years, like the space probes we've sent and are still working after so long. We do the exploration by proxy then, what's wrong with that? Eventually humanity may even be followed by a cybernetic civilization, if we can manage the tech before we go extinct.

North Korea is trying to blackmail the west once again. It worked in the 90's with Clinton and it worked in the 2000's with Bush, they make a big fuss and they get money to calm down. And the US media loves it too, they get to scare people and talk endlessly about it during a slow news cycle. Ratings up, win-win.

Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars. It all makes sense now!

I think the concept of a space elevator is more to bring payloads into orbit cheaply. It costs a lot of money per ton to shuttle something into orbit now. People could still be shuttled up and payloads use the elevator, that way the price per ton in orbit would go down dramatically.

You don't understand how votes work. When you vote your age group gains and when you do not vote your age group loses influence. That is why seniors have a lot of influence, because they vote. If you don't like the presidential choices, you can still vote for your representatives in Congress and your local representatives. Evidently if you do not vote, it is your own fault, because that is how the system works.

If you read the Wikipedia entry on John Draper, that is not true at all. He seems to be doing alright for himself.

I have done this ever since I joined FB due to friends and family over-bugging me to join: I installed the Opera browser, I got a new email that I use for FB; I've used Opera only to log into FB and into the email I use for FB. I use Chrome or Firefox for everything else. I just checked my Firefox, no FB cookies!

Well, I really didn't know they have the chromium-browser package! I've installed it and it seems to be working fine. I'll play with it some more. Thank you.

Always the same console message, as far as I can tell, it is a chrome bug. It just hangs. $ chrome /usr/bin/chrome: /opt/google/chrome/libz.so.1: no version information available (required by /usr/bin/chrome) /opt/google/chrome/chrome: /opt/google/chrome/libz.so.1: no version information available (required by /opt/google/chrome/chrome)

At least for me, I've been trying to make it work for more than a year, with the latest version but it is buggy as hell. I'll give it a try when they come with a new version for Linux.

"and we network old-timers have never forgiven you AOL'ers for ruining our network." Amen!

All those reasons work for me, plus: I've been using the same computer case for the last 10 years and just keep upgrading the parts. You cannot do that with a laptop, at most you can add memory.

From Wikipedia: Retrocausality (also called retro-causation, backward causation and similar terms) is any of several hypothetical phenomena or processes that reverse causality, allowing an effect to occur before its cause.

Hurry, someone tell the Baltimore Sun that The Onion stories are satire!.

--If people were subscribing to the dead-tree edition of the Journal, he would have not just their names but their home addresses and probably phone numbers as well. Now subscribers want to pay for the same publication--the Wall Street Journal--and the publisher expects to have the same information they would if they were sending the physical newspaper.--

Ok, consider this: I stopped subscribing to ANY publication several years ago due to the constant and relentless offers I was getting. In my view, they were abusing my personal info, so I stopped them. It took a good couple of years for the offers to stop. It would make a big difference to me personally if I could subscribe and remain anonymous. But that's just me, heh.