I would start by creating self contained units that can survive equally well in the sahara, antartica, and underwater with minimal* air exchange with
the outside. Salt water, cold, and sand are notoriously hard on equipment and if a single type of unit can survive in all 3 environments then they
might have a fighting chance. My guess is we have very little that can survive 80 years in any of those 3 environments without repair materials
being sent and I don't see mars being self sufficient for a very long time.

* the only reason I say minimal is that there is no reason even on mars that you couldn't do outgassing or ingassing of needed or unneeded
gases. It doesn't have to be 100% self contained if there is some way to regulate correctly the amount of different gases in the environment.

Loopholes are only the tip of the iceburg. Even if you attempted to remove all the loopholes, you would still
be sunk as a large multinational basically has the ability to write it's own loopholes. It also has other tricks
that individuals don't have like telling random country X that they will move 30million dollars to their country
if they give them below market taxes. Walmart and factories do this all the time where they will get 5 years
where they don't have to pay any sales tax for building a new store. Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, etc... are
just doing it on the national instead of the local level. The only way I see of fixing this (instead of playing
whack a mole) is to tax them based on sales and employment in the countries. i.e. if starbucks is selling
their coffee in the USA (which they obviously are) then their profits have to be in the USA too and to do this
you need to either figure out a way to treat all the shell companies that places like starbucks create as a
single entity or tax them in a way that shell companies don't create an advantage.

I still don't get it. So a company made a bad call and dumped inventory. In this case it
was to a landfill presumably so they wouldn't flood the market and bring down cartridge prices.
Also, from the looks of the titles, there were a lot of titles. My guess this is a pretty common
practice. Microsoft wants full shelves of their latest OS at best buy so they ship a bunch of
units, cost to them is basically nothing. The ones that don't sell get sent back and destroyed.
It would be against their best interest to sell them for pennies and dilute the market.
What is so special about atari doing it when everyone does it?

Strangely, there are lots of those now bidding in the $200+ range. I was going to post that there is no way they would
ever get their excavation costs back but I might be wrong. What are people buying these for? I also have a large box
of working atari games. You can buy large lots on ebay or at garage sales for next to nothing. Why the
premium? Is it just because of the history?

It's not microsoft's fault. If they want greater adoption, donate them to the schools. If they want
greater publicity, donate them to newscasters (which is what they did). The problem is that if
you give 100s of devices away then yes more people will use them but people will still use other
devices too unless you actually ban all other devices. There are two photos. How many photos
are there of just the surface or just an ipad? You're never going to get 100% of people to like and
use your product. Yes, it looks bad, but with the popularity of the ipad it was bound to happen
a few times where they are caught in the same room with someone using one and not the other.

Just because it is currently only in africa doesn't mean there wouldn't be plenty of
paranoid people in first world countries willing to pay money for a vaccine.

Sure there is a market. There are plenty of companies that make plenty of money by selling to paranoid people. Look at all the
money made during Y2K. If they were selling an ebola vaccine at walgreens people would be lined up around the block getting it.
I was actually just thinking that this would be a decent way to pay for ebola vaccines. Sell them as a buy 1 give 1. Everytime
some paranoid person buys one at walgreens then they donate one to africa. This has the added benefit as the vaccine to
africa is probably just as effective at keeping the paranoid person healthy than actually being vacinated themself.

It doesn't work that way. The population size was 9. You're only right if those 9 were pulled from random from the current
human population but that's not what happened. They were all exposed. It would take a rediculous amount of trials if all results
had to be divided by 6 billion (or whatever the current population happens to be). That's like saying a bug spray that killed all 10k
mosquitos might not work because there are 10 trillion mosquitos in the world so your sample size is too small. I agree that they
should now test a bigger but it doesn't make sense to divide their results by 6 billion.

Why only 10%. It should be at least 50% but I prefer 100%. Of course most everything created by congress is
needed by someone and those someones would most likely pick those categories. If congress is actually
allocating money the way their constituents want them too then in theory letting people pick where their tax
dollars goes should end up exactly the same. You could also have a box which says "area of most need" where
people could give to or only let the taxpayers allocate 80% and have the remaining 20% go to cover shortfall
in certain areas. This might work even better at the local level where idiot politicians cut off funding for firefighters
and schools instead of programs that hardly anyone but the politicians care about.
Whose priorities are we talking about? The politicians priorities, of course it won't line up, that's the point, but
it should line up just fine with the taxpayer and general population's priorities.

Because if they really are the opposing party then they should at least try to oppose the talking points of the republicans.
If they can't even pretend to do something different on the major issues then it shows they don't even care anymore
if we know that they are one and the same.

Maybe not line item veto but I support the idea that taxpayers can select which pile their money goes into.
Yes, someone else would probably still fund the other programs but that's the point so that you personally
can fund what you personally care about. That would also give the politicians something to do. They could
lobby individuals to support this war or that war or this charity because it is way underfunded but if noone
was willing to give any of their money to that program then that program dies like it should. And who cares
if some agency like the fire department gets way more than it needs, people are supporting what THEY
think is important and the stuff that politicians think is important when their constituents don't die like it should.

Columbus wasn't concerned with a genetic pool and although some crossbreeding probably occurred (most likely via rape)
this was mostly unintentional and the "legitimate" chidren probably crossbreed very little. Even with a "one way to stay"
type program genetic diversity is a very very minor concern assuming new colonists keep coming as it will take generations
to start seeing problems and a single shipment of sperm can fix the problem completely. It's just not a big deal.
The oxygen, plants, etc... is a much bigger deal but even that's relatively easy to overcome if you can overcome the #1
problem. The #1 problem is there needs to be a reason to go. Columbus came to america for trade, to make money, and
to make a better life for himself. Colonists later came to america to make a better life for themself. Colonists went to
australia and georgia as a penal colony to improve the life of both the prisoners and free up resources for the mother
country. People travelled west for the chance of getting rich and/or to have a chance of a better life. People immigrate
to america to make more money and/or to have a chance at a better life. See a trend here? Every major immigration
or colonisation has always been about either making money or improving one's individual lot in life. Currently you could
have a better quality of life in the sahara or antartica. There are also probably more resources easier to get there too.
The first major colonies in space will probably be similiar to floating oil rig platforms. Very high paying, very risky jobs
mining asteroids for gold, etc... Disovering a large amount of oil on some moon might be the catalyst needed or some
other rare much needed resource. These will most likely start out as 2-5 year gigs where you get to return home afterwards.
A permanent colony will probably come after there are quite a few temporary colonies and a decent amount of infastructure,
restaurants, etc.. already in place in space. You need a high value reason and i'm not sure space tourism is it but space
mining or space oil might be.

We should buy 2 cruise ships. One for suspected ebola carriers, one for known ebola carriers.
Anyone remotely suspected should be allowed to take a paid vacation on the cruise ship. They
can also be given protective gear if they like but for the most part this should be a relatively
safe ship where anyone testing positive should be immediately moved to the second ship where
proper medical care can be given.

This is more humane and probably alot cheaper in the long run than many of the current solutions.

People stopped using mechanical watches because other watches were better. Also many
high quality mechanical watches self-wind as long as you wear them. Not wearing them
is actually a problem. They actually sell special cases to wind mechanical watches when
not in use: http://www.rakuten.com/prod/4-...

If the apple watch is better (in any sense of the word) then it has a chance. The only problem
I see with nightly charging is that (at least with smart phones), that usually means that
heavy users have to charge midday which IS a pain.

One interesting thought experiment is that if you wanted to contain an AI without it trying to escape then you
could put it in an environment where it didn't know it was in a prison then you could interact with it by going
into this environment like the movie "13th floor". The next logical jump is of course, that we are the AI and
that's exactly where we are at.