So now we're going to bring trained marksmen and their guns in firefighting planes? That'll cost more than $10,000.

I-5 is 1381 miles long. To have only 25% of the population living within 100 miles of that isn't very dense.

Mars has water, Venus doesn't.

The consequences of a mistake in re-engineering Earth's climate are considerably higher than on Mars.

Let's say you've moved into an apartment because it was close to your work. Every time they come over for quarterly inspections or to fix an issue you've reported, they mess up your toilet so it'll overflow next time you use it - unless you remember to specifically opt-out by asking them not to do that.

If we were able to create anywhere near 1G constant thrust, we could be going to other solar systems instead of Mars.

He's said he wants to retire to Mars, not to work there. Low gravity and a more controlled environment where it's quite possible nobody will have the flu could be good for the elderly.

I'm a few blocks from the county dump. Across the street from the dump there's a large undeveloped foresty area.... which is covered in trash and furniture and such that people have dumped there because they don't want to pay the county dump to take their stuff. So I'd say the cost of landfills for consumers is far too high -- it needs to be free, like it is with e-waste, if we want to avoid people dumping everywhere (and not have a police state).

A more reasonable solution would be to encourage people to get all their trash and recyclables to a central point by making it free, and then pay whatever we have to as a community via taxes to process it for recycling or disposal. We'd get a much cleaner world that way than we get by pretending we can make everybody responsible.

Mark pseudonym accounts as such. Put the name in a different color of whatever you need to do. That way people who want to use it anonymously don't inconvenience those who want to know who people are.

It's up to a judge to decide what evidence is admissible and what isn't. Don't blame the existence of the evidence.

Claustrophobia has nothing to do with seat size. Imagine a failure mode where the power goes off, the screens die and all movement stops. And the only way to get out is someone on the outside with a power saw.

Imagine a present where every major building has a transportation device that crams a bunch of people into a tiny space, and has a failure mode where the power goes off, the lights go out and all movement stops. And everybody inside is trapped between floors with no personal space until rescued. Oh the claustrophobia! They're called elevators. I'm not a fan of them, but they seem to have caught on pretty well the last century or so.

Net neutrality doesn't mean ISPs have to sell "unlimited data" deals. Put a 30 GB monthly cap on the lower priced service plan and let the people just looking for court information use that while the guy downloading ISOs all the time pays for a premium plan.

Originally, he needed that cache for security. At this point though, it's in the interests of all parties to leave him in Russia as a scapegoat rather than pointlessly give him prominence as a martyr years later.

The argument is that spies allow you to know that the other side isn't going to attack you first. In a tense situation, with rumors that your enemy is massing for attack, your spies tell you whether it's bluster or imminent war that warrants a preemptive strike. There's a small amount of truth to it.

Why do we need toilets and electricity? People managed thousands of years without them.