Very fast charge (on the order of 1-2 mins for current battery sizes) would make "gas stations" viable for electric cars. It'd immediately remove the current big stumbling block, which is that once your capacity is depleted you need to wait for a few hours to recharge. Bigger capacity would be nice, but it'd just delay the issue. Fast recharge would let current gas stations convert to electric, allowing us to reuse existing infrastructure and easing the transition between gas and electric.

That's nonsensical. What's the equivalent of a patch for water pipes? Infrastructure is designed to be put in once, and last for a very long time. Software is continuously being modified, updated, upgraded, fixed. It's not the same thing at all.

A significant proportion of the people still using XP do so because their hardware has no modern drivers. The likelihood of Linux drivers, for XP-era drivers, is close to nil. For the people who use XP just because they can't be arsed upgrading (and for corporations/govt organizations who haven't planned an upgrade, too), screw them, they deserve everything they get.

What amuses me however is that while people here criticize Microsoft for not providing support for XP, they don't criticize the hardware manufacturers which haven't bothered making more recent drivers for their hardware. It's a strange double standard, especially since hardware has, if anything, more of a reason to have long term support; it's more expensive, rarer and possibly without a more modern replacement.

You think every small or medium corporation using a 2.4.0 kernel release has the means to hire enough developers to keep a whole Linux distro up to date? Think about it for a second. That's the problem with a lot of the open source advocates: most people don't have the means to maintain stuff by themselves.

Relevant SMBC.

One could argue that religion is lack of applied thought in a particular area. I don't know how they do it, but I've seen quite a few people manage to section off their thinking in what could be best described as little boxes. Their rational, educated thinking would permeate their work, but their private lives and religious faith would be completely separated.

Actually that's an excellent idea. They'd make the CO2 shoot up to sky high levels, making Mars possibly habitable through slow terraforming, all while living in the shit they spew up for centuries in the name of the free market. When the process is done, everyone else can move in and as a bonus you get to show them without the shadow of a doubt that AGW is real!

But is it actually valuable though? The guy/gal you send to Mars, what did they end up doing? You've only shown you could rocket someone there, which you could've done just as well with a robot. You've not shown you can make the trip or the destination usable for human life, quite the contrary in fact. The whole thing just feels like a bunch of myopic people mistaking the destination as the goal. The destination is only part of the journey towards the goal of establishing a colony. Throwing people on a one-way trip with no chance of survival does not in any way further our progress towards that goal.

None of the examples you've given were guaranteed death sentences. Some were unknowable at the time (like Curie's work) while others had a high probability of failure, but not a certainty of death. That they did die in the end is part of why we remember them in the first place, so there's selection bias thrown into all of this.

One of the reasons the Apollo project is so lauded is that on top of being successful at achieving what it set out to do in a very short timeframe, it also cost a very minimal amount of lives, and none of those were part of the plan. Accidents will happen, but sending people to their doom is another matter.

Plus, sending people on a one way trip is easy. Sending them there with the means to either go back or to survive once there is a whole lot more complicated, but it's also what science and engineering is all about! If all we cared about with Apollo was shooting some men on the moon, I doubt we'd have discovered and learned as much as we did.

That's a bit pedantic. When saying "NP-hard problem", you usually mean it as an upper bound as opposed to a lower bound. Nobody would describe an EXPSPACE problem as "NP-hard" because that's completely besides the point.

Flip side, those colonies were a helluva lot more habitable than Mars. People already lived there well before the colonists arrived, but I don't see too many indigenous species when CO2 freezes on the surface of the planet. The people you send there are basically stranded in the middle of the ocean, not sent to a lush and fertile continent.

This isn't to say the conditions weren't hard back then, but there's a wide gap between the two.

Did nobody note the awesome "Internet Exploder" typo?

Part of the reason for a corporation is that you dissociate financial liability between the corporation itself and its employees. It's what makes incorporating attractive to smaller companies, since if the company sinks into heavy debt it doesn't take you down with it.

Actually, no, you're diluting the substance by a factor of 100, then diluting the result by another factor of 100, and so on, 100 times. That's 100^100, or 1e200.

Good point highlighting how Slashdot still doesn't support Unicode in 2014 by the way...