For a falcon heavy having a fleet of these ships would allow them to recover all three first stage elements vastly reducing the cost to put really heavy things like all the elements for a mars transfer vehicle in space.

I agree plus it gives them flexibility. As much as Elon talks about having the first stage land back at the launch site, there's simply too much valuable infrastructure. Having a fleet of these autonomous ships gets Elon the reusability without endangering his personal and launch sites.

Oh yeah! I was migrating all my machines from 10Mbit Ethernet to 155Mbit ATM only to see it completely eclipsed by 1Gbit ethernet before I was even done with the project. Got burned on that one!

It seems it's centered around some perceived benefit (usually financial). Well meaning bean counters who don't see the whole picture and get befuddled by glossy brochures. Though in my experience once all the numbers are on the table and we really start talking turkey, suddenly they realize the math makes no sense.

If you're a start up and you have zero infrastructure, the cloud makes perfect sense, until you get to a certain size and then it suddenly stops making sense.

These are the questions I end up asking when someone runs into the I.T. department shouting that we need to upload all of our code to the cloud and power down our data center.

1. Does this technology put our companies assets at risk?
2. Does this technology significantly improve the performance/security/reliability without violating rule #1?
3. Does this technology put us in a situation where a single vendor/point of failure/attacker can road block us?
4. What are the long term costs of this technology compared to our existing infrastructure?
5. How disruptive is this technology and do it's benefits outweigh the disruption?

In many cases once we get into the conversation and the person has a better understanding of what's going on behind the scenes, suddenly "cheapass-hosting-services.com" stops looking like such a great deal.

I've been putting money aside each month with the goal of buying a 3-d printer. What would you recommend?

I've commented about this in the past, I think strong AI will be what allows us to take the "great leap forward". However, I don't expect us to have some general purpose AI. Instead I see us generating a domain specific AI that becomes superior to humans in it's understanding.

A good example might be to give an AI all the data from the LHC and then ask questions like "Does this data demonstrate the existence of X particle", "Design an experiment using the existing design of the LHC that would most likely generate X particle"

That same approach could be applied to any number of fields.

Lord of the Fries is great. What's even cooler is that most of those games now out of print are available as Print-N-Play PDFs on their website.

As for Kill Dr. Lucky, Titanic games licensed it and produced a really nice version of it. When my original KDL game fell apart from use I bought this and tucked in all the paper expansions.

To expand on your list:

Carcassonne (this is a classic along with Settlers)
Ticket to ride (maps for US, Europe, Africa, Asia, etc...)
Kill Dr. Lucky
Quantum
Five Tribes
Takenoko
Edo

Cooperative games:
Pandemic
Lord of the Rings
Red November
Forbidden Desert

They're talking about building a rocket whose first launch is in 14 years. Yeah, I know it takes a long time to engineer something complex like a HL rocket, but I think in this case they're hedging their bets. A valid strategy might be to just go slow work up a design and then watch what SpaceX and NASA does and modify their design based on the lessons learned from those HL systems.

It's not a bad way to go, but it also means in the short term no Taikonauts will be leaving LEO...

TimeZoneInfo.ConvertTimeToUtc( local ) and ConvertTimeFromUtc( utcDate, TimeZoneInfo.Local ) seem to do the trick, introduced in the framework in .Net 3.5. And you can use a stock name from GetSystemTimeZones to convert to any standard time zone, or roll your own with CreateCustomTimeZone

And more importantly they are all backward compatible for dates before 2007 when the US congress mucked with the daylight saving rules.

Buy yourself a kindle... no not a tablet, that gives you too much access to the internet. Then that hour you normally spend sitting on your laptop while watching tv... spend it reading. We live in the golden age of literature... you have more books at your fingertips that anyone in history.

Even if stacked under this capsule was the entire mars one stack, you would still need the capsule in case something goes wrong from from T-0 through SECO. Being able to abort and bring people home is a critical element to this.

Once you're in orbit, now you can spin the capsule around, mate it to the transit vehicle, get comfy and head on to mars. In your nice roomy hey let's go to mars bus!

As for what this cost? Less than we've spent bombing ISIS or for that matter what the DOD spent on diesel last year. We MASSIVELY under fund our space agency. Go check this out: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/02/16/wait-how-big-is-nasas-budget-again/#.VIHeOYqPUyI
It's a joke. We spend NOTHING on our space program. Tests like this are not a waste at all, we need to test these systems before we rely on them.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I think a strong AI would benefit humanity. Turn it loose on the problems that have baffled us and see what it comes up with. Fusion, grant unified theory, etc. The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself. If along the way it and we figure out how to transcend our bodies and all kinds of other sci-fi awesomeness, all the better.

Clearly this is a system where a few people get to dictate scarcity and inflate prices to keep competition out of the market. I'm glad it's being turned on its head.