Moving things to Mars is always going to be incredibly expensive, and if there are people willing to take the trip knowing that they'll have to work with severe power and resource restrictions, then those things are luxuries and the money can be spent on sending more useful and mission-critical things to Mars instead.

The next major milestone on Mars will be self-sufficiency. Once you can live off the land and energy production becomes cheap, you can start producing more luxury items and make fewer sacrifices, but it will be quite a while before it becomes cost-effective to build up enough infrastructure for effectively limitless fresh water, heat, power, etc.

Can't you buy organic-labeled food? Can't sellers of non-GMO food just label their food non-GMO? Why is that inadequate?

None of this is forced onto farmers. Farmers always have the ability to switch away from GM seed and are never required to start their farming business with GM seed. Farmers choose to buy seed from companies that dictate how they use it, because that seed produces a product that makes them more money, either by being more valuable, or costing less for them to grow. Generally, consumers prefer the GM produce, either because they feel it's "better", or because it's cheaper.

What do you mean by "inferior"? Even assuming that the resulting salmon will be less tasty than the unfarmed, wild salmon, if the modified salmon is considerably cheaper, then people may still find that it's a better value. If the product is truly inferior and not worth the price, it will fail on the market and the problem will be solved that way.

OTOH, the superficial style elements should be the easy ones to adapt to. If you haven't learned the organization's style guide, expect a code review to be a bit painful. Ideally, that should stop once you learn to anticipate what the reviewer is likely to bitch about, and alter your coding style accordingly. If you've utterly failed to do that, resulting in painful code review after painful code review, that's a sign to me that you're incapable of working in that organization.

There are some bits of personal flair that I don't think anyone is interested in forcing, but consistency in things like variable names does indeed help everyone else that's reading your code. If someone doesn't realize that Alice's coding style is to use trailing underscores for member fields, but Bob's style is to use a leading lower-case m, it's never going to be clear who wrote what and whether something that looks like a local variable is actually a local variable unless you know *everyone*'s personal style, and you know that none of them conflict and all of them actually signal things like this.

Disagree. There are different naming conventions for things like constants and class members. The point of these conventions is to make it clear from the name of the variable what the variable represents. If you aren't confident that the code base is consistently following the same conventions, you have no confidence that something that appears to be a local variable is actually a local variable, which means you need to spend more time poking through code in order to understand it.

Consistency begets readability, and readability begets maintainability.

If there's no icon on the notification bar, then GPS should not be on and it should not be draining your battery. Check the 'battery usage' screen (if this exists on your version of Android) to see what's responsible for your battery drain. It is unlikely that disabling GPS will improve your battery life if you aren't using any apps that also use GPS, but with as many Android devices out there as there are, a bug is always possible. I'd encourage you to try and be scientific about it. If your version of Android doesn't have a battery status thing in the settings that plots your battery level over time, get an app that does that, and watch the slope of that line with GPS enabled and disabled (give it a few hours in both settings without using the phone).

I agree, provided you allow businesses to consider the dividend an expense.

The problem is that a public company is owned by the shareholders. A dollar earned by the company is a dollar earned by the shareholders, and you'll see that reflected in the value of the shares owned by the shareholder. Corporate dividends are paid out of profits. The corporation has already paid an income tax on those profits. It's essentially transferring money from the shareholders to the shareholders, so why should it be taxed a second time? Salaries paid from the corporate to its employees are considered an expense, and only taxed once. Why do dividends deserve the extra tax?

http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/22/google-facebook-spent-record-amounts-on-d-c-lobbying-in-q1-2012/

It is an outrage against whom? Do you believe that companies should donate money to the government when this objective "moral requirement" requires that they pay more than is legally required?

What if a company is looking to build a new factory, and a locality really needs the jobs, and so they offer a tax break for the company in exchange for building their factory there. Do you think a moral obligation exists for the company to ignore that tax break and pay what they would have paid without it?

I think the OP's point was that you could replace "US" with any other country, and your "benefits of citizenship" argument would still stand. Yet, none of these other countries require that you pay income tax if you neither live nor work there. The US is still an anomaly in that regard.

It can be both. People don't cease to be passionate about things when they become employed.

So if Google stood up and said "we're not playing the patent game anymore", and got rid of all of their patents, what do you think would happen? Until the system changes, it would be kind of stupid to just sit back and get destroyed by everyone else's patent litigation. Participation doesn't mean that their primary goal isn't changing the system.

In addition, wasn't this system one of the reasons the EU was founded in the first place? Companies didn't like the idea of having to deal with 20 different tax systems as they tried to sell to people all over Europe, so when the EU was founded they said companies located anywhere in the EU could participate in an EU-wide market and not have to worry about 20 different tax systems.

And so, Ireland comes along and decides they want more businesses to settle there, so as to bring them more jobs, so they set a low corporate tax rate, and companies come running. All of this seems to be to be working as intended. If you want to change it, change the way the EU works, don't get all pissy at companies that are using the system as you designed it to be used.

I'm starting to suspect we're using two different definitions of "rule of law". Here are a couple of excerpts from the wikipedia article about it that explain how I'm using it:

"Discretionary enforcement" of the law in the US is limited to situations like speeding, or marijuana possession. Due to the (explicit and intentional) separation of roles of police, prosecutor and judiciary, it's hard to prevent enforcement of serious offenses without a grand conspiracy, and even then, the victim can appeal to the FBI and bring another layer of oversight to bear on the problem. It's similarly hard to escape being prosecuted for something serious. In China you have one Party overseeing everything.

Further, understanding a system, and believing it to be applied consistently, is not a requirement for a rule of law. It just means your citizens and your system of justice and equity have grown accustomed to each other. For you, "don't piss off the Party" might be a perfectly understandable rule, and punishment for pissing off the party may be quite consistently metered, but that isn't what rule of law means.