Or if he had gotten pulled over for speeding (or some other minor traffic violation) and the officer smelled the marijuana.

And I am sure that that some tax breaks or subsidies helped them get their grid up to begin with.

There is also the age of the solar system to worry about. If it is in its early years there could be constant planetary bombardment going on.

If it is in its later life the planet's core could have shut down, leaving no shield.

I believe this planet will be like Venus, a rocky surface, but a CO2 atmosphere that makes it at least 300 degrees Celsius on the surface.

If they made 1000 of them initially, why not take them to a trade show and see what kind of reaction that they got.

Instead they threw out 800 of these units and removed it from their memories.

I agree that robot missions are important, but I think it is more about a push to force humans to expand their knowledge into these areas. Our human space travel knowledge has not really expanded a lot in the last 40 years.

And the only way that we seem to force ourselves to consider the issues you discuss here is to push toward a long term goal like this. If the Russians hadn't launched Sputnik, I don't think our satellite technology, human space knowledge and all of the secondary technologies that were created along the way would be where they are at the moment.

The other fact here is that the earth has had 5 great extinctions in the past 650 million years. The next one could be 50 million years away or 100 years away, if we want to succeed as a species we need to understand that we need to move beyond just living on earth. And the sooner that we start that the better.

Can't we just send folks away, personally I would start with the current (US) politicians, lobbyists, and reality TV stars.

That sounds like a good start to me.

Most of the world didn't care that much about our previous president...

Space-X has done a bunch of docking with the international space station already, if they have a rocket capable of transporting people to the space station, this will be huge for them.

A Sith wants to take over a small country, it doesn't seem to be an issue in my head.

It isn't like there is a power-hungry "politician" nearby who controls vast areas like an emperor.

Wait a second... Putin is the Sith Lord, Vader is his apprentice.

We need this Vader to destroy the emperor! He is the only one who can restore balance force!!!

TLDNR you passed the 140 character limit. :-P

I embrace change when it makes sense to do that. I will embrace a driver-less car, as it comes out (probably in the next 10 years). But many things that are new and the "wave of the future", end up dying out within a few years, because they don't solve real problems or they cause more issues than they end up solving. I haven't heard one thing here that would be so much more convenient by controlling it through the internet, that I absolutely need and am willing to risk the device being hacked to get it.

Then you get a programmable thermostat that does not connect to the internet and you set it to go cooler at certain hours of the day and you setup a bunch of different modes (normal weekday, weekend, vacation, ...).

Turn on your dishwasher and laundry as you go to work or go to bed.

Tell your kids lock the door.

All of this stuff can be done without an internet connection and should be done without an internet connection. But as soon as someone can hack all of a specific oven, heater, dryer or other appliance people are going to realize they don't want these things connected to the internet. Especially because huge sections of commercial companies don't worry about securing internet devices at the moment, and I doubt they are going to change that anytime soon. It may be naive to ask why someone would want this ability, but when you look at the most popular passwords used and other security indicators like that, it may be more important to ask should people have this ability?

I would argue against being a cyborg, but my insulin pump and my constant blood sugar monitor tend to tell me that I am a cyborg.

And they also tell me not to eat cookies, but I mostly ignore that part of it.

In the rest of the article he explains his reluctance to put the dog on carprofen because it had the possible side effect of causing kidney and liver damage to the dog.

Then he later found out that wasn't proven by clinical trials, but it was still something that his vet warned him about originally. So he was listening to his vet.

While I don't mindlessly grind out code all the time, there are times when I work on a problem and I have to mindlessly grind out parts of it. I am pretty sure this is the same with most projects.

I love writing code and working on hard problems, but do I feel like working on them for 80 hours a week, every week? No, I enjoy having a life outside of work and a separation of work and home life is necessary.