I see a lot of comments bashing the overhead costs of different charity organisations. Granted, some of it might be unnecessary, but not all of it. The logistics needed for a relief operation in a catastrophe site is a huge and difficult challenge, and only a sufficiently large and professional organisation can handle it. You need materials, food, shelter, trucks, people with different skill sets, lawyers and diplomats to ensure the cooperation of the local government, and so on. It can be quite chaotic, and of course it's going to be inefficient form time to time - but it helps. Without the people who are handling the economics and the logistics, there would be no food or shelter for the workers in the field to hand out.

No, but I can add a place where people have been equally unhappy without their government: Belgium.

Five years ago Linux was sort of cool to use, required a bit of hacking, and provided a desktop full of eye-candy. The cons were that Wine didn't work so well if you wanted to use Windows programs, there weren't any good drivers for the latest hardware and you often ended up with some non-functioning parts (suspend/hibernate, peripherals, printers, 3D graphics...).

Nowadays the exact same things are still true. Wine still doesn't work reliably. There still aren't drivers for the newest hardware. There are very few Linux games compared to Windows games. Photoshop, MS Office and Outlook still aren't available for Linux.

It's an uphill struggle to keep Linux up-to-date. I'm starting to think it's probably never going to get there - and life is too short to keep tinkering with my own computer. It's not fun any longer when you're still facing the same problems year after year. And I know most of these problems aren't Linux' fault per se but rather lack of third-party support, but that doesn't matter - I'm the one who has to deal with it anyway.

That, and the fact that Windows doesn't suck anymore.

I agree to this. Make a distribution that works like Windows 7 except:

1) Free (as in speech and beer)
2) Huge loads of great free software available
3) Super easy software installation via GUI interface or command line
4) Faster and lighter on resources
5) More possibilities to customize everything
6) Rotating 3D cube! Yay!
7) Command line still available for advanced users
8) Nice online community of friendly people eager to help

Ubuntu used to be this distribution. Which distro comes closest now?

Which is unfortunately nearly every single time.

Be sure to check out Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. It's like Nineteen Eighty-Four but with a private industry spin, foreseeing things like flatscreens, reality shows, censorship... Great stuff.

If services start using Facebook as sole login credential - which Answers.com apparently hasn't done, but Spotify, for instance, has - what's there to prevent millions of users to register accounts like bjsjfo88803 or e93u9f39f for the sole purpose of logging in to other sites? I already do this for Youtube.

Thing is, oil will very soon be prohibitively expensive (we're talking a few decades, tops) and even coal will start to become scarce within a relatively short time span of only a few hundred years. Short I say? Yes. The earth's been around for some 4 billion years and we've been using up its stored resources in a miniscule amount of time.

And when that time comes, well, we'd damn well better have the techontopian future you're talking about or the problem is going to solve itself, likely in a very unpleasant way (starvation, war etc). We don't have a choice - no matter how inferior the renewable energy sources seem compared to fossil fuels, they're our only hope in the long run. The faster we can make the transition, the better.

"He'd always been frightened of ending up as one of those child prodigies that never amounted to anything and spent the rest of their lives boasting about how cool they'd been at age ten. But then most adult geniuses never amounted to anything either. There were probably like a thousand people as intelligent as Einstein for every actual Einstein in history. Because they hadn't gotten their hands on the one thing you absolutely needed to achieve greatness. They'd never found an important problem."

From Harry Potter and the methods of rationality by Eliezer S. Yudkowsky

Basically they're so small that quantum mechanical effects come into play.

I frequently host conference calls with people from other parts of the world. Every time I schedule them it takes something like two minutes for me to check the local time for everyone. It's a minor inconvenience, sure, but nothing I can't manage, it's just a matter looking it up. Same thing goes for traveling across time zones - I mean, you have to buy tickets, wait in line to check in the baggage, wait in line for the security check, wait for the gate to open, sit on a plane for several hours, and then to everything again in reverse order on your destination. Adjusting your clock, on the other hand, only takes a few seconds to do. Time zones are good. They were invented for a reason, and those reasons still stand. In fact, in China where the whole country runs on the same time for political reasons, the Western parts of the country has adopted an unofficial local time that better matches the sun's movement.

Maybe you're right... But I think you're forgetting something: human space exploration has values beyond the purely rational. Kennedy didn't propose putting a man on the moon because it was useful somehow, he did it to inspire his people, to win the space race against the Soviet Union, and to win votes in future elections. Just look at this speech - if Obama or someone else manages to put together a piece half as inspiring, then I think we will have a human on Mars within 15 years: http://webcast.rice.edu/speeches/19620912kennedy.html

That's a very valid point. Astronauts are versatile and orders of magnitude more useful for doing science in situ, but are also orders of magnitude more difficult to transport and keep operational there. Just the little matter of having to return to Earth poses a pretty big challenge.

On the other hand, if we keep limiting human space presence to low earth orbit then we'll never lower the barrier of getting humans into space - and that's where we want to be, eventually. Unmanned vehicles have their time and place, but they will only take us so far. It's like when airplanes replaced ships for long-distance travel - the planes were more difficult to build (and still are), they had many inherent weaknesses such as the need for long runways and tight security (still true), but in the end the pros outweighed the cons and we learnt how to handle the problems. That's what I hope will happen with human space exploration as well. Even very difficult problems can be solved if the gains are large enough.

I think we're quite a bit farther away from making robots as useful as humans than we are from launching a human mission to Mars.

As awesome as the rovers are, they're hopelessly, frustratingly inefficient. It's hard to control something located a dozen light minutes away. The total distance traversed by Spirit is 10 km and by Opportunity 27 km. Every single movement must be carefully planned before uploading the command so the rover doesn't get stuck in a sand dune or fall off a cliff somewhere. All the progress made by the Mars rovers in six years could probably have been accomplished by human astronauts in just a few days.

I bought a Sony Ericsson 8 years ago that had video call capabilities. I didn't even try it once, and it never took off anywhere in the world despite a huge number of phones and networks supporting it. Instead, people used the extra bandwidth to check their mail, surf the web and download ringtones and themes. Last year Apple tried with FaceTime (does anybody use that?) and now it's Google's turn. I don't see that it will pick up this time either.

Kind of funny to see that this feature, which for so long was believed to be the communication of the future, turned out to be a fiasco when the future finally arrived. Apparently we just don't want to see each other when talking on the phone.