It's also hard to explain how the increasing challenge of getting enough oil and gas is a result of a "false" scarcity

Here's the trick, the people who say there is plenty of stuff are throwing coal, shale, tar and anything else they can think of into the mix and pretend it's the same as easy to extract liquid oil. Another common trick is to pretend that all that unsurveyed land in Iran, the arctic, wherever has huge oil basins when we do not know one way or another. There's plenty of fossil fuels. Oil we can get out of the ground - not so much. The only reason I have the job I have is that the more computing power you have the easier it is to find the stuff from survey data.

Humidity is very low in the air in that place now. With a bit of outside air circulating under a dome it should stay relatively low.

Sorry you feel that way. But if you look at my account I've been active since 2009, rather dedicated for an astroturfing account

That's about when PR companies decided to put money into "social media" and this place started to get astroturfed, but it does appear that your comment was wrongly labelled by Exitar.
Let's consider what is now a very old example of this sort of contraversy. The F111 also had a variety of early problems, as mentioned by others here, yet despite all those problems decades ago they were useful enough in some roles that there were retained in service long enough that I saw one flying the year before last. There are none flying now but nearly 40 years of service is enough for a jet fighter isn't it?

For instance Australia's new and inexperienced government is shelling out billions for these F35s in the middle of an austerity budget - presumably because someone in the US leaned on them and they don't know how to do anything other than completely cave in yet.

Due to being in a different place and quite a few years older than most here it appears I misunderstood "SAT scores" to be equivalent to an accurate measure of high school achievement averaged over at least two years. Other places do not do a single test.
So I'd better update my statement to make things more clear.

Raising your score in a single type of test is easy - just do a lot of that sort of test as practice. Raising your actual intelligence is a lot harder.

Real IQ tests aren't like most of the stupid things you find on the internet

The sort of things used by lazy fad driven HR idiots are until you tell them to either do their job or get out of the way.

I'm no pychologist, but I'm been told by some that at least in the field of education IQ tests are pointless and can vary widely with the same child over several years. It was described to me in the 1980s as being nothing but a measure of how good people are at doing that sort of test and translating poorly to other situations. It's still an artifact of that time that only remains due to management fads.

If he had this "decency" you speak of, he would have only alerted his own people and not the foreign governments

He notified a couple of newspapers. If you want to hassle people about letting foreign governments know then your problem is with them and not with Snowden.

I run into too many technical people who hate learning new things even though they are in a field where learning new things is mandatory

That sounds like people who followed the money - the same problem that turned a "woman's profession" of sitting inside and typing into what's close to a boy's only club and an industry with a high turnover and short attention span. I got away from that problem by working with scientists instead of a bunch of "programmers" that were scared of 64bit, multithreading, and anything that wasn't fucking Visual Basic.

University forces you to push through the boring shit that you need to know before you can even begin to grasp the meaning of the interesting stuff. If you learn by keyword search you can end up with a list of facts about the thing but not enough understanding to make use of it properly.
A good example on this site was a programmer asserting that "single bit operations are faster" presumably due to him bypassing all the boring stuff about hardware and clock cycles that many others here learnt in high school.

To get down to it, while it is possible few people when leaving high school have the self-discipline to learn a lot of difficult subjects just by going through textbooks or other resources. If nobody is talking to us about it we don't know where to get started - so University or similar provides that start.

And college may be heavy on the theory behind computer science concepts it does not put much effort into teaching the intricacies and pros and cons of the various frameworks floating around today.

Which is just as well because who uses Modula-2 today? How about the godawful VB of 15 years ago? Both apparently looked like winners instead of the weird Java thing and that antiquated C.

If you want somebody to follow standard operating procedures, sure, put them in a cube, give them a job and forget about them. If you want someone capable of writing new procedures you need to either train or apprentice them yourself or get someone else, like a university, to do it for you.
It's the technician versus engineer argument. You only actually need an engineer (or a very experienced technician with a wide range) when you want to change things, such as solve a problem or do something new. So in the short term sticking a kid in a cube with a clipboard of "how we do things here" makes sense for the company and the kid.
In the long term they could both do better.

Where I am the current vocational approach to programming means there's no "real" programmers in the place, since too tight a focus means we have no chance explaining the mathematics to them in under a couple of years. So we have scientists who "spent 4 years doing calculus", and even if their code is crap they at least can estimate and work out when their code is spitting out noise instead of answers. Following the list on the clipboard is not for everyone. You need at least a few people capable of thinking up that list.

and he has to use the proxy of SAT scores

Which, though still flawed, are a vastly better way of measuring ability to reason than IQ tests and more difficult to game.
Raising your IQ is easy - just do a lot of IQ tests as practice. Raising your actual intelligence is a lot harder.

It can be argued that an OS really isn't much more than a kernel and init with everything else as userspace.

Not any current conventional one just like conventional fixed wing aircraft can't get up to the same altitude as the U2. I think it's more impractical than impossible, although generating that much lift from huge rotors may require materials that we don't or may never have.
Besides, this copter was just a platform for a vision system instead of a serious lander design.

What's wrong with Aphrodite?

Doesn't work well with Apples.

Which is why this is so interesting.

Viruses and prions don't fit everything in your list either, as do other things that reproduce without sex. Aliens could be alien enough to be scaled up things on those lines - which of course is also from the land of make-believe but so is all speculation about aliens when you get down to it.
Solaris is deliberately a bit of an extreme but the important question it asks is this: "What if aliens were truly alien?". The more different from us something is the more difficult it is likely to be to communicate.

Besides, willaien was discussing how to communicate with truly alien beings and I just supplied two examples from fiction. I really don't get why you jumped in to be so critical of me when they are not even my ideas.

No, because it's at odds with reality as we know it.

Space is so damned interesting because we don't even know what most of it is, just that the unknown stuff has mass and can't otherwise be observed with what we have now. It's a blank spot on the map that may as well have "here be dragons" on it. For all we know there could be asexual non-carbon based critters out there with intelligence that would just not get a lot of the concepts we see as important. Communicating with such a creature "from the land of make-believe" is unlikely to be trivial. So I gave two examples above -
1/ find a point of commonality and build a bridge (Egan)
2/ a story where the effort to find a point of commonality is still ongoing (Lem).
In Egan's novel, Diaspora, most of the human derived intelligences are quite alien to our viewpoint from fairly early in the novel as well, moreso later when some never had physical form, so a major theme is communication between different mindsets.