I mean, I don't exactly believe in the Star Trek universe which is even more fairy tale than most religions. Where are we in their world order - are we equals, enemies, slaves, pets, food, pests or just a honking big X-factor that threaten their very existence? Since their military power would be mostly unknown it'd be real easy to get paranoid. Just dealing with wacko humans is bad enough, what do you really know about an alien or how they think? Nothing. I think we'd jump right into a military arms race which might end very badly for at least one of us. Perhaps both, if MAD still applies on an interplanetary scale.

'"To quote, or double quote, that is the question'" - Not Shakespeare

That all sounds like things I've had in the past, perhaps not all at once but unless I'd been to Ebola-infected countries lately I might not think much of it. The infected person came from Liberia, but if a Texan that hadn't left the state for ages starts showing symptoms it's a lot less obvious. All it takes is one of those die-hard unbelievers in modern medicine who won't seek help until he's half way down the list of serious symptoms and you're in trouble.

Well, how many times have you seen "let's make our own date/time/number/argument/xml parser"?

<consultant mode>
Well, I'd put it in a 2x2 matrix with low/high impact, low/high corporate usage. High/highs is stuff like your office suite, a lot of people use it and quite a lot. Low/high are things like time sheet recording, people need to do it but it's a very minor part of their work day. Both of these you generally need to have good solutions for since you'd be wasting so many people's time otherwise, the heavily used of course more so. Low/lows you don't really need to care much about, unless they add up to some extraordinary amounts. The killer is often the high/lows, basically the specialized tools a few in your organization use.

The (strike:problem) challenge is that these tools are different. For example, your graphics department might rely heavily on Photoshop. Nobody else in the business might care about that, but they again have their own tools they care about. Retraining, lost productivity and lower output quality can be significant costs. Existing workflows and procedures must be migrated. Forced migration may lead to employee dissatisfaction and higher turnover as they want to continue their career towards becoming a Photoshop expert. Those costs have to be considered relative to the gains of making a migration. I can do an in-depth study, if you got funding...
</consultant mode>

Seriously though, I think more plans about migrating to Linux dies from a thousand cuts rather than one fatal blow. I haven't done an OS migration but I've seen some others, the major issues are under control. It's all those minor "uh oh, we didn't think of that" issues with emergency band-aids and workarounds that tends to turn it into a fire fighting exercise.

For computer generated graphics custom workflows and creating tools to animate things others can't have has been the driving force. There's plenty of complex interactions between models, textures, animations, physics simulations and various like creating a whole army from a few parameterized models and AI. No tool does everything well and often there's some secret sauce you want integrated into the workflow. Photoshop on the other hand mostly seems like a one-stop shop, you hand a skilled person the image and what you want done and he'll produce an end result. Efficiency seems to be the primary driver, not integration or customization.

Well, allowing JavaScript gives people who'd like to de-anonymize you:

a) A much bigger attack surface, rendering engines are rather safe while scripting engines are quite risky by comparison.
b) Much more accurate ways to fingerprint users through querying the system.
c) Much simpler ways to use AJAX to create traffic patterns to trace you through the system.

That the TorBrowser developers (Tor is just the transport layer - it speaks TCP/IP, not HTTP) choose to leave JavaScript enabled is more a pragmatic choice so users don't experience a "broken web". But if you need the protection Tor has to offer, then you probably should disable JavaScript and find yourself web 1.0 services to serve your needs. Otherwise you're probably better off just getting a cheap VPN.

No, they're very good at reproducing things and if you haven't got teachers or you haven't got skilled teachers or you haven't got interested teachers then the computer at least give kids a chance to learn. Unlike here in western society for these kids education is a precious resource that they know is essential to have a decent future, first you have to give them the opportunities before you start worrying about motivating them to make use of them.

I view Tesla as the best bet for a completely new American car company in a long time.

The U.S. Big Three have been around for eons. After World War 2 Hudson and Nash were hurting, merged to form American Motors, and went bust. Packard and Studebaker were hurting, merged, and went bust. Kaiser/Frazer tried, and went bust. De Lorean tried and got in to all sorts of trouble. Nobody seemed to be able to launch a new car company and make it work.

Tesla, on the other hand, seem to have cracked it. They're selling all the cars they can make. I see lots of them around here (Vancouver).

...laura

Actually there's at least two potential plot lines in the books already to make that... ambiguous. Heck, half the plot is taking seemingly irreplaceable characters and kill them, the world keeps on twisting and turning. But yes, I don't see it happening until after they've sailed for Westeros.

Actually it's a bit more complicated than that, it started as one book that outgrew itself and was divided geographically but the timelines eventually merge again in Dance of Dragons with characters from the south appearing after the events of the fourth book. So it will be highly biased towards characters based in the north/east since they're in the entire book, followed by characters travelling north while those staying in the south aren't in the fifth book at all, but who will certainly return to finish up their arcs.

Pretty much nobody argues with the kind of science you can conduct in a lab like physics, chemistry, optics, mechanics, electronics and such, if you can put it in a lab and reproduce it then it's generally not controversial at all. Even when CERN finds some exotic new particle. All the controversy usually revolves around systems that are either so complex we can't meaningfully reproduce it all in a lab so basically parallel world theories or where the results come from a thought process, not compelled by any law of nature.

In the first case we do some partial models that are only approximately right, like for example weather forecasts. And lots of people claiming that flapping your wings this way or that will set off a butterfly effect. In the second case you'll never settle the discussion on applicability because these people might react different than those people based on culture, age, sex, education, experience, history or simply understanding the purpose or confines of the experiment and how applicable it really is to any real world situation.

For example, I suspect you can take pretty much all literature and studies done on airplane hijackings done before 9/11 and throw them in the trash bin, or at the very least put them in a museum. Not because they were in any way scientifically invalid, but because nobody will react in the same way anymore. Granted, that's probably a rather extreme example but there's lots of example to prove those kinds of scientific truths are fluid and change over time. It's a process, not a set of answers and it'll always be noisy.

The problem with any system is content.

Bingo.

Use static HTML, CSS, the F4Player and see the lectures catch on. Once you've got content, choose/buid you system based on that. That might even be Wordpress or Joomla or something.

Well, the company itself is only one piece of the puzzle. They're also connected to vendors, customers, competitors, their particular market and the general economy. All of those give a lot of impulses into the system, if your competitor launches a great new product that's bad for you. If your vendor's got supply problems, that's bad for you. If your customers for some reason get mad at you that's bad for you. If they suddenly want something else like tablets instead of your laptops that's bad for you. Growth and recession drags the entire economy up and down. The effects ripple through like waves in a pond and it's never still. Just because there's waves on the surface doesn't mean the tide stops coming in, but if you measure from the bottom of one wave to the top of the next then it might go against the fundamentals. They exist if you're investing in a far longer horizon where today's waves are of no real significance, in the long term the companies that make money go up and the ones who lose money go down.

That said, belief is often more powerful than the fundamentals until the illusion cracks. For example take the dotcom boom, as long as everyone thinks it's a boom they hold on to their stocks. If it dips, they think now they're getting value and buy more. That happens until the bad news overwhelm the value buyers and the stock really start tanking, which again leads to a stampede out. At every step of the way there's people trying to be ahead of the market, but the day traders don't really influence the long term stock price. They're just there trying to make a margin on the market over-reacting/under-reacting or not grasping all the interrelations at play.

And the space station would do what exactly, pull materials out of a magician's hat? If all the raw materials are eventually going to come from earth anyway, you're just adding intermediary steps to increase costs. Here's a number of reasons why you might want to have a space station, but practically doesn't apply today:

1) We can gather and refine materials and produce parts/fuel with the required tolerances/quality from a lower/zero-g gravity well like the moon or asteroids at a lower cost than shipping it from earth. For example say you discover an asteroid full of bauxite ore. You still have to create a mining ship, send it to the asteroid belt, extract the bauxite through mining, ship it to the space station, capture it, smelt it, roll it to sheet metal and cut it with extreme precision. While launching it from earth is expensive both the setup costs and production costs of doing it in space dwarfs the savings.

2) You can likewise gather energy by for example setting up gigantic solar panels that can charge a space craft. However, none of our current rockets run on electricity and the energy costs of orbiting/deorbiting a space ship probably dwarf the energy gains.

3) You can refuel/repair/retrofit/repurpose incoming spaceships without going down into the gravity well, however we generally don't do return missions because of the costs involved in sending them back to earth. It may be useful if we have big reusable "ferry" ships between say Earth orbit and Mars orbit, though even then it's questionable if we shouldn't just launch resupply rockets directly rather than going through a space station.

4) We could build ships that aren't hampered by the launch forces and are designed for zero-g only, but practically we're pretty good at various forms of fold-out designs that'll survive launch and transform into a more fragile shape in space. Same with the rovers, they hit the ground curled up like a ball then deploy.

5) We could build bigger ships than could be launched through a single launch, however the total launch costs would be the same. Practically we'd probably build it like the ISS though through interlocking modules, with large interlocking sections it should be almost as structurally sound as building it in one single piece in space.

6) If we have a lot of cargo going between many different systems then a hub-and-spoke system is more efficient than direct peering. In the foreseeable future though, everything will either come from Earth or go to Earth so this isn't relevant until we've got major off-world colonies.

The TL;DR version: Nothing a space station could do would lower space exploration costs today, only increase them.