I'm not sure whether I understand the principles correctly, but if you can conjure up something that deflects seismic waves, you wouldn't need to drill holes under the entire city. All you'd need is a ring of deflectors around the city large enough to deflect a decent earthquake. The city would then only be unprotected in the unlikely event the epicenter is directly beneath the city. Even if that is, for some reason, impossible, underground work is required in most cities on a regular basis anyway. One could drill the necessary holes when the sewers are upgraded, new utility lines are being laid etc. Sure, that would mean at least several decades before completion for most areas, but most nation-scale infrastructure projects take that much time anyway.

Have you ever tried to use modern GNOME, i.e. version 3.x? It's an abomination! completely unworkable desktop environment. Every app takes over the entire screen, can't minimize/maximize etc. It tries to implement mobile "dekstop" features (as the aforementioned fullscreen apps), but this just doesn't work in a workstation environment. Or am I the only one these days who wants multiple windows open (and visible!) at the same time, so I can do terminal stuff simultaneously while writing a document and browsing the web? Unity, on the other hand, is quite usable, even if it makes some rather odd design choices. Yes, it takes some getting used to, and it's not perfect, but it's a gazillion times better than default GNOME 3.x. I have tried GNOME fallback mode (basically gnome 3.x trying to impersonate its older self), but this has some serious features lacking (can't alt-tab for instance). Personally, I would now prefer something that combines GNOME 2.x with Unity. I do really like the unity dash for quick finding of files, but prefer to have an applications overview a la GNOME 2.

This might sound a bit stupid, but in my opinion it is more interesting to see how the soil survives than how the plants do. Most people think soil is dead material, while in fact it is full with activity of bacteria, fungi, insects, earthworms, nematodes and more. Growing anything usefull requires good soil. Once we know how soil biology behaves in Lunar conditions, we might be able to come up with a way to convert Lunar regolith into useable soil.

I live in a place where the annual number of clear days averages at just 21. We do have more than enough wind though, but my local council seems to view wind turbines as "horizon pollution" and has banned their construction (seriously!)

And you're confused because you're making this über-US-centric. AFAIK, fair use is a purely American concept. In many countries a notion of 'fair use' doesn't exist. As Canonical is a British company, any argument based on fair use might be totally irrelevant by definition.

You're wrong. The net inflation of the yen over the last two decades is closer or below 0. In a nutshell: inflation no longer happens. See here for details: http://www.inflation.eu/inflation-rates/japan/historic-inflation/cpi-inflation-japan.aspx Besides that, the word "Stagflation" is a combination of inflation and stagnation. It has nothing to do with deflation. Japan did not experience stagflation. It experienced stagnation, yes, but not stagflation. Stagflation is the paradoxical situation of having (high) inflation and stagnation at the same time - something that keynesian economics deems impossible. Much of Europe is going through stagflation.

For a good example of deflation: see Japan. Recession since the 1980s.

Bitcoin is a doomed currency by definition. At around 21 million bitcoins, no more bitcoins can be created. This inevitably means the value of bitcoins will rise and rise and rise and rise and rise. Another word for this: deflation. As any economist will tell you, deflation is extremely harmful for an economy. Why: the value of money increases, but the value of real (tangible) products DECREASES. On top of that, delfationist economist run the risk of its people to hoard all the money (since it will become more worth with time), instead of spending it into the real economy.

I'm sorry to awaken you from your dream that the NSA cannot monitor Ubuntu One clouds. It most definitely can. Have you ever looked at where your machine is connecting to when Ubuntu One is active? Right, it's Amazon. Canonical buys some cloud storage space from Amazon and basically just resells it. Amazon is, as we all know, an American company, and thus falls under PRISM.

Voyager 1 is now in interstellar space. That's something very different from intergalactic space. Something about several orders of magnitude further away.

Well.. Ubuntu nowadays does have quite some tracking. Remember the amazon shenanigans they built in to Ubuntu? You have to manually turn this off. How many casual users do you think know that it is even possible to turn this off? Or Ubuntu One? Or unity lenses? Or who assures me there is no back door in Zeitgeist?

If you want to market or profit from your app, you most probably need some kind of company registration. Hence, you are trackable - at least your company is.

Von Neumann was born in Hungary; he moved to the US in 1933. Einstein was a German; he moved to the US only in 1933, decades after he published his famous relativity theory in the 1910s. Now, if we were to follow your logic and only those countries where technology x was invented can use this technology, then the US would still be a well.... hunter-gatherer society. You can attribute many 20th century inventions to US citizens, but they tend to build on earlier industrial revolution technology. And where did that happen? Right, in Europe. Now, take your nationalistic bullshit, and put it up your ass. Technology is for all of mankind.

You're forgetting one major infrastructure problem that in my opinion plagues apps: mobile data plans. Most fancy games and apps these days are at least several tens of MBs big - I've seen ones which hit the 200MB mark. Most people - even in the developed world - don't have a mobile data plan of more than, say, 1GB per month. If one single game eats up one fifth of that data plan in no-time, that's a very big reason for me NOT to buy it. Sure, I could go home and use my wifi to download said app, but that kinda defies the concept of mobile, doesn't it? ISPs keep talking about speeds, fancy 4G/LTE etc, but the speed of mobile internet isn't really the problem; it's the limited amount of volume that is the bottleneck here.

which won't get you anywhere if you ever decide to venture out of the US.