If you care so much about all that windows crap, why are you running Linux at all?

I'm not saying it's a bad reason, I'm saying the odds of that succeeding in a reasonable timeframe - say in the next 50 years - are just nonexistent. What I'm saying is that there is no way anyone would convince enough people to make this project even examined, hence the project is doomed. The adventures of the last millenium are vastly different - I think you'll give me that, after all they had air to breathe and water to drink - and so the comparison is at best irrelevant. Also, I didn't imply we would need to carry everything there. What I said is that the project would need support from earth for dozens of years (and a lot of them) before the colony could survive on its own. During this timeframe the whole thing could fail at any point and the goal of self-preservation would not be met until then. Those are the reason you will have trouble convincing anyone of doing it.

At last, my example of humans being unable to preserve their own climate is just here to illustrate that if noone (or let's say not enough people) cares about our planet, how are you going to convince them to care about another?

Huh? Are you on crack? Who in their right mind is going to invest in those things?

Don't get me wrong, I'd love to spend a week on the moon or mars if I could afford it, but I just don't see this happening.

As for a reason, you gave none, not answering the GP at all. And no, self-preservation really is a pitiful reason as no such colony could exist without earth's support. For such a colony to be independent would take decades if not centuries of constantly pumping big money without any kind of return.

We can't even fix our climate, so imagine terraforming Mars !!!

Of course, they did hire new people. But tell me, how many hardware companies do you know that produces high quality software and/or services?

Well, there is one: Apple. And this is IMO the key to their success. They do both well (whether or not you agree with their policies/strategy is another matter, both their software and their hardware are top-class in their respective fields, and nobody even questions that.)

The rest of them? All hardware manufacturers I can think of makes software that sucks big time (graphics, printers, scanners, all those devices - and their drivers - come to mind)

So is it possible for WD to do a good service online? Of course it is. But in my view, it's extremely unlikely.

If you want me to restate my previous comment, here it is: The point is, HD manufacturers probably suck at networking.

There. It's down, proving my point at this very moment.

Choose your vendor carefully. HDD manufacturers are probably not good at cloud services, just because it's not their core business, nor is it close to their core business. I could've told you that. You want cloud storage? Go DropBox, Amazon, Google. These guys know what they're doing.

Now, don't treat this storage as safe or secure. It's cloud storage. Safe is copied over to at least two different remote locations plus at least two local storage devices. Secure is encrypted and offline. Cloud is neither, but it is convenient.

The key here is to know what you are doing, which isn't always obvious.

Of course we are, just a different kind.

They couldn't care less about a legal smack-down as long as they're afloat. The only thing they understand is money. It will stop only with bankruptcy.

No, no, not by the bible, only by the "good parts" of the bible, or in other words, by other people that chose those good parts. The Bible has nothing to do with it.

When you need people to tell you what's inside a book, it's either that it's too complicated (tech stuff, specialized book, etc) or it's that someone will try to fill your brain with their view of things. Obviously, someone explaining the bible falls in the second category.

It looks as if religion has found a set of explanations to make the big book acceptable and now it's serving that to the world, not the other way around.

So all upskirts pictures are legit and we should encourage people to take them?

After all, all those panties are out in public and protected by just a skirt which you can look below... from a public place.

Your vision of what is right and wrong seems to be broken.

In France we actually got someone behind bars for something very similar with a law that I find pretty smart that says approximately: "If you are somewhere where you *know* you shouldn't be, and you don't get out immediately but you *knowingly* stay there and snoop around, then you're guilty."

I think that's the expression of common sense. It might be just me.

Also, whenever you have a method that has to return a couple of longs, it would also save an object to wrap the result.

It would add convenience, not save space. That said, on a 64bit JVM, passing an int by ref *could* save 32bits.

Objects are passed by reference, in that the callee shares the same instance as the caller, not a clone.