I want people to get off this planet.

Why? What do you think is within the reach of human beings in space that is not available on Earth? A reply containing the words "wonder", "exploration" or "adventure" are not acceptable.

Space is mind bogglingly large but despite that the Earth is fucking huge. Helpfully it's also absolutely drenched in the sort of things us humans need to survive. With a bit of preparation we can readily travel to just about anywhere on the surface of the Earth. To simply survive we don't need to bring significant amounts of our home environment along with us.

The Earth is also jam packed with resources. The idea of mining asteroids and comets is laughable. It's ridiculously expensive to actually do and nowhere even remotely close to being cost effective. It's not even a question of profitability, it's simply wasteful to expand the resources to mine a single asteroid when a single mountain on Earth is far more accessible and likely has a much better yield of industrially useful materials. It simply does not make sense to pay thousands or millions of dollars a pound for carbon, ice, or silicon (the primary component of most asteroids and comets). Even for space based industry, launched prices of a thousand dollars a pound means it's more economical to build stuff on Earth and launch it into space.

The idea of "spreading out the species" is another very silly idea. It would take a ridiculous amount of resources to build even a remotely sustainable colony somewhere else in the solar system. There's simply nowhere else in the solar system where humans can easily survive. Even with a self-sustained colony on Mars the odds of humanity being wiped out by a natural disaster (asteroid, etc) aren't significantly improved over all of humanity on a single planet. Without a full ecosystem a Martian colony would eventually die out, likely long before they were able to build their own means to spread to other planets.

While the Martian surface temperatures are fairly low (~63ÂC) the atmosphere is also incredibly thin. At the surface the atmosphere is about 1/100th the density of the Earth's atmosphere. This means the ability for the atmosphere to convect heat away from a spacesuit is 1/100th that you would expect on Earth.

The occupant as well as the electronics and other powered elements of the suit all need a way to bleed of waste heat. A small heat sink on the back might work on the Earth but would need to be much larger to work as effectively in the thin Martian atmosphere. A spacesuit can't "breathe" like insulating clothes would on the Earth.

Such a cooling system likewise needs a method to be shut down or reversed in order to keep the suit's occupant from freezing to death if the outside temperature dropped significantly like in a shadowed valley or at night.

The cords would just keep getting tangled up. You're much better off getting the DC model with a big battery pack.

That's one of the best reasons ever for eliminating copyright - let the differing visions compete on their merits, rather than on what is "official" according to the copyright holder.

I loved the Thrawn trilogy, but at some point I realized they could never be movies because they were just too long. Which is a shame - I would sit through them with joy, but the general public wouldn't. Back in the day, everybody I knew thought that the Thrawn trilogy was 7, 8, and 9.

I don't know if today's grown Star Wars fans will ever be happy. Nowadays it's popular to blast even Return of the Jedi. I think the sophisticated fans feel that only IV and V, or even only V, were any good.

My memory is that when TPM came out, everybody on Slashdot posted that they loved it for about a day - and then suddenly the hate came in. I never figured it out. Suddenly it wasn't cool to like TPM, so everybody hated on it.

WTF is with those "sponsored links" at the bottom? Apparently even the "disable ads" option doesn't remove them. Oh well, at least I can kill them with adblock.

Considering that the cost to the U.S. of this ebola outbreak is going to be in the billions of dollars, it makes a lot of sense to fund research into vaccines to reduce the cost to us later on, regardless of what other countries are doing.

It's too bad that nobody has invented a method where a link to a full explanation could be included within the summary itself. Maybe when people start using this new-fangled "world wide web" thing, we'll be able to do cool things like that.

More likely they'll have to cancel the project. After all, if it was possible for modern technology to create machinery that works when submersed in salt water, I sure that somebody would have already done it.

Loading movies and music on a computer is something older geeks do but hardly anyone else. Everyone else is using online services like Netflix, Spotify, and Vudu and just renting/streaming. This is especially true for the college age crowd the Stream and Chromebooks are marketed towards. They're sitting on gigabit Internet connections in their dorms so cloud storage is a no brainer for them.

For anyone wanting to use a Chromebooks or Stream PC as a backup laptop it's cheap to pick up a high speed SD card with a lot of storage. for most tasks they have plenty of power. Loading up a browser with too many extensions is problematic on any machine, not just low end ones.

If you stay on DST year round, won't schedules eventually gravitate towards everything happening an hour later? And eventually, somebody will get the brilliant idea to switch the clocks forward another hour...

It is misleading, although mostly because the "House Majority PAC" is misleadingly named. I'm not quite sure what they intend to accomplish with that name -- maybe they're trying to make it less obvious which party is benefiting from "outside money"? Their website says that it was formed in 2011, so it's never actually been aligned with the "house majority."

In that case I'd say he was both. He was made a pioneer by his intentions. He wouldn't be the first pioneer to be abused and mistreated, just as he is not the first pioneer to give his life trying to get humanity to the next frontier.

May we mourn the loss of this brave pioneer and honor his or her legacy. I think this is a perfectly appropriate time to quote these words:

I think the big elephant in the room is more to be found further upstream, in the area of manufacturing. Worrying about software hacks is one thing - not having the faintest absolute clue exactly *what* is inside the chip package is something else entirely. Think its an accumulator bank? Oh sorry, maybe we forgot to mention the harmonic bundles associated with wave guidance within the interstitial distances of the rapidly blinking transistors .. yeah, those can be read from space. With a satellite (or 12).

The game is over folks, or rather .. the game is on, depending on how you look at it. Until you are capable of investigating and participating, directly, in the sub-assemblies, you will always have a weak back door. Either we, ultimately, become able to assemble our own chips on the desktop, or there will always be a power class: those who can build such devices, and those who can only be ruled by them.