You're point is well-taken: robotic missions make a lot more sense than manned ones.

However, I'd like to point out that glory is worth something too. It can inspire a generation of individuals to invest themselves in STEM, for instance. It can encourage people to look to the future, instead of staying mired in the past (and aren't a lot of us guilty of that?). Glory can re-frame how we see ourselves, our species, our capabilities and priorities. Symbolic acts have tremendous potency, and history can swing upon such fulcrums.

I'll extend your answer with the "big picture" view: Docker (and it's Google-backed competitor, Rocket) provide isolation that's stronger than the traditional process model but weaker (and less resource-intensive) than the VM model.

It also introduces yet another packaging system (called "images") that has its own public repository of contributions that you (and any other malware author) can contribute to. For developers, the appeal is being able to bundle up an OS (sans kernel, operationally speaking) with their app and all of its dependencies into one file they push back up to this public repository (or a private one like Quay.io) without having to document an installation procedure for sys-admins. For sys-admins, the pipe dream is to push workloads around to whatever machines have the capacity without delving into the mess of individual apps. Of course, this requires a whole extra layer of additional tooling that doesn't come for free. :O

All that said... don't use it for security. It's not the same as a dedicated VM.

Don't ask me how I know this, but a major scandal with the NRO (National Reconnaissance Office) is about to erupt: apparently they've been forgetting to push the "turbo" button before handing the keyhole sats off to NASA for launch. As a result, America's espionage capability is hamstrung by an artificially constrained clock speed. :O

Yep, every spy satellite has a little switch inside it. If anybody gets inside, that switch clears a register on the motherboard, and it'll show a "WARNING: Case Opened" the next time it POSTs, accompanied by a glaring 1-second beep.

Good luck. I captured all the traffic that a nexus 7 sends during initial setup, and it was immense. Numerous hosts, protocols, you name it. A few hundred megabytes total. Very hard to make heads or tails of (especially given the encrypted content).

Except you're bypassing the compiler now and potentially accessing a larger portion of the sandbox attack surface than before.

Actually, Ayn Rand's own admirers were calling themselves "The Collective" in her own lifetime. It may have been intended as a tongue-in-cheek thing, but the cultivation of dogma and ideology was (and is still) very real. http://crooksandliars.com/john...

A lot of the speed is due to hardware, operating systems, and compilers all converging on C and C++ at a critical juncture in computing history. They've had the benefit of shitloads of academic and industry research into optimization (of which other languages have only recently started to benefit in the past decade as JVM, LLVM, and V8 started receiving lots of attention). That's not to poo-poo the speed advantage--C is definitely the gold standard there--just to contextualize it from a language design standpoint. In 20/30 years it could easily be the case that Go, D, or some ML/Haskell variant is the fastest due to compilers being able to better reason about how programs in those languages behave.

Baloney... the story was NOT in the public eye (proof) and it wasn't headed that way. Despite very clear warnings from previous whistleblowers, everybody had their head in the sand. Snowden provided concrete, compelling evidence that forced the issue of NSA domestic spying into the US political dialog.

And yeah... he could have stayed anonymous if he'd wanted to be kidnapped and hauled off to a black site. Putting his name and face to the news gave the story credibility and staying power. Snowden is the man to thank for the 82% concern about NSA surveillance and the ~60% support for weakening the Patriot Act. True, it's not enough to put an end to their shenanigans and restore reverence for human rights and due process, but it's definitely a setback for the NSA.

Sure dinos were intelligently designed... by an agentless, iterative, massively parallel, DNA-based world-spanning supercomputer. Just because an intelligent system is smart doesn't mean it has intentions, goals, or a human-like "self".

Chromium is the open-source twin of Chrome. Don't know what sort of anti-marketing/anti-tracking plugins it provides, but it's potentially an option if you want less bloat. You could also look at Pale Moon and other Firefox-based browsers.

Mozilla's budget is at least 10x that of Wikipedia, you just notice the latter more because of their non-profit campaigns each December.

Many people cram their way thru intro-level courses, if not whole degrees. It's very undesirable, but it's not a "scandal" per se. It's simply an ongoing reality that educators, such as the ones you reference, struggle and experiment with.

A much bigger problem, IMO, is the bureaucratization of education. In higher-ed, you've seen it in the form of increasing administration-to-faculty ratios ("chief diversity officer", anyone?). In lower-ed, you see the obsession with trying to formalize, test, measure, and customize every aspect of a student's experience, at the expense of actual, you know, teaching. Perverse economic incentives then tempt teachers to forge scores and and teach-to-test, thus encouraging rote memorization and avoiding deep conceptual development. Sure, your suggested battery of tests may sound like a fine idea in isolation, but when you pile it on top of everyone else's fine ideas and impose it from afar, you end up distorting and smothering the education process.

Unfortunately, that lower-ed scientific management philosophy is creeping into higher-ed, and it'll be a major part of what kills off quality, affordable education in America.

Mesh Technology - Lets you enjoy an enclosed porch when the bugs are out.
Hardware/Software Separation - You'll get along with your spouse better if you have separate bathrooms (particularly toilets) and separate closets.
Social Media Integration - Parties revolve around the kitchen, so ideally have nice flow between the kitchen and (as applicable) the living room, porch, and dining room. In my case, I really don't want guest helping with the cooking or dishes, so give me a design that fences them off with a bar-top counter, but keep it open enough that I can peripherally participate in whatever's happening in those other rooms.
Dedicated I/O Path - Your pantry should be between your kitchen and garage/carport, so unloading is fast and easy. Also include a small desk and file cabinet for processing mail and keeping keys/wallets/purses out of site.
Security-Hardened Design - Minimize number of entrances; ensure perimeter and walks can be fully lit; install alarm system; include tornado shelter (if applicable).
Non-Paged Plan - This is VERY expensive, but you'll appreciate the absence of stairs if you spend your retirement years here.
DRY Principles - Make sure site has adequate drainage, that gutters are clog-free or otherwise easy to maintain, that bathrooms can be well-ventilated, that your roof isn't too complicated, and that you don't have a pool. Moisture is the enemy!

Yeah, obviously you can't do anything about that piece of dust except hope it misses you. However, there's a much greater amount of dust simply drifting with the stars around the galactic center. If you move thru the interstellar medium at 0.7c, you're going to have a bad day. Creep thru at a much slower speed and you have a chance, especially if you stay within the Local Bubble.