We need to make life multiplanetary - exactly my thinking. Where can I direct a donation to this effort? It's an investment in the future that I'm concerned about, not getting a monetary return.

I receive more parcels now than ever before. Most of my shopping is done online. How is that not good for the postal service?

Could humans survive on a planet with 17x the gravity of Earth's? Not very effectively, I would guess.

... the NSA has just freed up a bunch of server capacity for spying on _you_.

In my opinion, we should be _populating_ planets, not keeping them sterile. We can do worthwhile science, watching low level life forms adapt to martian life.

If I put on my I-want-your-data hat for a second, I think giving a data set is the wrong approach. Give Politico a search interface to perform research on. Then I get to collect data on the things that Politico cares about and do my own tertiary data mining. Maybe that's a bad idea, I don't know. I'm not very good at being evil. ;)

I think you hit on some good points here.

Slashdot is a totally different environment than a professional setting: there are CEOs, engineers, high school kids, lawyers, etc.. all here posting their thoughts. They all get lumped into the same bin of comments and moderated without regard to those unseen traits (at least, in theory). One day I might mod someone +1 insightful and the next day -1 troll. I don't risk losing my job by doing so. No one opinion is higher than the others, so there's nobody to target with bribes (well, other than the people selecting the stories to comment on). I'm sure there are groups on /. that moderate certain opinions down which is an issue. Still, I think this site is pointed in the right direction at least.

By that logic, open source projects should stop providing source code, too, since most people can't understand it anyway. No need to mention that source code is available - let people ask for it.

You know, in a free(-ish) market, this is not a choice. You must use the cheapest, most profitable method that is available. The reason is that if you don't, somebody else will, and they will eventually drive you out of business.

Apple isn't leading the market based on price - their products are among the most expensive. It seems that using cheap labour simply maximizes their profit. I'd be interested in seeing a real justification that Apple would go out of business or lose their place in the market if they used more local companies and labour.
Even if they started with an increase of 5% or 10%, that could plant a seed for future local expansion. They have the clout to make "Made in America" something that other manufacturers want (need) to emulate.

If keeping a train of thought is a major problem, try this: remove caffeine from your diet, eat more healthy, exercise, set up your desk area clean and ergonomic, make sure you have proper lighting, avoid distracting music/noise.

I think when someone builds the next facebook and offers an ironclad contract forbidding any sale of personal data, I'd probably be willing to pay $5 or so per month for the service.

Indeed - I'd pay to not have my data pimped around. I don't know what vendors' single-minded fixation with free+advertising is all about.

That's one of the best posts I've ever read on slashdot. Thank you for putting the effort into a thoughtful reply!

Mars is fundamentally inhospitable to human life. The rest of our solar system is fundamentally inhospitable to human life. This fairytale notion that we're going to magically whisk ourselves away to another planet, star system, galaxy, etc. and live there is just that: a fairytale notion.

I've said it before but we should first set our sights on propagating life to another planet. Even if we can only get bacteria to live on Mars or some other planet, it's a start. We'll learn from that relatively cheaply and become more prepared for human inhabitation when that time comes. Plus, it's something we can do right now. Let evolution take care of the rest, if that's all we could accomplish before Earth's life is extinguished.

With slaves you've got parallelization down, but processing speed and inter-slave communication will become the bottleneck. You've also got to feed all these people which costs money.