Having lived it, I can assure you there is a great big difference between -40C (not that cold with good clothing), -60C (fucking cold even with good clothing) and -80C ("my lungs are freezing and I feel like I've just fallen in a pool of liquid nitrogen argh cough cough cough")...

Yes, but not for long. Lunar orbits are inherently unstable because of the overwhelming influence of the mass of the Earth.

17 ? More lige 1,271 different secret gov agencies. Why are there so fucking many ?!?

I liked 'The White Plague', about an artificial disease that wipes out all women... and the crumbling society that remains.

A colleague got crushed in a very similar accident a decade ago. As an electrician he was servicing a damaged robot in a factory (frozen food warehouse actually) when some suit decided to turn it back on without checking first. He got multiple fractures and almost lost a foot. And a nice settlement.

Spot on, but also in the US trucks are cheaper than the equivalent SUV. Different tax on purchase for 'utilitarian' vehicles.

Half of the people at work (research lab) have been using Ubuntu for the last few years. The others are on Macs. The choice of OS is left open. Windows (XP) runs almost exclusively in a few virtual machines kept on tight leashes.

Get a Dell. The Linux option is well hidden on their site, but I had no problem getting an M6700 with tons of funky options (keyboard different from the country I ordered it from). We order Linux laptops from them at work, but I also did as a private customer. Yeah, I know, Dell is not sexy, but all the Linux laptop companies (System76 and others) couldn't get me what I wanted (I'm not in the US).

I believe a simple solution to that is to use higher tax rates the richer you get, to keep you from accumulating wealth without limit. There has to be a point of diminishing returns which should be fixed by careful consideration by economists and politicians, and certainly not by lobbyists for the housing/renting/construction industry.

The situation is not as symmetric as you imply because of the vastly different budgets. And I'd much rather see the budget of the NSA targeted at finding and FIXING security holes rather than exploiting them and letting them be also discovered by others, possibly even more evil. And also it would be cheaper for allies to collaborate efficiently than to spy on each others.

As someone who has climbed El Cap 4 times, I can say that it's not going to feel quite the same watching it in 3D than to actually do it. Eating vs watching foodies pics? Being in love vs watching porn?

Bullshit. You can have for instance separate busses: internal secure (for anything critical), internal unsecure (read-only, so info like speed can be read by others), external unsecure (car stereo, etc). You can even have them all on the same copper with the proper subnetting.

I have a perfect example here at work. After we installed a Wifi relay in the lobby, the idi^H^Hperson manning the entrance started taking sick days after sick days, claiming the wifi was making her sick. Problem was, it wasn't activated yet (building installation wasn't finished), but since it was already powered, it was blinking. Then we activated it and placed a piece of black tape on the LEDs, told her 'Fine, we won't be using it then', and all was fine.