Recreating my machine from install media isn't that gruesome either. However, I'd rather do it on my terms then have to suddenly deal with it. Murphy's law dictates it'll happen two days before a deadline or in the middle of something critical.

All the stuff I care about I make incremental offsite backups.

If you find yourself resorting to baking your motherboard in the oven to fix it, this is an act of desperation. Yeah the guy managed to get some more life out of the motherboard but this isn't a fix, this is a temporary hack.

We've now conflated two important distinctions into a single subject here. Functional resilience and long term data integrity.
I solve the long term data integrity problem by doing nightly snapshot delta's of my whole machine and my wife's machine (to a rasp pi with an external drive at a buddies house). Granted that's a single point of failure, but it's out of house in case my house {burns down, get's robbed, etc}

However, that doesn't fix the near term issue of me busily working away on a project when boom, my drive fails and suddenly I'm sitting there looking at a paper weight. That sucks. Having that happen to me once was enough for me to say screw it, I'm buying two drives and mirroring them using the motherboard raid software (which md supports) and it's a non problem. This solves my functional resilience.

raid is not a backup, what is gives me is resilience. Would you rather spend tomorrow recreating your machine from install media and backups, or simply swapping the drive out and suffering a background sync?

I don't build a machine these days that doesn't have mirrored hard drives. You realistically can't backup 6TB worth of data, so barring some horrible FS failure (which is rare these days in Linux land) your best bet is RAID1.

For a falcon heavy having a fleet of these ships would allow them to recover all three first stage elements vastly reducing the cost to put really heavy things like all the elements for a mars transfer vehicle in space.

I agree plus it gives them flexibility. As much as Elon talks about having the first stage land back at the launch site, there's simply too much valuable infrastructure. Having a fleet of these autonomous ships gets Elon the reusability without endangering his personal and launch sites.

Oh yeah! I was migrating all my machines from 10Mbit Ethernet to 155Mbit ATM only to see it completely eclipsed by 1Gbit ethernet before I was even done with the project. Got burned on that one!

It seems it's centered around some perceived benefit (usually financial). Well meaning bean counters who don't see the whole picture and get befuddled by glossy brochures. Though in my experience once all the numbers are on the table and we really start talking turkey, suddenly they realize the math makes no sense.

If you're a start up and you have zero infrastructure, the cloud makes perfect sense, until you get to a certain size and then it suddenly stops making sense.

These are the questions I end up asking when someone runs into the I.T. department shouting that we need to upload all of our code to the cloud and power down our data center.

1. Does this technology put our companies assets at risk?
2. Does this technology significantly improve the performance/security/reliability without violating rule #1?
3. Does this technology put us in a situation where a single vendor/point of failure/attacker can road block us?
4. What are the long term costs of this technology compared to our existing infrastructure?
5. How disruptive is this technology and do it's benefits outweigh the disruption?

In many cases once we get into the conversation and the person has a better understanding of what's going on behind the scenes, suddenly "cheapass-hosting-services.com" stops looking like such a great deal.

I've been putting money aside each month with the goal of buying a 3-d printer. What would you recommend?

I've commented about this in the past, I think strong AI will be what allows us to take the "great leap forward". However, I don't expect us to have some general purpose AI. Instead I see us generating a domain specific AI that becomes superior to humans in it's understanding.

A good example might be to give an AI all the data from the LHC and then ask questions like "Does this data demonstrate the existence of X particle", "Design an experiment using the existing design of the LHC that would most likely generate X particle"

That same approach could be applied to any number of fields.

Lord of the Fries is great. What's even cooler is that most of those games now out of print are available as Print-N-Play PDFs on their website.

As for Kill Dr. Lucky, Titanic games licensed it and produced a really nice version of it. When my original KDL game fell apart from use I bought this and tucked in all the paper expansions.

To expand on your list:

Carcassonne (this is a classic along with Settlers)
Ticket to ride (maps for US, Europe, Africa, Asia, etc...)
Kill Dr. Lucky
Quantum
Five Tribes
Takenoko
Edo

Cooperative games:
Pandemic
Lord of the Rings
Red November
Forbidden Desert

They're talking about building a rocket whose first launch is in 14 years. Yeah, I know it takes a long time to engineer something complex like a HL rocket, but I think in this case they're hedging their bets. A valid strategy might be to just go slow work up a design and then watch what SpaceX and NASA does and modify their design based on the lessons learned from those HL systems.

It's not a bad way to go, but it also means in the short term no Taikonauts will be leaving LEO...

Buy yourself a kindle... no not a tablet, that gives you too much access to the internet. Then that hour you normally spend sitting on your laptop while watching tv... spend it reading. We live in the golden age of literature... you have more books at your fingertips that anyone in history.