So you think that a higher status makes you a better cook? Or that a higher status makes the local supermarket to sell you the unprocessed food cheaper?

the cheaper food actually tasted even better

A definite no. But then, I was not raised on industrially processed food; you tend to like the sort of food you were raised on.

Apps are becoming progressively worse, not better, over time. In the early days there were a lot of cool apps written by people who just wanted to write cool apps for a cool new tool.

Now with the preverse incentives of the app market, the app store is saturated by apps trying to squeeze a maximum amount of money for a dwindling amount of useful application.

In app purchases, in particular, are well on their way to completely destroying gaming at all levels.

Every free app you download any more is ususally worthless until you shell out significant amounts of money in IAP to make it usable, and then its still usually still not good

I'm all for paying software and content developers for their efforts but the methodologies for achieving this in app stores and on the Internet in general has completely failed.

Increasingly the only thing I use my tablets for is an ereader. They excel at that, but for just about everything else the app comcept has failed.

I think Ubuntu has user shares turned on. In which case you right click on the directory and click on the 'share' menu item, just like Windows.

Disclaimer. I wrote the Samba code for this feature...

Until the Chinese actually try to live on the moon for any period. Horrible temperature profile, little to no water excepting maybe at the poles, some of the nastiest dust in existence getting in to everything, hard vacuum.

Mars is a paradise compared to the Moon which is why if you are talking about a colony it makes a lot more sense than the moon or just about anywhere else in our solar system Only problem is the transit time.

Chances of NASA sending an astronaut anywhere are approximately zero at this point so whether is ethical or not is kind of a moot point.

Uh. . . . . don't nuclear power plants GENERATE electricity? All you would need to do is cut them loose from the transmission lines and put in the control rods until the event is over.

Someone should probably generate contigency plans to safely cut transmission lines at as many key points as possible and they could mitigate the effects of this kind of disaster.

Also helps that a lot of our long distance communication infrastructure is fber optic now and immune to this kind of event.

Chernobyl was a fission plant, but nature does have fusion reactors reacting all over the universe all the time,

And quite a lot of them actually exploded. ;-)

The people hiding Jews in Nazi Germany also broke the law. I guess that would also exclude them from being heroes in Bill Gates' opinion?

Not a fan of the NSA part, but anything that reduces the worldwide birth rate is good in my opinion.

So you are in favour of a global thermonuclear war? Because that certainly would reduce the birth rate worldwide.

No, because in Germany, while you're forbidden to publish the picture without consent of the person, you're not forbidden to take it, nor to show it to the police.

for example just about any photograph depicting the demolishing of the Berlin Wall would have been illegal.

Given that the German law contains an explicit exemption for pictures of contemporary history, that statement is not true.

No, there are usually exceptions for that type of photography. Also there are typically exceptions for people of special interest (that is, if you photograph a politician, he cannot forbid you you to publish it, at least not on the ground of that law) and for certain other common cases.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Note that the German term "Recht am eigenen Bild" translates literally to "right to your own image"

That's why astrophysicists concentrate on the sky instead.