All very good points, but let's consider that colonization may involve a bit of compromise. Maybe in the best case we continue to need respirators and good shelters. Is that unacceptable? Doesn't mean it's not useful to increase the surface temperature, release certain gases, start some form of food production.

The stability and accessibility of Mars remains very important at our present stage of technology. We aren't going to wait for terraforming to complete before we start colonizing. It's a major advantage if the process is easy to monitor and interact with, if resources are easy to extract (mining), and equipment failure is less of a concern (no caustic substances at 500C).

In the end, it's probably better to get more practical experience at terraforming something else before we start on our #1 target anyway.

2/0.1 = 20
2/0.01 = 200
2/0.00000001 = 200000000
2/0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 = 0

Exactly as you would expect!

Technically speaking, the previous elected administration was also the Obama administration. And however outdated the security practices might have been under Bush, they are at least 7 years more outdated today under Obama, which is not an equal failing. Notably, the cyber aspect of national security has become much more pointed in the years that he has been in charge. You can give Obama a pass if you honestly don't think it should have been a priority, but most would consider national security should be one of the presidents' top priorities. In any case, if you want to distribute some of the consequences to Bush, I suppose we can go egg his house or something, but the practical side is that however much accountability we are willing to assign to previous administrations is that much less incentive for the present administration to take this seriously.

This is only true for lower quality extra virgin olive oil. High quality extra virgin olive oil with low acidity has a high smoke point. Also, virgin olive oil has a smoke point comparable to refined canola oil (only slightly lower), at 199C vs 204C. For reference, there is a chart of smoke points here. Unless you are using extra virgin olive oil, you are safe frying in light olive oil at about 199C.

Back in the Napster days, a flat license of something like 2+ Billion dollars was offered to get this same sort of thing started...

They're also smugly saying "I told you so" - and doing so seemingly without understanding the situation. The situation hasn't changed since the beginning: don't use the service if you don't trust the encryption. If the service is breached and the (open source, peer reviewed) encryption stands up to attack, then the threat is astronomically minimal.

I really hope that you were joking too. I don't know you, so just in case - here's the joke that I was referencing. :)

It's great that all you care about is results. I wish that there were more people like you. However, it doesn't mean that the tech industry is immune from the wage gap (or position gap) between men and women. It has and it continues to happen. There are some companies who are pioneers in this sense, too. However, these are not the norm. While I am optimistic about progress, we have a long way to go to establish equality. I welcome hearing about it on Slashdot, as the topic is worthy of discussion. To squelch discussion is being complicit with the status quo, which is a form of racism/sexism in and of itself. Please don't take that as me accusing you of anything. It's not my point. My point is to explain the merits of discussing it here.

I agree that the tech industry is diverse. However, it continues to be a male-dominated industry. If certain people feel alienated, or there is a wage/position gap - should they not be free to voice their opinion? Should they not be welcome to engage in discussion about it (it's not like anyone is forcing anyone else to participate in it)? What makes Slashdot the wrong place for it? I mean, if they're "nerds" in their field, should they head over to Ms-Slashdot.org and discuss it there? Just because the CEO of Apple's sexuality was a non-issue, does it mean that others in other companies do not experience it on a wholesale basis? Another example: while I am a huge admirer of Grace Hopper, her story is an exceptional one, considering that she practically stands along among history's female computer pioneers.

With respect to how to achieve social justice, I don't know if I agree with you. There is really no way to point out how inequality within the status quo without someone feeling attacked. Every online discussion that I have ever read about gender equality or racism results in a person in the majority (who is usually white, male, and/or heterosexual) attacking back, or at least pushing back in a way that indicates that they feel threatened. This type of behavior is endemic to the status quo. An attempt at social change that will negatively affect the privileged will often result in a negative response. At best, activists of social justice are accused of being divisive or stirring the pot. Maybe they are being divisive, but maybe they're right to be if they've been living with inequality their entire lives.

I also understand your point about grandstanding. However, if we agree to stipulate that there are a few people who grandstand about race/gender/LGBT issues for their own purposes, I don't think that it is fair to dismiss or otherwise not discuss all other claims on that basis. Similarly, when you mentioned in the GPP that you didn't care about Gamergate - I really do. I mean, this was a case of gamers actively harassing outspoken women who wished nothing more than to change the status quo of what they believe is sexist industry and culture. Irrespective of the merit of the actual arguments, the community response was generally despicable, and I couldn't think of a better place for it than Slashdot.

I'm not trying to get into an argument with you here. I honestly respect your opinion - and I can see that we feel differently about this. That's fine. We live in a fairly diverse country, and the tech industry does not exist in the vacuum of a few companies who pioneer. My point is that I welcome hearing voices from all of these people here.

I like a lot of what you had to say, but please forgive me for being pedantic on one point that you've made.

Who's we white man? ;)

It's great for you that you're privileged enough to not have to care about issues of gender equality. However, to be clear, I do care about that stuff, and if you have any interest in social justice, I believe that you should too.

My last point with respect to your sinking ship comment, I believe that there is one major shortfall that you missed, and it's not /.'s fault. It's the /. user community itself. Seriously, commenters here are almost as bad as YouTube - going straight for the ad hominem jugular over something as minor as an error in punctuation (or worse, a technical error in a post). I suppose that it's endemic to any Internet forum, but some places are better than others...and this place is worse than many others. It's like a magnet for internet buttholes and tough guys. There isn't much that can be done about it, other than trusting the moderation system, but that kind of environment does tend to stifle productive and respectful dialog.

This is brain dead capitalism. This is Scarlett O'Hara exploitative, short sighted, moocher stuff where you go in, get what you want and have no concern for the people or big picture view. When things fall apart you go cry and run off to the next batch of suckers.

This isn't Ayn Rand, understand your interdependencies, work together and support your highly competent support structure to build a larger ecosystem where everyone wins and improves in their core competencies to the benefit of everyone else.

Uber doesn't just need researchers. They need Google. They need Tesla. They need other car brands that are working on the problem. And they certainly could have used the money that the government and students were putting into the school to fund those researchers and give them access to other projects which may have given insights to the project they cared about. You can bet the government is interested in autonomous vehicles. Now that's gone because those researchers won't be given money or access to work already done in that area for the government.

If they had let the researchers work through the university, they would have saved themselves a lot of money paying for the research.

Uber apparently thinks they need to own patents on self driving technology rather than just mass produced self driving cars ASAP.

Google is light years ahead of everyone else when it comes to navigating highly complex city streets. By destroying a research facility and bringing researchers in house, they've pretty much just cooked the golden egg. A university has a much better inroad to private industry and public funding to work together to solve this kind of complex problem.

They didn't just need those researchers. They needed access to everyone's researchers who are working on solving this problem. It's a huge win for everyone when people no longer drive cars and everyone gets to their destination safely. There's a huge motivation for collaboration. And apparently Uber isn't interested in that sort of thing.

So a university is out of a lot of money and valuable education resources for nothing.

My early experiences were the old Atari VCS (2600) and VCS stood for video computer system. I was fascinated by the pixels and the idea of a TV being interactive.

I wanted control of the pixels.

Later, in school, I got to work on Apple ][ computers, and those just begged to be programmed. Gaming can initiate the desire, but so can a lot of other computer driven things these days.

It is not prep directly.

Indirectly, games can be prep. For a few friends and I, cracking copy protection got us into 6502 machine and later on, Assembly language. We would use the monitor to see what was going on. Reading the ROM listing told us a lot more.

BASIC is slow, and that too drove learning more. To get the real magic out of the old machines, one has to know stuff. We made games, played them and learned. Utility type programming was good too. One such program generated book reports with just a few picks and keyboard input.

Just playing, unless the game incorporates programming concepts, is not meaningful. The ability of games and other interactive things can spark the desire to build and control.

The latter leads to activities that do serve as prep.

It was never feasible for him to block the bill, so I don't see why details of, e.g, when he did it would be important. The purpose was to raise awareness and I've seen quite a bit of coverage including major political sites like DrudgeReport so I would say whatever his notions were they worked out rather well. If it is a call to the masses then it makes sense to give them time to digest and react (hopefully with a call to their representatives) before the actual bill.

As is, are we under the impression that once in office Rand Paul will abandon the cause? Because if not, as the chief executive he would certain have the ability to direct these agencies differently. Personally, this convinces me he would be committed to doing so.

I don't think that this has anything to do with whether or not the FBI actually has a case. I suspect that this is the federal government sending a message to security researchers that airplanes are off-limits. It's the same reason for the TSA's billions of dollars of security theater - it's not about safety, it's about making people feel like they are safe. If average citizens do not feel safe flying, they won't fly and we won't have an airline industry. This would have a tremendous effect on our economy. If average citizens believe that flight control systems can be hacked by a geek in his/her seat with a laptop, they will not feel safe, and may not fly.

I'm not much of a conspiracy theorist, and I'm not about to start now. However, given the fact that it seems other-worldly outlandish that a security researcher can gain control of any flight controls via the wi-fi entertainment system, I strongly suspect that this is the purpose of the FBI's heavy-handed tactics.

If the thesis is that refusing to enroll qualified black applicants in college has unfairly sabotaged their ability to compete, what is the anticipated outcome of refusing to enroll qualified Asian students?