Very true. By the same token, by the time your average programmer was done with your brain surgery, you'd have toenails growing out of your asshole for some inexplicable reason. "Oh, we'll fix that in the next surgery." *That* is why we have "clueless" administrators pre-approving their shit.

The brain surgeon has to be worried about malpractice lawsuits; the programmer does not. The brain surgeon requires board certification; the programmer does not. The brain surgeon requires twice the education and years of formal, on the job training before he is ever allowed to operate; your average programmer thinks he/she can write shit-hot code before they even graduate.

Yeah... that feels about right.

You pay more for your stuff if your privacy is worthless. But, in all honesty, if you purchase anything online, your privacy is toast in the U.S.

Cash is king, baby.

Emerging? They were emerging a decade ago. They have emerged. Look, if the company is, as you say, "set in its ways", that is a cultural problem. Unless you are an executive that gets to set goals and compensation, you have very little influence over it. If that is not you, either stay and live with what you have, or leave for greener pastures. The basic question you have to ask yourself is "how will staying here using these outdated tools affect my lifetime earnings potential?" Put another way: "are they paying me enough to put up with this shit?" That is my prime criteria for deciding whether to stay at any job. Your job is to make recommendations. I assume you have already done that and been shot down. Decision time: should I stay or should I go.

Are you suggesting a Martian penal colony? I don't see that ending well for anyone.

How about "on a smartphone"? Surely I'm the first person to ever think of that.

Or "on a plane", "in a car", "just like that, but yellow", "at the beach", "indoors", "during a snowstorm", or "while watching Pigs in Space"?

Sourceforge is where open source projects go to die. That's the only summary you need.

What you originally said was "we'd find a way", not that we would "learn why it's just not possible." We already know why FTL travel is not possible. I was pointing out the absurdity of your original statement.

I can haz FTL travel now?

It is a simple economic problem. How well does it pay?

And, this, my fellow nerds, is why we are at war with science in this country.

Yes, it is to prevent the next anthrax attack. Because what else could we possibly do to combat terrorist attacks by our very own scientists? Nothing, I say. It is war, or we just surrender. You wouldn't want to surrender, would you? Why, then we'd be no better than the damned French!

Me? I'm going to DARPA to get some funding so we can win this war! The first thing I need is a telescope -- to show the people just how wrong these "astronomers" really are...

And gravity still affects the mass in space as it expands, so that items that are strongly gravitationally bound remain so. Yet items that are weakly bound can grow apart.

Bonus question: how does this expansion affect the orbits of planets around stars and the orbits of stars in a galaxy?

So, essentially we have not only a human operator issue, we have a human/systemic maintenance issue, too? I gotta wonder how that will play out with driver-less cars. "Sorry, I won't start because your tires are bald." Or will we here something along the lines of "I'm sorry, Dave. The brakes have just failed" while driving on the highway. Some of the beaters I see on the road would not qualify as safe. What is this going to do, in the long term, to the ability of poor people to get from point A to point B in a car that only a poor person would be desperate enough to drive?

My bet is that more automation will solve the problem at the expense of the poor by refusing to go anywhere if critical safety equipment is damaged or inoperable.