Indeed, this is exactly the kind of thing I was hoping for. Thank you for the links !

We should send robots first, to set up infrastructure

I would get 100% behind a plan to come up with robots able to semi-autonomously build up infrastructure. Let's try and get this done and working on plain ol'Earth first.

I seem to remember the thermal conductivity of an ideal gas is directly proportional to the molar density times molar heat capacity, so this sounds very counter-intuitive...

All I need a single public IP for, is for my VPN endpoint.

Keep in mind that polls are designed, and those internal to a political party doubly so.

Mars' atmosphere is about 1.5 % of Earth's atmospheric density. It's around 20 mBar, or eight times too thin for sustaining life even if it was pure dioxygen. For all practical purposes it's near-vacuum. And vacuum makes for a very good thermal insulator.

As I envision it, it will take the form of a gradual redshift down to absolute zero. Stars and galaxies' lives and deaths and rebirths will be coming to us in an indefinitely- slowing-to-a-crawl slow-motion display of unbearable length... and it'll never quite go 'black' as much as fade away asymptotically forever in slowness and cold. Much like an avatar of the universe's entropic death, converging in on us from everywhere at once.

Man, this *is* depressing.

The sky will slowly go black until it's as depicted in Greg Egan's "Quarantine" ? Well, except for our own galaxy being still visible and reachable... that's a consolation prize alright.

Doesn't that require the appearance of an event horizon between these objects ?

Yup. At "worst" in an accelerating universe the galaxies would be receding from us at speeds that would tend asymptotically to 'c', but never at 'c' nor above.

Nonsense.

I took my son to his uncle's wedding four national borders and 4000 miles away when he was 15 months old, and that took no noticeable extra effort.

Market share is not capital.

Hachette is also well known here in its home country France for its frequent and long-standing collusion with the state. It holds an all-but-in-name monopoly over most schoolbooks, the purchase of which is mandated by the public education system. In 2011 the European Commission started investigating Hachette, Penguin, Georg von Holzbrinck, Harper&Collins and a couple other big publishers for abuse of dominant market position and anticompetitive practices, especially in the electronic book market. Hachette also is forcing DRM onto e-book authors even in their outside deals with other publishers.

It's fine by me if someone wants every mention of him/herself removed from a search engine. I have an issue with selectively removing just the choice stuff which they object to, though.

So this politician wants some details of his professional conduct unreported in a Google search ? Welcome to internet-non-existence. Your reelection-platform website, twitter campaign account and commentary blog get tossed along into a black hole.

And in any case, someone who really wants the information will find it eventually.

For an entertaining take, see Greg Egan's Distressed novel, which has a whole subplot about a rich family whose members have their entire DNS replaced by a "translated" equivalent made of artifical, new nucleobases, complete with updated enzymatic machinery. As a side-effect it turns their skin jet black and allows them to survive on a diet of tire rubber.

They then plan to release a superbug on their fellow humans (it cannot affect them since they have become, in effect, complete aliens) and keep the Earth for themselves.