So, on a standard US keyboard, is this sign a minus or a hyphen?: -

Yes there are good reasons for going to Mars. Greatest among them is to safeguard the species from any catestrophic impacts on Earth they would extinguish us.

No potential impact to Earth would render it less hospitable to life than Mars is. For speicies survival a set of fortified underground bunkers/mini-cities would be far more practical -- and unlike Mars, we do have the tech to do that.

The suggestion that we currently have the technology to colonize Mars is, in brief, ridiculous. No human has been move than 500 miles from Earth's surface in over four decades, and the farthest we've ever sent a human is under 250,000 miles; at its closest, Mars is 38,000,000 miles away. We do not know how to safely get a human being that distance through interplanetary space, and the first few people we try to send are quite likely to die.

That investment of blood and treasure might be worthwhile if there was something useful for humans to do when they got there, but there isn't. We'll get better scientific results by building and sending better robots.

There is no practical reason to send humans to Mars in the near-term -- say, next five centuries. Especially not when all of our resources are needed over the next century or so to put human civilization on a sustainable footing. We can probably do some useful stuff with humans in Earth orbit and maybe on Luna, but deep space is for robots.

The only justification to put humans on Mars is some vague hand-waving about "inspiration" -- i.e., it's a huge performance art project. Maybe someday humanity can afford that. But not now.

Right, because it's a daily problem I have that I want to put files called Polish and polish in the same directory. And I can't think of any way to differentiate them other than capitals.

What a dumb argument.

By the way, what about when you can't distinguish them by capitals? What if I want a file about my new table in the same directory as my table of figures? What do I do then?

Despite the fact that I think case-sensitivity is a Good Idea

Why? I've never heard a single good argument in favour. With programming, you often want case sensitivity to distinguish between a public Name and a private name, but the same need isn't there with files, and case-sensitivity is just more likely to lead to mistakes. I say POSIX should be changed to prefer case-insensitive filesystems.

I have source trees that I can't check out of an SVN server on windows because either the files get overwritten by different case filenames being aliased onto the same file

Windows' behaviour makes sense. What doesn't make sense is having Readme and readme in the same directory. What possible reason could one have for differentiating 2 files on nothing but case?

This excellent blog article describes a technique developed by Judea Pearl decades ago to do exactly this. Would be interested to understand how this is different/better.

I do not consider myself to be US-centric nor uneducated, but prior to the incident at the Winter Olympics in 2010 where a luge athlete from Georgia was killed during a training run [wikipedia.org], and here in Vancouver, the host city for the Olympics that year, this incident was pretty major news. I had no idea previously that there was evidently a country that was also called Georgia, although I had certainly heard of the US state by the same name.

Sorry, but you sound pretty uneducated.

But today, Microsoft doesn't care about Windows

Them's pretty big words considering they still spend a huge amount of money developing and maintaining Windows on various different form factors.

Obviously you didn't read it either.

Jews have never fought wars to convert a populace. All the wars in Deuteronomy are over revenge or simply territory. Such was life in the ANE. The ancient Jews were nomads who wanted to settle. Whether an escape from Egypt ever happened or not is irrelevant.

Science fiction isn't fiction that has elements that aren't science but might appeal to geeks who like science....Science fiction is science that is fictional. Very different animal and naturally restrictive.

You are using a defintion of a term, which is at odds with the defintions of that term used by almost every other educated native speaker of English. This will probably make it hard for you to communicate. You might want to look to that.

Luckily, he is James Risen from the New York Times... If he were James Rosen from Fox News...he would be labeled a criminal co-conspirator and flight risk by Eric Holder so that they could trace his phone calls and emails.

They snooped on Rosen. That's bad.

They snooped on Risen and threatened, repeatedly over the past six years, to lock him up. That's worse.

Both journalists were attempting to enable the American people to keep tabs on the U.S. government (supposedly "theirs", in reality owned by corporate interests and the security-industrial complex). Your partisan take on the matter is counter-factual.

We love to rag on cops, but they do a dangerous job

Farmers are more likely to be killed on the job than cops are, and most cops who die on the job die in vechicular accidents, not assaults. Cops' seige mentality is bullshit.

If you start firing cops for every mistake or worse, jailing them, you quickly run out of cops

(Of course a citizen watch would be a huge social/poltiical change. But I'm not sure anything less than a huge social/poltiical change would fix the problem.)

You and OP look to be in the same clan when he claims they're doing this "in a rather violent manner". Hyperbole much?

An unjustifed arrest is assault and kidnapping. It is a violent crime.

That's true even when the pigs (and those who trample citizen's rights deserve that epithet) don't apply chemical weapons or electrical torture devices, or beat citizens into submission, or use lethal force.

If I forced someone into a cage at gunpoint for no good reason, I would go to jail for a long time. The same should apply to a cop.

I guess you've never seen a regular web user. They don't write documents at the same time they're reading a website.

At home, perhaps their media masters have managed to turn the web into as passive and one-way a medium as television. But at work, even these drones are quite likely creating documents in a word processor, or e-mail messages in their MUA, or entering data into a web form, while referring to another document (e-mail message, website).

There is a reason that every physical desk is in landscape mode. Put documents next to each other.

This.

This is exactly why I really wanted to go all-Linux after Windows XP. I found I just couldn't do it; I do, after all, work as a .NET programmer which mandates Windows familiarity, and XP was just getting to be a major security risk.

Sigh. I might be able to hold on using Windows 7 for 20 years... perhaps. If there's no decent MS alternative by then, I'll probably be foreced to pay Microsoft a rent.