Windows users generally don't have a chip on their shoulder.

Linux users generally hate Windows a lot more than Windows users hate Linux.

why PC-only gamers are the master race

You can check a lot more houses faster with a drone. Like, look at an aeriel photograph vs. one taken from a car and see how many houses you can count.

Also like you said, with a drone you can see backyard pools.

am I safe?

My server doesn't do anything other than web serving via apache/mysql/php, and everything else is locked down.

What you say is logical and seems quite obvious when you think about it.

Problem is what you *didn't* say. You didn't mention that every wealthy country has a stagnating population, actually declining in many cases. You didn't mention that the countries with exploding populations are all in Africa, South America, Middle East, and South Asia. As in, black and brown people.

Since the white people countries and lighter-yellow skinned East Asian countries are not growing in population, no action is needed there (obviously). Any population control measures must be applied to black and brown countries. And therein lies the problem. Progressives oppose it because this flies smack in the face of liberal ideology, which states that black and brown people are a gift from Gaea, to be treasured and nurtured. Conservatives oppose it because Jeebus forbids contraception and preventing any birth is a sin.

Any effort to help Africa with its population problem will be instantly attacked with charges of racism and genocide. By parties on all sides of the political aisle.

Considering these girls are from Ireland, this should solve their potato problems quite well.

Standford should use Google money to fund its normal operational stuff, then use the money it normally uses for operations to do privacy research.

Nobody needs a home thermometer and refrigerator connected to the internet. Gadget makers and tech press have been trying to foist this shit on us for years and nobody wants it. Let it die already.

Touching the dead can give you Ebola? That seems like an extremely easy to transmit disease. I'm surprised a worldwide Ebola apocalypse hasn't occurred already.

Or by "touching the dead" do you mean people drinking the dead man's embalming fluids?

Human psychology is extremely relevant here.

We could build a self-sustaining underground colony on Earth that's powered by nuclear reactors and which grows its own food hydroponically. It could probably survive a dinosaur-killer asteroid event. And as you mentioned, it would cost way less than a Mars colony.

But think about it. Who the hell wants to live in an underground colony on Earth, permanently? You're not gonna get many volunteers. And I guarantee *nobody* is going to fund it. Living underground in Kansas has zero glamour. Like it or not, humans love exploring new places and thanks to sci-fi, Mars has a tremendous romantic value.

And that's just the "human race survival contingency" aspect. In the long term (centuries), Mars has so much more to offer than Kansas underground. Think of the resources to be discovered, science to be done. It's a whole new world!

Because there is no reason to colonize Antarctica. It has all the negatives without any of the positives.

Mars has some huge positives, namely the fact that it's not Earth. Think of it as an offsite backup for the human race.

Colonizing Antarctica would be like making a backup of your computer on a USB stick and then leaving it plugged in.

True only if there's enough battery life to last between the nightly charging. A smartphone with 2 hour battery life, do you think it will sell?

But beyond that, yeah I think won't matter. Like a 20 hour battery life won't be much of a selling point over a 15 hour one. Unless a miracle quantum battery comes out that lasts a week between recharging.

No, the main value of G+ was that Google was losing social networking to Facebook big time and Sergei Brin decided Google cannot be left behind. So they tried to leverage gmail and youtube and all their other services into forcing you to make a G+ account to give it a big boost. (Google could already track you every way to Sunday before G+ was ever dreamed up)

The fact that they're not forcing G+ on you anymore means that after 5 years of trying, they gave up trying to beat Facebook and decided not to piss off their core users any further.

Wow, that is the most insightful thing I've read on Slashdot in years!