I suppose, a bit. But mostly because you need a lot of rainfall and a lot of height difference to make sense. Compared to wind or solar, there's a lot less room for expansion and to power the needs of the future. And putting small waterfalls in tubes is not very visually appealing either, here in Norway the ones we have left we mostly like to keep for tourism and preserving som of the natural environment. Sure you could put Niagara Falls in a dam, but it wouldn't be pretty.

Sorry, but I've met quite a few intellectually sound people who deal too much with evidence and proof and far too little with reality to be easily manipulated by anyone with a little street smarts as long as it happens to be an area they don't know much about. They simply don't use their EQ do consider questions like who is this guy? What is it that he wants? What's his goals here? Why would he tell me that? They read things too much like a scientific paper with objective informasjon, where a more street wise person realizes he's being hustled.

I think you're confusing cause and effect, people ask why you don't use Windows and the answer is because you want to use something other than Windows. Particularly when the person you're talking to doesn't feel the same things chafing, maybe even though it works for you it doesn't work for me and it's not just about "being different" but that we have different needs or priorities. Just like every graphics tool discussion usually ends up with why you don't use Photoshop. It's the way of things when one tool has ~90% market share.

The "average person" also used Internet Explorer when it had 95% market share and was really slow at seeking alternatives. Because IE6 worked because sites had to work in IE6, the mainstream only follows once a significant portion of early adopters have led the way. Not that Linux has too many trendsetters, we're "experts" but soccer moms don't take car advice from race car drivers. They want to know what works for a soccer mom.

Market share is a battle won one step at the time. Either you double 1% to 2% and get a few more to care or you halve to 0.5% and a few less care. That the 90%+ didn't care and still don't care is something that might change if you get the pebble rolling into a landslide, but if the pebble's stuck you're stuck. It's not about making Linux a killer gaming platform, it's about making gaming not be a Linux-killer. If that makes it viable for another 1%, you're making progress.

Still not much, I must admit I thought Linux would be different after playing with it for 15+ years. On the other hand, it hasn't faded away into obscurity. It does get significantly easier and better to use, but so does the competition. And times change, it almost had it once when we had wired desktops plugged in the wall. Then mobile came and sleep modes and power management matters. Wired went Wireless and Bluetooth and so on. And now recently touch is the new hype. I think when it's more like a car, where a car from ten years ago is very much the same that Linux will catch up. It's morphing too much.

A doctor can look at the medical records of anyone for the purpose of providing medical treatment, it doesn't mean he can snoop on the records of husbands/wives/exes/your daughter/celebrities/etc. so I don't see how military intelligence is different in that respect. A lot of people technically have access to acquire privileged information, it doesn't mean they can snoop on whoever they like or do whatever they want with it. You could have picked many good arguments against this, that was not one of them.

I think UEFI has two different tasks confused. One is to boot my OS, which should just involve pointing it to the right storage device and loading X bytes into memory. The other is to provide a system configuration environment where I can boot and other hardware settings and there I want a rich environment. I want to be able to use my USB mouse and Bluetooth keyboard in a GUI, wired and wireless drivers for PXE boot, storage and RAID drivers, you name it. Basically it is a little OS in itself, running off motherboard firmware.

Now I have the impressions it's doing all this loading of a micro-OS with complex drivers only to finally hand over control to the real OS. Why? Maybe the OS wants to run a newer and better Bluetooth driver and now it can't because UEFI is running an old version. And if you do update the UEFI driver and break shit, you also broke your boot configuration. Just do the minimum requires to get the boot image, load it into memory and hand over control to the OS then get out of the way. If the boot fails, then you can launch the full configuration environment.

Not that I really want to defend Mars One, but... the huge event would be the actual Mars landing, which would have the whole world watching. The first trip and the first establishment of a base would keep people interested for many months all the way from launch until they're settled, for no other reason than it's the first time ever like the first moon landing. The second biggest thing is the selection process, who gets to go. Who will be the next Neil Armstrong, the competition for first man on Mars would be rather epic. The runner-up years would be about who would join them, using clips from the Mars colony as filler and publicity bait.

The base itself has very little news value, it will be a bunker stuck in the same barren landscape and the activity consisting mainly of the same routine maintenance. Alone it would be roughly as popular as NASA TV, which isn't exactly pulling in the crowds. It's not an entirely implausible concept which is why they've got so many people's attention, but the figures don't add up. My guess is you'd be raising 1% of your expenses. It's like a game show "Who wants to be a billionaire?", it sounds good except that that you need a billion dollars in prize money and it won't draw 1000x as many as "Who wants to be a millionaire?".

Cheaters cheat at every opportunity, they're also the ones who become notorious shysters and con men of every variety, both inside and outside the law. But most people aren't naturally born cheaters. What really brings out the widespread cheating is the perception that the system is rigged. That's why it is so hard to turn a country full of tax fraud, corruption, bribes and so on around, why should I make an honest effort when everybody else isn't?

At least when it comes to certain crimes I think the culture among your friends and family are far more important than what the law says. If your dad is an old Woodstock hippie and your buddies would say "Sure, who hasn't smoked a little pot in college" it's different than if they'd disown you and your bible study group would expel you. Of course they wouldn't support your cheating but if they cheated too and got away with it they won't take the moral high ground, just the practical advice that the first rule of cheating is to not get caught.

You'll probably be waiting a very long time. Reality doesn't make the math easy, for example if you want to describe water flowing down a stream good luck on all the non-linearity in the eddies and currents. Or the way turbulence acts in air resistance, it's messy. There's no real reason to think it'll get easier on the particle/wave level, in fact it ends up working in even more messed up ways you wouldn't imagine on the macro scale. But hey you can hope, I'd advise against holding your breath while you wait though.

I'll agree that the media through sensationalism is running high on hyperbole. But just because the media is crying wolf doesn't mean there won't one day really be a wolf. And that could end up pretty bad for us when we don't believe it.

Heck, I don't mind things that fail and fail hard. The most annoying thing is things that go bad but don't fail. Like the PSU that killed any motherboards attached. Or the RAM than silently corrupted bits sometimes. Or the flaky HDD that kinda kept it running in degraded most but failed spectacularly on the rebuild when another drive died. Or the CPU where the fan came loose and would BSOD under load. That's hardware but software is actually the same, if it fails 100% of the time that's easy to fix. If it works 99% of the time with no real obvious clue as to why you're fucked. When I finally get my group of friends together it's actually quite hard to put a price on failure, our time is scarce and when we finally get together I'd pay a lot to have it just work. An unreliable system is just not worth much at all.

Every time you need to use the "didn't-move-to-a-different-society-you" to justify something, you lose. First of all every place has their shitty sides, secondly because just because everyone does it doesn't make it right. I think you missed the main point though, which is not what I could do to future-me but that future-me doesn't exist yet. When society intercedes on future-me's behalf, they're just speculating on what a figment of their imagination might want and the actual person involved doesn't get a say.

Yes, it's a slippery slope. Which is why I reacted to the "good for future self" = good thing, end of discussion. It would be good for hangover-me if they reinstated prohibition so party-me didn't get to drink. But what you're also then saying is that I can't give myself a hangover, which is a pretty deep intervention in my personal liberty. It's not all black or all white but many shades of gray.

I was having a thought alone the same lines, what are they going to call it? The Virgin Car? The Virgin S? The Auto Virgin? There's exactly zero ways "I drive a Virgin" sounds good, unless you're talking about tonight's date. And the odds of them releasing it under any other name is also near zero. So oddly enough, what I'm most curious to see is the name.

It's a vicious cycle where the more sheltered and unprepared for adulthood they get, the longer you want to wait to give them the freedom and responsibilities needed to grow the f*ck up. And yes, a car is often an enabler for a lot of other activities that are helpful in that respect. Just after WWII we had boys as young as 14 sign on to go to sea for months at a time with no mom or dad to look after them. They grew up, fast. Maybe not the best idea today since you'd want an education, but for example this winter we had a dog sled race here. Teens as young as 15 responsible for their own dog sled team over 400km, they got caught in a big storm and had to dig in and eventually rescued. I'd be shit scared if I was 15, alone, in the mountains, with a storm blowing and there was no one else to rely on. Of course they were prepared and not exactly our average teens, but most teens could handle a lot more responsibility than they do.

I'm not going to pretend that I'm innocent there either, not taking any responsibility is convenient. You have to be pushed a little to stand on your own, participate in chores, make your own choices and not least of which dealing with the consequences. Like using your allowance for ice cream and realizing you don't have any left for candy on Saturday. If you manage to cry your way into having candy anyway, you're not learning. It might seem kind to you then and there, but it's not doing you good in the long run. The same with parents that always drop everything whenever their kids want something, they must to respect that you have a life too and not a slave that'll come at their whim. Put them in a car and they'll still expect the world to revolve around them and is reckless about the consequences because they expect someone to clean up the mess they made.

Boeing wouldn't take it. Would SpaceX? I'm not so sure, they haven't launched the Falcon Heavy yet. We know they're working on the Raptor engine and even bigger rockets, but not if they're at the point they'd accept a fixed price contract. Sure they might say they will all the while SLS negates any chance NASA will actually do it, but it's easy to bail on that. I think SpaceX would be better off with a runner-up contract, like with the "Commercial Crew" program. There's probably not room in NASAs budget for two projects of that dimension though.

You make it sound like running a corrupt/compromised system is a good thing. The system isn't supposed to let you alter the system files, but it might happen anyway for example by an exploit or mounting the drive in another computer. If it's just random bit flips I think Windows keeps backup copies anyway. If all the copies fail verification, it'll tell you the system is corrupt and insert a repair disc/USB stick with good copies. It's broken, not bricked. And whatever broke it, you probably want to fix. It's basically the less nuclear version of a wipe and reimage, the BIOS makes sure the boot loader's not compromised, the boot loader makes sure the kernel's not compromised, the kernel makes sure the modules aren't compromised and so you build a trusted zone of what's going on. Of course if you signed malware, you're pretty much screwed.