Terraforming serves the same purpose in KSR's books as it would in real life, in that it fulfills the dream of having a second Earth. A family or group can go out into the Martian landscape, find a pretty spot, and set up a homestead there with a minimal amount of skills, technology, or outside help (beyond what is needed for agriculture). That angle was a big part of Green Mars - I haven't actually read the other books in the series and I hear they differ quite a bit in focus. You can see the dream of terraforming Mars as a petty or vain thing, and I won't argue with that. But take a step back and look at the reasons people give for why we need any manned spaceflight program. It's always something like, "We need to colonize space for the future of the species." Putting humans in space is, at its core, about propagating the human experience out as far as possible. Terraforming works to that end. The goal is to make a new home, and people will prefer it to be as comfortable as the old one, and as similar as possible.

Speaking practically, any real Mars program will start small with the people living in a pressurized, heated chamber. Either that, or you'd need to start the terraforming a century before anyone arrives. Another thing to consider, since we are discussing KSR's books, is the safety aspect. Killing off an entire colony is as easy as ripping a hole in the tent covering it, or attacking the equivalent weak point of an underground structure. When you're dealing with humans, conflict is always a possibility. Especially as the colonization advances and you have thousands of people aligned with different groups. Having a breathable atmosphere is a godsend when war turns you into a refugee, or your colony has some technical or natural disaster that puts it out of commission.

Congratulations on discovering sampling. It's a common technique in electronic music, which rap is a derivative of. And yes, you will get sued if you don't license the sample (and your track is popular enough for the record label to care). With the popular stuff you hear on the radio, the samples are always cleared, either that or a lawsuit is pending. Un-popular artists can get away with it. Some people use more obscure samples that are either not copyrighted, or the copyright in the country of origin has expired, to avoid the issue.

Firewire gained more widespread use in applications that favored it, like video hardware in the early 2000s. I bought a Panasonic camcorder around that time that came with nothing but Firewire, and I remember several video capture devices that also used it, even though I never went looking for it specifically. Things that didn't actually benefit from Firewire - human input devices, slow I/O (floppies and early flash storage) - were of course using USB. Later on when USB 3 and eSATA came out, is when you really started seeing the disappearance of Firewire devices.

"Apple knows my needs better than I do" says more about the Apple apologist than it does about the company's clairvoyance.

My counter-anecdote involves the puck mouse-era iMac from 1998 or 99. It shipped without a floppy drive. Floppies were still the primary way to move data from one box to another. CD burners were still a few hundred dollars, and unreliable, not to mention the cost of -RW discs. (Not that the iMac had a burner anyway.) Home networking wasn't a thing yet, beyond 1 computer connecting to dialup. So, that computer needed an external floppy drive for me to do my homework on it. The hard disk ended up dying after less than a year, probably due to the high temps inside the case - apparently they thought it was a good idea to leave out the case fan, even though you had G3-era hardware and a CRT packed inside. Apple has a long history of making that particular design mistake, going way back to the Apple III and as recently as a few years ago in the Macbook Air. Maybe they should have tried to "Think Different"?

The unemployment numbers are cooked, but it's not by the White House or the President. (Though they don't have any problems citing the numbers...)

9 deaths in 9 years? Is that supposed to be shocking?

They don't have to overtake the US government's entire budget, just the amount they're willing to spend on Tor.

If we stopped investigating crashes after 2 months, we would have a lot more planes with serious safety issues in the air.

3 years ago I was involved in a contract to replace several thousand public school computers from Lenovo that had bad PSUs. The computers weren't just dying, they were actually catching fire.
Lenovo has been coasting on brand reputation for quite some time now.

Go into the Cricket store and the workers will be on a small tablet trying to punch in and change your account information. No shit - last time I went in there, they still had their full desktops, but they were only used for ringing up purchases. Other stuff was done on the tablet. The tablet this particular employee was using had issues connecting to the network, so it took forever, and I had time to ask her, "You can't just do it on the computer?" No, they are actually mandating employees to use tablets now.

Wal-Mart's security team takes shoplifters into a small interrogation room of sorts, asks them for their ID, and makes them sign some kind of agreement that has a blank for their SSN. Most people hand it right over hoping they won't get the police involved. (They may even be able to get this info after the fact from the police themselves, but that I'm not sure of.)

What this may get used for is things like tracking shoplifters. Wal-Mart and other large retailers will take down your name, driver's license number, SSN, and take your picture if you get caught shoplifting, with a warning that you are not allowed back on the company property, or they will consider it trespassing.

A system like this could be used to automatically track people who have shoplifted to either get tailed by security or kicked out of the store (and possibly charged with trespassing). It also wouldn't surprise me for the companies to share this info, either directly or through a background check / data-broker company, of which many already exist. Imagine being locked out of 90% of retailers in the country for shoplifting some candy when you were 17...

I don't see where they claimed to be concerned with privacy.

As far as I know there weren't any Germans in the 1940s researching how to change eye color. Can you source that?

Resistance to the ACA mobilized fast and hard, from the moment it was proposed, and court challenges to it have proceeded non-stop from the beginning right up to this year. There are fundamental flaws in the ACA (like insurance companies and employers still being the gatekeepers to healthcare) but they don't need "careful vetting" to spot.