If the target, the target's friends and target's friends friends are all using encryption for 98% of communications, while you can still crack it (presumably?) you have to know what you're looking for in advance, like you would when applying for a warrant. That sort of defeats this huge plaintext scanning system the NSA and English governments have been putting in to place for the last half decade or more. Without all the supplemental background information their job gets exponentially harder and there's more data to decrypt than they have computing resources for.

PGP isn't exactly known for being user friendly. Gmail does not support it out of the box. The average person just can't be expected to understand that kind of cryptography.
 
That said, if you encrypt the device, encrypt the transport method, and the receiving device, that's pretty damn secure in about 98% of situations. WhatsApp just rolled out end to end encryption for their service as well, and they only charge a dollar a year (I think). That's encryption the average person can use. When an 18 year old mother of two in Sao Paulo can review her grocery list with her mother via secure encryption and neither of them know they're even doing it, that's a whole new level of secure. Compare that to the plain text emails I get from my boss about what I might consider vastly more important things at the office.
 
The golden era of unencrypted plaintext email is just about dead, I think, is the problem for intelligence agencies. At least for those people outside of gleaming glass corporate offices.

Leading is a relative term when you're discussing countries capable of human spaceflight. Last time I checked, the United States was paying a princely* sum to space-taxi their Astronauts to the ISS.
 
*When I say Princely, I mean, "the United States pays more to go to the ISS than the King of Malaysia", because that's totally a thing that happened as part of an arms deal, and we still pay more than he did for the privilege, despite our station being connected to theirs.

I sure hope we create the species that is above us. We're terrible at traveling through space (susceptible to radiation, decaying bodies, reliance on organic-based food, etc). At least something from this Earth should populate the galaxy. Magical wormholes and warp drives are not going to save us before we ultimately become self-defeating.

The new Dell XPS 13 (2015 version) is a pretty solid contender for "best Macbook Air-like device that runs Windows 8". Either that or the new X250 Thinkpad. I own the X230 and will probably pick up the XPS 13 to replace it here soon. It has a keyboard, the base model costs the same as a MBA, and has a 1080p screen. Hard to beat. The high end model has some insane 3200x1800 touchscreen which Win8 actually scales pretty well.

I think your advice is valid in both hemispheres.

Solar still works just fine in urban spaces too, it does not scale as well there due to population densities, obviously, but urban spaces take up a tiny proportion of available land. I will give you that solar does not work for the minority use case of nighttime industrial solar, but given the tiny portion of the energy market that represents I don't see it being a major issue. As solar power continues to drop, nighttime industrial may simply vanish as solar continues to drop in price. I don't see the point of arguing this, solar will be cheaper than coal by the end of the decade even without subsidies. You will need nighttime generation capacity but long term the writing is already on the wall, business will opt for the cheaper solution.

Solar can be installed locally per house for cheaper than the cost of grid power. General rule of thumb is you need 60% of your roof covered in Solar to meet 100% of your daytime residential needs. Solar doesn't need to be centrally located in giant farms, it can be distributed in urban areas with overlap on existing structures with no problem.

Nighttime power use is a lot lower than the 3pm-7pm peak daily usage block when residential and commercial is at it's highest. People are generally watching TV on their couch and commercial properties aren't being lit/climate controlled as much. This isn't a major , unsolvable problem.

Interesting use of TypeScript, an entire rougelike (i.e. Nethack, i.e. the '@' game) game authoring library written in TypeScript, from the author of libtcod:
 
Game: http://roguecentral.org/doryen/yendor.ts/game/index.html
60fps example:http://roguecentral.org/doryen/yendor.ts/bench/index.html

Library:https://github.com/jice-nospam/yendor.ts/releases/tag/v0.4.0
 
What's interesting is it does alpha shading, fluid mechanics, cloud mechanics, terrain generation etc all inside of a text based game, somewhat like Dwarf Fortress but a lot more flexible graphically.

I would be willing to pay for utorrent, it has a fantastic web interface, and now that I have it setup as a service and use the web interface instead. It also interfaces with the XBMC utorrent plug in. So for that I would buy it for maybe $30 one time purchase, instead it's on a subscription model, which is annoying. There's no one time payment option, and I have too much going on to manage a billion tiny subscriptions each month and review if I'm still getting X value out of them each month. I'm not going down that road.

It has a fantastic web front end and you can run it as a service in windows, I'm not sure how else you would accomplish this in the windows world.

"Do not look at laser with remaining good eye."

You are either Brian (the guy who created the sign), the laser scanner guy we wrote the sign for (at Corel) who's name I can't remember, or your sig is an incredible coincidence. If you're the guy, I really should tell you the rest of the story -- It's hilarious.

The controls was a bit excessive with 8 movement keys, 8 gun aiming keys plus action and shoot - you certainly got good at contorted finger manipulation in order to wander around a room with your gun always pointing the right way. But very few future games beat the immersion that was created - I think the way that a single bullet sunk you lead to much better immersion.