Sadly, that was a great assessment of the past, current, and probably future.

Which is quite a coincidence, because my new Windows phone is actually quite good at not draining the battery when I'm not doing anything. The other day I was still at 95% battery by the end of the day because I was too busy to use my phone. My old Android phone on the other hand would easily go through 25-50% of it's battery in a day, even if I didn't use it for much. Most of the time I would plug it in at the office because if I didn't, it would be below 20% by the end of the day.

I don't think you can fix this problem by trying to teach more people how to program. Making students take math classes every year hasn't helped solve the problem of not having enough mathematicians. High level math is just something that is beyond the cognitive capabilities of most people. I'm not ashamed to admit that it's above my cognitive capability.

Programming, and more specifically, actual software development, as opposed to just being able to write a few simple functions like one would use in Excel, is also something that I believe to be outside the ability of a large percentage of the population. You can try to teach programming to everybody, and that may bring the number of programmers up a bit and salaries may go down a little bit, but it's not going to solve the fundamental problem which is that most people will never be able to write software.

I think the difference is that writing is an important skill to have even if you aren't going to be writing novels. My life would be so much easier if people writing emails could just compose a few simple sentences that are easy to understand.

Programming on the other hand doesn't seem to be all that useful unless you want to actually write computer programs. And I say that as somebody who is a programmer. It's definitely not something that everybody needs to know how to do. There's so many other skills that students are lacking in. Trying to add another subject which will only help a tiny fraction of students seems like a bad idea.

I think that MIDI support in and of itself is fine, but Android has so many other things that would be useful to so many more people. How about mounting network drives so that you can access them in every application. How about integrating Google Drive so that applications can access files without the application developer having to write code specifically to handle it?

Not as far as I'm concerned. The last space race meant we just build very large things that already existed. We basically built really big rockets. Rockets have been around for centuries. We also used computers for navigating the rockets. But computers advanced on their own without the need for the space race to really push them. We developed some pretty interesting materials and technologies to make the rockets lighter, and to make sure they didn't burn up on re-entry. But we didn't actually come up with any solutions that made it significantly easier to lift mass out of earth's gravity well. It still requires huge amounts of energy (and therefore money) to lift things into space.

You're still looking at a very long time to turn around and come back. Apollo 13 was only a 5 day mission, and their oxygen system problems happened 56 hours into the mission. They were only 15 hours from the moon when they encountered problems. Turning around was a relatively simple thing to do in this case. When your turn around point is 5 months away and something goes wrong, you have to have the materials on board to fix it. You don't have the option of just aborting the mission early and coming back home.

To avoid the 20% to 40% power loss when converting from DC to AC

...they're doing it wrong. DC to AC conversion is easily achieved in the high 90% range. For instance, a typical solar inverter is around 95% efficient. And you can do better, it just gets more expensive (although that's a one-time cost, whereas energy loss is a constant concern.)

Someone is pushing some other agenda here.

What it really means is that it makes many have access to servers that never had them before. Before all these cloud servers showed up, if I wanted to have a place to backup my files to, I would buy another hard drive or backup to DVD. Which means I bought 0 servers. Now with cloud storage services, I just back my stuff up to the cloud. I'm using a certain percentage of a server.

A lot of things that require servers just didn't used to get done, because it wasn't feasible to buy your own personal server for yourself if you aren't going to utilize a significant portion of its resources. But with cloud services, even if you only need 1% of a server, you can still do that task because it's now possible to buy very small pieces of processing and network time.

Sure. Did it to myself decades ago. Offspring of my genetic line aren't of the least bit of interest to me; perfectly happy raising kids of other birth who needed parents (5 so far, mostly excellent results.) Plus that whole "all the bareback sex with my SO we want, any time" thing is awesome.

Which, again, is just how I approach feline guardianship. Don't need new kittens from them. Plenty of kittens out there that need to own their own human.

This is what people don't seem to get. Even getting people to Mars is a much bigger task than just launching a single rocket. The round trip time for a Mars mission is around 2 years. You have to send everything you need along for the ride. All the food that the astronauts need to eat on the ride will need to be brought along with them. I've seen some numbers (can't find the link now), that even a single Mars mission would require 30 launches of supplies from the earth. There's also no ability to bail out like they did with Apollo 13. Once they are on their way there, there is no possibility of turning around. Even when you get there, you have to wait about 6 months for the planets to get into the right alignment for the trip home.

No. I would visit my sister in phoenix , who has a decent job, but they did not bother with AC. Why not? Because they are acclimated to high temps. OTOH, she thinks that 50-60f is cold.

Normally, that is called Texas.

Nope. Why do you think that dems and pubs want to increase h1b, which is even worse.

30% is low. Back in the 70s in I'll, I would work in temps of 105 with 60-90% humidity. That was humid. And yes, it sux.
In addition, in the winter, it hit -40f. Most of the time, we would have -30 through -35 for 2-3 weeks at a time.
But I was acclimated to it.

After 3 years of moving to Colorado, I went to visit a friend in IL, in the middle of winter when temps were -20 to -25f. I wore the same clothes that I used to ( good down jacket, etc.). AND like always, never a hat. I walked for 20 mins in that and nearly lost my ears for that. Ears were black and it was touch/go if they were to be removed.
The body can handle extremes, but it needs to acclimate to it. without that , it is a killer.