Get where, exactly?

How many days in space (or even on a different planet, if you insist) would it take before the "I'm in Space!" novelty wore off and you spent the short remainder of your cramped, miserable life wishing you could be somehow teleported back to the planet your body and psyche were groomed for countless generations to live on?

In the movies, space is made to look like a grand adventure -- in real life, you'd quickly realize it's permanent exile from almost all of the things that make life worth living. Imagine the tiniest, most Godforsaken shit-hole backwater town you could possibly have, the kind that teenagers run away from the day they get bus fare to the city -- but there's no way to leave it. Ever. Also, you can't breathe the air, or ever even go outside without a space suit.

One of the WiFi SSIDs around my building is "ClickHereForIdentifyTheft". I nominate that one.

Of course, in the cases where it did work, you'd never hear about it.

I think this is setting your sights too low. Having a computer "go south" after a year (or even two or three years) isn't acceptable. Never mind the cost of the actual hardware: the cost of losing some or all of your data, and/or the use of your computer at what could be a crucial time, simply isn't worth it. Better to pay a bit more up front and get something sturdy and reliable, and save yourself a lot of stress and heartache.

Shouldn't a computer running MacOS/X count as a *nix machine? It's running a variant of BSD after all...

Of course then you are no longer 'on ice' so much as 'on tree'.

I'm not sure that's going to pan out. Solar panels generate power from light, not heat. (adding heat actually reduces the amount of power they can generate)

True, but you could keep the old plants mostly idle on sunny days, and save fuel and/or reduce pollution that way.

I agree that in the long run we need a efficient energy-storage solution, though.

Believe me, women get just as much criticism for "doing it wrong" as men, if not more. Body-weight and mothering style alone are the topic of enough daily public criticism to drive any woman mad, let alone "rules of appropriate sexual behavior", which many people seem to think is the public's business more than the woman's.

We just don't notice because (a) articles like mostly that appear in women's forums, less so on Slashdot, and (b) when they do appear, you (and I) tend not to pay much attention to them, since it isn't us they are criticizing.

Why wouldn't there be any women?