"Besides, we've been crossing the Atlantic for thousands of years."

Yes, you clearly know your stuff. Everyone should pay attention to your ideas, which aren't crazy or stupid in the least.

Tread carefully - there's pretty good evidence for commerce between Africa and South America in that time frame, and the Chinese mega-ships were almost that long ago.

There is currently no company that can realistically make something like a moon colony happen, much less a mars colony, because there needs to be some kind of return of investment. ... It's just not something that's going to happen until a mars rover unearths a huge diamond deposit, or discovers some martian species capable of picking fruit for cheaper than the Mexicans. :) Your post is self-solving. The Moon is full of helium-3, which is essential to profitable fusion generators on Earth, which would pick up so many carbon credits (in the jurisdictions that are so predicated) that they will take over just as soon as the R&D is ready and the governments get out of the way (the R&D is likely the easier part).

Give up the silly fanboy complaints, photoshop is multi-window these days. The gimp style interface won once photoshop users started using multiple screens or multiple desktops.

It's a pity Nokia gave up on Debian based phones, and when they were selling them you had to go out of your way to find the things. Some repair shops still have unused N900 phones - still amazing years after release but a bit heavy for a phone.

I'm all for it. Bring on the paradoxes.

I'm a rabid fanboy of the dot - and I'll hang in here until the bitter end. But that front page story about ctrl-shift-t the other day made me think that end may be closer than I thought.

They were screwed well before then.

It's the old barbarian versus farmer problem manifesting itself yet again even though it's the 21st century. The unskilled invaders (in this case management with a background from elsewhere) have no choice but to rely on the specialists that supply their means of support but the only tools they have to deal with those specialists are violence and threats. They don't even know if they are being lied to so they are frightened of the better specialists that would be more capable of lying to them.

Management by nepotism and MBA is close to second generation Feudalism where the spoiled brats get to run the fiefdom and have no clue about anything other than boozing with other spoiled brats. They just hope that shouting and threats will do some good.

It appears that nobody has a clue exactly what Snowden apart from Snowden himself, so that may have happened. I suspect it's more likely that they do not have any worthwhile systems in place for tracking what he had access to.

I'll add another - a young "computer systems engineer" came to me and said a system was down. I asked, to try to find out some details of whether it was a service or the entire host "how do you know, did you ping it?" The reply was "nothing so sinister".
So there you go - even professionals that work with computers a great deal think something as simple as ping is a dirty hacker tool of evil, and it's a far more common mindset than my single example. They are so deluded that they see me as a "white hat cracker" just because I use nmap, tcpdump and the rest.
Also don't take this as a rant against engineers. I was one for a couple of decades until I wandered into IT via cluster computing.

It's likely that a truly secure network environment is incompatible with a shambolic outsourced workplace that is mostly designed to funnel money into the right pockets. Secure data transfer takes a lower priority than giving a horse judge a job.

Personally, my suspicion is that part of the NSA is extremely smart and competent

We've just had another wakeup call about that, just in case not seeing the collapse of the USSR coming wasn't a big enough wake up call. I've got no idea how they missed that one since it seemed like every journalist that was paying attention to the issue could see it happening.

What are you talking about? It was well known the USSR couldn't keep up the level of spending

It wasn't well known in the "intelligence community", they were waiting for the non-existent ace in the hole to come out and were utterly dumbfounded when it didn't. Their paranoia had them living in a fantasy world where the decades long economic problems of the USSR were "just what they want us to think".
That's why I've listed that as a truly "epic fail". Too much SIGINT and not enough HUMINT meant a major divergence from reality.

The last meaningful America's Cup races were held in the late '80s. Somebody squinted hard enough at the 12-meter rules and entered a multi-hull. Now it's just a matter of who spends the most money on a carbon fiber boat with a wing sail. This is a sailing race of fundamentally unseaworthy vessels. It would be literally be safer to cross an ocean in a dinghy than in one of these monstrosities.

Come September, do yourself a favor. Watch Deep Water on Netflix. Read any book on Ernest Shackleton. Read any Lin and Larry Pardey book. You'll finish all three before the America's Cup race is over, and you'll know more about sailing than watching every second of the America's Cup races.

I have a late 2008 15" MBP on Mountain Lion. It's fine.

Upgrade to the maximum RAM you are capable of. (A good practice at all times.) Mavericks will be a different beast, and it's well worth waiting to see on a 5+ year old machine, but you're probably fine.

I see accounts of similar proposals constantly on Hacker News.

Shoot - I see a similar attitude from non-technical people within my org all the time. They aren't looking to make money though. They just think, "Hey, we need this tool and you are a technical guy. Why don't you knock it out in a couple weeks for us so we can roll it out to 20 different countries."

It makes me a little crazy sometimes that people don't realize the work it takes to make something well and then to support it over time.