Well there's two parts to it, one is the "chain" property where like git's commits it's not possible to edit one transaction later and have it go unnoticed. You can run independent background audits that confirm that this blockchain state corresponds to these transactions and account balances. It's a lot more difficult than adding one fraudulent transaction by itself, like that somebody deposited cash in your account when they never did. Obviously if you can add "genuine" transaction to the chain that's different, but they can be validated in the process.

The other part is inter-bank transactions where it's essential that everybody agrees on the state of affairs. I wouldn't use the "proof of work" but rather signatures of trusted parties, one party one vote. If 100 banks get an inter-bank ledger, 98 of 100 agree on the block chain all the alarms should go off in the last two banks. With signing and countersigning it's pretty hard to go back on anything as 100 banks have digitially signed that they saw your bank digitally sign that this block chain is correct. Because it's harder than you think to find one trusted master to rule them all, both domestically and internationally. Everybody wants to do their own verification which is exactly what block chains provides.

Technically, no they wouldn't as NASA is a civilian agency operating outside the chain of command. In every other respect, yes it was the military backing it and funding it.

Well, just like when Musk launched the Autopilot saying this is going to become our self-driving car he's exaggerating quite a bit what it'll do in the short term. It'll be an outpost, sustained by Earth resupplies and the bigger the outpost, the greater the need for resupplies. It'll be a very long time before you hit critical mass where each expansion would make it more self-reliant. It'll mostly be a proof of concept, can we expand the living quarters with on-site materials or do we need domes from earth? Can we generate enough food, water, air, heating and power and so on? The burden on Earth needs to go down, then the size of the outpost can go up.

I expect they'll keep enough emergency supplies and consumables in reserve to survive while they try things out and figure out what works and doesn't. But if it doesn't work, we have to send more supplies and less people or all supplies and no people or in worst case just abandon it. Though I don't really believe that, I mean if they just sit in a bunker and eat canned food like on the ISS it's hard to see any reason why they should be forced to leave. But they also wouldn't really be making any progress towards colonization that way, it'd be just survival. Then again, surviving Mars might in itself be the first step since we haven't actually done that yet either.

I think that whole segment is full of artistic liberty. I'm sure they'll have reuse and fuel boosters and "quick" turnaround, but the Formula One pit stop where the rocket lands right next to a fuel pod, it is hoisted in place and is ready for liftoff again is fantasy. I'd guessing that logistically they'd always do it backwards with a previously landed and refurbished rocket launching first with the fuel, then if successful a new rocket with people that afterwards lands and it refurbished. But I think it's fair to leave practical details like that out to convey the essence to non-nerds.

Popular donor, Luke Skywalker will be.

Actually I wish they'd go back and do something old because they had the funds without needing the hype. If there was three things you'd find on any business desktop it was IE, Outlook and Office. One down, two to go. They might have to work on an AD/Exchange too in order to really succeed. I think it's nuts that in 2016 most people still use proprietary tech for simple documents and spreadsheets.

If that was the way the world worked, we'd have Saturn Vs to launch superheavy payloads into space right now. Or for that matter a Shuttle program. Using robots instead of people lets us be small and cost-effective instead of huge, expensive and risk-adverse and you say it like it's a bad thing. Those programs get axed, the staff reassigned and the capabilities lost because we can't even justify the operating/launch cost. To Mars with the SLS would be a one-time gig for human spaceflight, nothing more.

Also, you're wrong about the excitement. Today the landing site will be mapped out by robots in great detail in advance, you can probably do a VR tour long before the actual landing. They won't be explorers landing in the great unknown, they'll be scientists and researchers landing at an outpost. Sure there will be some excitement but it will never peak and pass quick, just read about the end of the Apollo program. And that was riding the high of the moon landing and Apollo 13, A mission to Mars will last too long and be so prepared before the humans arrive it'll never manage to hold the excitement.

Don't worry, it's actually a death ray. They just don't want xeno-environmentalists getting all uppity about some alien fungi going extinct.

Well as of last week StatCounter puts Win7 at 39.46% and Win10 at 24.33% of the desktop OS market share, of course that's not all devices running Win10. But a whole lot and after the free offer ended there's not been much migration at all. I suspect Win7 will be even harder to kill than WinXP and that wasn't easy.

Yes, but it would have put more pressure on the existing user base like Y2K compliance to follow the "full" standard. Right now it's like we're on IPv4, tagged WORKS4ME so why bother with IPv6. But I know I've made many more "shortcuts" than limiting something to 4 billion...

You're breathing CO2 right now, it's "only" 0.04% but pretty much anything that is actually toxic would have killed you at those concentrations. The Apollo 13 astronauts remained functional at 2%, even 5% isn't usually fatal and it's actually the absence of oxygen that kills you not the CO2 itself. Not to mention it's essential for photosynthesis so plants grow, it's far from obvious that CO2 emissions are bad for the local environment. Pretty much all the bad things that happen locally are from things that are not CO2, like CO from unclean combustion, NOx and various other particles that get whirled into the air. It's not like humans shy away from a fireplace...

So the 1992 UTF-8 specification didn't exist when the 1983 IP specification was created, but they could have done:

First 2^31: 0(31)
Next 2^59: 110(29) 10(30)
Next 2^88: 1110(28) 10(30) 10(30)
Next 2^117: 11110(27) 10(30) 10(30) 10(30)

And just declared that for now it's 0(31) - still 2 billion addresses but the sky is the limit. Heck, they might even have used shorts (16 bit) that way and declared that hardware/software should update as the need approached:

First 2^15: 0(15)
Next 2^27: 110(13) 10(14)
Next 2^40: 1110(12) 10(14) 10(14)
Next 2^53: 11110(11) 10(14) 10(14) 10(14)
(...)
Next 2^140: 1111111111111111(0) 10(14) 10(14) 10(14) 10(14) 10(14) 10(14) 10(14) 10(14) 10(14)

As for PKI, that couldn't possibly have happened. US export regulations wouldn't have allowed it at the time, this was long before Zimmerman and PGP.

A good example, 80% are franchises and 20% centrally owned but you'd never know the difference. The franchising agreement controls pretty much everything, so would a dealership contract. Some people still hasn't figured out what car dealerships was all about. In the before time, before the Internet and all that the car manufacturer would need a retail store, effectively a dealership since nobody would order a car by mail order or over the phone. But instead of that belonging to a big car company that took all the profits back to their corporate HQ, laws were passed to make that a local business that would keep it part of the local economy. It's a bit of a protectionist racket, but the local customers may have wanted it. Today though you don't need a retail store, because you can do it online. The car manufacturers want to cut out the middle man, the middle men want to stay. It's become a protection racket for e-tail vs retail instead of local vs big business.

And this one is the blocker for the really interesting research now, which is combating aging. This graph is in Norwegian but it should be pretty understandable, it's number of deaths by age for each sex and in total. If you look at age 1-17 it's almost zero. from 18-40 we get to make our own stupid choices but still very low, 40-60 people start to check out, 60-80 it's climbing rapidly and 80-100 almost everyone dies. If we were all as resilient as 20 year olds we could live 1000+ years, we're fighting disease in a more and more frail body. I'm not saying it's pointless but it will get exponentially harder and harder to improve.

The problem is though that nobody wants to experiment on healthy people that don't suffer from anything but aging, that you're in good shape for a 60yo but considerably worse than when you were 20yo is only natural. Beyond that you should eat healthy, exercise and all those other lifestyle choices we're not going to make any real medical effort to make you young again. Could we for example clone a new heart and give me a heart transplant, for no other reason than it got 50 years less wear and tear? Can we fix presbyopia that from Greek literally means "see like old man"? What about a way regain lost hearing, that almost everyone loses with age?

This is not how you would maintain a car, you don't wait for it to break down first before you start doing anything. Parts have life spans, parts need service, parts that start showing signs of wear and tear gets replaced. Humans? Don't fix it if it's not broke, in fact we often can't even fix it when it's broke. You're just supposed to accept that you're not a spring chicken anymore, half your body's systems are failing and doctors are running around with the proverbial duct tape. At some point we have to try experimenting on making healthy people even healthier, to rejuvenate them. We haven't really started yet and we certainly won't finish in my lifetime, nor in the lifetime of anyone I'm likely to meet.

The 10 GbE card would be the least of my worries. We have had two operators offering it for "consumers" here because apartment buildings typically have a single connection but most pro routers have dual uplink ports so it didn't really cost them anything to offer it - but the price has been ~10x their gigabit price at $1800/month and $700/month respectively. From what I've understood it's extremely few clients, but... there's always that guy working with 4K dailies both from home and work or whatever and the odd billionaire tech freak I suppose. Personally I got 150 Mbit and could get more but my connection is rarely the problem, I think the only time I'd like a faster line was when my GTA IV installation got irrecoverably borked and I had to wipe it and download ~57GB again. And even that took less than two hours...