Have wifi in the airport terminal. -- At how much extra per month?
Zero per month, since this is a "pay as you go" fee. It is small compared to the cost of the flight, just like the cost of a couple of muffins and a cup of coffee. If you are a business traveler then you can include it into your trip expenses.
That isn't a "simple" solution. Adding that much configurability adds a lot of complexity to code
In Windows it is solved by the registry. The OS and applications are highly configurable, but most of the settings are preset as defauts and written into the registry.
This creates a simple user experience (nothing to configure) and at the same time allows deeper configuration, if required, with a registry editor or with 3rd party tools like TweakUI. This also removes developer's dilemmas of what color scheme to pick, what fields to show and in what order, etc. etc. - just code it with parameters and let someone else to tweak details as they like. A good part of MS's KB articles deals with fixing things in Windows by editing registry; this is possible only because these keys in the registry exist in the first place. If they are hardcoded you need a patch. But the essence of this approach is that you don't need to ship with a GUI that can change all these settings. You don't even expect to need to change most of them. But when one day the customer calls and says "you know, 4 items in the 'recent files' list is not enough" you tell him to just change a certain value in the registry.
A registry and a bunch of.config files aren't too different, in general, but the registry benefits from the shared, reused and well debugged code that manages it. There are also advantages in fact that some parts of the registry are available to drivers through a kernel level API (this is much appreciated by driver developers.) And of course the registry supports concurrent, safe, atomic access by multiple processes (try that with.config files...)
Why would anyone who really cares about security use a device for which there is a known back door?
There are many companies that are legally required to protect the data. Thieves won't be able to decrypt anything, and the government already has access to the data. Outside of the HIPAA crowd every business would love to have an HDD that can't be stolen and then read on a separate computer. Again, this is not a protection against the government - if the latter wants the data it just sends in the police and takes whatever it pleases.
So to summarize, only the people who have something to hide from the government will NOT want such a HDD. There could be some users of this type - most notably, political parties (see Watergate,) then individual rebels, and finally criminals. This is a drop in the bucket, compared to all the businesses in the country who would love an extra protection against theft.
but is it that hard to wipe the screen every now and then?
I don't want to pay several hundred dollars for the privilege to carry a cloth and wipe the screen like a cleanliness-obsessed mental patient. If the device is designed to be dirty then I don't want it. Hardly any loss to me, by the way - I have little use for such slow and small devices (that's where my other 17 reasons for not using them are coming from.)
Her response when I told her about the iPhone 2g? "Why would anyone use that? Won't it get finger prints all over it?"
Believe it or not, this is one of my several reasons to not use any of those finger-oriented touch screen devices. I guess different people perceive it differently, but for me it is disgusting to look through fingerprint smudges.
In the metric of deaths per TWh for which nuclear has 0.04 and coal has 161.
Coal doesn't have a tendency to poison huge territories for millennia. Mining is dangerous, but the baby on the surface, above the mine, is not in any danger. We also have a good idea how to make mining safer (by using robots, for example, once we learn how to make them good enough.) A lot of coal is mined in open pits; this method is efficient and not very dangerous.
With nuclear energy you are one accident away from losing your country. Japan is a small country; we are yet to see the aftermath, but I wouldn't be surprised if agricultural activities, if not residence, will be prohibited in some most contaminated zones. They didn't have any land to spare to begin with, so this will hurt.
The chance of such an accident is small. The planet experienced only two large ones so far. But the damage from them {was,is} considerable, counting long term effects and denial of land and writeoffs of huge amounts of materials and resources. The question is simple - is the country willing to bet that nothing bad happens? Note that it's not enough to safeguard against technical flaws and personnel errors. You also need to safeguard against the nature, and against determined terrorists.
Certainly this depends on the size of the country. A large one, like the USA or USSR, can survive an accident with "acceptable losses." If need be, they can throw money, men and resources at the problem because they have all that. But we already see that Japan is overwhelmed by their accident. It certainly didn't help that they had the earthquake and tsunami at the same time. But the previous nuclear incident in Japan was also handled pretty bad, and there was no earthquake to hinder the efforts.
Like Japan, Taiwan does a lot of high-tech manufacturing.
There is more than one level of high-tech manufacturing. It's one thing to take a 0402 capacitor and put it onto the PCB. It's a very different thing to make that capacitor from microscopic parts in the first place. Do you think there are no trade secrets in ceramics that allow you to cram a few uF into an 0402 part? (Murata is a Japanese company.) Even this tiny segment of passives is dominated by US and Japanese manufacturers (TDK, Taiyo Yuden, Kemet, Panasonic, Murata.) Even AVX, a very solid US manufacturer, has nothing to offer if you need 4.7uF in size 0402.
Companies like Panasonic-ECG and Rohm are doing very well, and they are producing very cost-competitive components. If you are looking for a low cost surface mounted aluminum capacitor, Panasonic is the most likely manufacturer.
Because when you've got a hairy performance problem you don't want to find out that it's because of code generated by some "easy to use" wizard.
There are no wizards in.NET, outside of the creation of a new, blank project when you ask for it. The WPF code is as KISS as possible already. Everything that you have is expressed as code - there are no hidden databases of properties that manifest themselves only at compile time. If you want you can write WPF applications in Notepad, and they will compile to exactly the same binary as an IDE would make.
Yes it lets you design the interface with drag n drop components
Even that is no longer true. A drag/drop still exists, technically, but it doesn't do you any good, and I don't even have that panel visible. In WPF you are writing your XAML code (the GUI) by hand, either by typing it in or by copy-paste from a similar window.
Visual Studio "writes" very little code, and only when you ask for it. It can create message handlers for you, and you want that. And it has IntelliSense which autocompletes what you type - again if you allow it to do so. But 99.999% of modern.NET development is done by typing the code in by hand.
I have know idea what.NET is, marketing has provided too many definitions
.NET is the latest Windows API and the application framework. It takes care of launching your code so that you don't need to copy and paste hundreds, if not thousands, lines of standard code into each of your applications. Remember Win16 "Hello, World" ? It was about 150 lines of code to just print one line of text..NET takes care of creating windows on low level, sending events back and forth, and transferring data between controls. It correctly handles thousands of internal (WIN32) messages so that you don't have to; but you can always override that or preview events before they are acted upon. It also provides system level APIs for about everything that Windows has.
If you don't want to use the free.NET today, you can always pay for commercial libraries that are obsolete, clumsy and not as good. Or you can write a console application. If you are good at history you can try to resurrect MFC or OWL, but that would be painful and pointless.
C# is not part of.NET because.NET is a library that your code calls when it wants to do certain things. These calls can originate in various languages. However C# is well integrated with Visual Studio, is very functional, and is loaded with metadata (good for reliability) so you will do well if you stick to C# - unless there are good reasons to select some other language. I would say 99% of all software will be fine with C#.
I'm working (very successfully) on a C#/.NET application for last couple of months. I had an option of doing it in C++, and maybe I would have gained a tiny bit of performance... but the nature of the application (a large, complex database interface with tons of custom imports and exports and typically well under 100,000 rows in all tables combined) doesn't ask for performance.
Most of the application is GUI and the "business logic." None of that requires those last 5% of performance; it won't even see it. But what it does require is the speed of development (there is a lot of business logic) and reliability. That means that explicitly called destructors, along with pointers that live their own life, are a bad idea. In C# you still need to be aware of the lifecycle of your objects, of course, but it's much easier than in C++ where you must employ very rigid coding standards to be sure who owns what and when the pointers to objects become invalid.
So that was about C#. The.NET, which is somewhat orthogonal to the language, is something that you practically must use if you code for Windows. And most people use Windows. I have a decent experience with Qt, but it is nowhere as good as.NET simply because it is bound by its cross-platformeness. Such simple things as saving of window size and position become complex because size of decorations differs.
Of course WPF is not easy. You need to know most of it to write anything useful. You can't start with stdio.h and later progress to io.h or something. In WPF you must know it all - or at least most of it; binding is the first and the largest obstacle that you must conquer. Once you do that, though, many things become automatic.
I don't know why knowledge of something - especially of a library that is mandatory for anyone who claims to code for Windows - might be detrimental on a resume. I would rather think that voicing such a viewpoint is telling too much about whoever said it.
Why should you charge taxes on people that have generously left their own homes to come and contribute to the wealth of the US with their own labour, and don't even get to vote on how that wealth is used?
Those taxes are used to defend and protect GC holders, to pay them unemployment insurance and other benefits, to build roads that they use, etc. etc. The only missing piece is inability to select the same corrupt politician that is squatting in the office for a few decades. This is a very minor loss - many citizens don't vote either.
Besides, if GC people are so unhappy they can always leave - and some do, for various reasons. Deterioration of the US society is the major reason among those; taxation is not so important unless you make lots of money. Inability to vote is probably dead last.
You would need to change the direction of the piping twice a month.
The Earth would go bankrupt just on delivery of the liquid for this heat engine, unless it is molten glass or some other local material. But local materials are hard to use.
We can't set up any heavy machinery on the Moon or on other planets without some major discoveries in propulsion. Right now we are like ancient seafarers in a canoe crossing the Atlantic ocean. Can it be done? Yes, perhaps, if you really have to. Is it practical? Not really.
to me excitement is the emotional response to functionality.
You are in the minority; otherwise the year of desktop Linux would be 2000, not 2020:-) Most people don't need functionality, and because of that they buy into "smartphones" that are just the next revision of a calculator or of an electronic notebook. In fact, lack of functionality is one of the reasons why I stay away from smartphones - I don't need what they do, and they don't do what I need. However Apple proved that such a geeky approach does not matter, statistically - there is plenty of people who feel the need to update the world on the minute details of their breakfast.
Because the worker toiled for a month, got the money, and keeps it. Money is a token, not a consumable. The worker needs a new $thing but he is not buying one; this means that the month that he spent at work was spent for nothing. He could have sat at home all that month, and the end result would be the same.
From the POV of the phone vendor this is also bad. They worked hard to build that phone, and they calculated that if they sell that one phone on that one day then they all get paychecks and can buy food for their families. But the worker #1 didn't buy the phone, so the phone manufacturers have to go hungry.
They need to exchange their phone for tokens that they later exchange for food. They can't eat their phones. This is what you get from specialization. If, on the other hand, you are talking about a village of farmers, one farmer may want to occasionally buy a few products from another farmer if his products are slightly different, but that sale is in no way earth-shattering, and nobody is hungry.
Sure, but growth and waste aren't exactly directly related.
They are usually related, and who cares how direct the link is? If you ship your electronic waste to China don't be surprised if some of that waste comes back in baby food.
With regard to laptops vs. Elbonians: you have $500 and need to decide what to do. You can buy a new notebook and scrap the old one; or you can lend your $500 to an Elbonian student who wants to study in a good US university. There will be a ROI in this case, both financial and moral.
We truly have no idea what it will take to wow us.
Why should anything wow us? A hammer and a wheel don't generate much of excitement, but they are around for thousands of years. A product must be functional first and exciting last.
With regard to the OS, "less is more." MS is working in the opposite direction because they have to sell more bits to justify the sale price. But in general the OS doesn't matter because the OS doesn't produce any valuable output; it's like a janitor that keeps the office building clean so that highly paid engineers can come and do their work.
we can accomplish almost all the same goals via robotic exploration
And if you can't, it means you need to build better robots. You need robots for any work on Moon and Mars anyway - there are no cheap laborers there, and every minute outside (esp. on the Moon) is dangerous (radiation, micrometeorites, damage to spacesuits, etc.)
However exciting a manned trip to Mars may be, it is certainly not justified at this point in time. Humans would be needed there only if we are pretty sure that there is sentient life on Mars and we need to establish contact. But a dead planet - which Mars largely is, as it seems - doesn't warrant sending people just to put boots on the ground. If a person chips a piece of rock away he will carry it to a robot, to do further analyses. If you need a more complex analysis, bring rocks back (you have to have this technology first anyway.)
As an example, if you have some money allocated for Mars and you instead want to divert it to Earthly projects, you can start with things as simple as solar panels for everyone. They last a long time and produce a lot of power (I know because I have a PV setup; my heating is now free, with lots of kW*h to spare.) But there are many other things to do too - clean water, for one, or food, or housing, or a 1 Gbps Internet link for everyone:-)
This is in fact *more important* than a trip to Mars. The human civilization is rotting from the inside; the level of education falls, the level of "I want $foo right now, waa!" is rising. Nobody wants to work, and nobody needs to work, as it seems. Ghettos keep growing, gangs keep growing. Those problems are killing us faster than Ebola; Mars is not even in the equation. We can fly to Mars, but how much good will it do us if the spacefarers don't have a planet to return to?
He didn't claim that. Besides, it's not necessary for him to be "away" - pipes can freeze while he is at work or asleep.
just close the main water valve and then open all your faucets connected to that pipe.
And don't forget to turn off all water heaters that you have in the house.
insulating the pipe will work wonders
It is important to know that the water is not self-heating (unless it is radioactive.) So the insulation will only slow the freezing process down, but in the end, if there is no flow, it will freeze anyway. In a cold climate pipes are insulated and buried in the ground. If a piece of pipe is exposed it will freeze unless there is a good flow of warm water in it. Also it's coldest at night, and very few people need water at that time.
Slashdot Mirror
How about knowing that your location was somewhere within a range of 800 miles? ;)
It would be damn inconvenient if the police asks you if you were in New York City on a certain day but you claim that you were in San Diego.
Have wifi in the airport terminal. -- At how much extra per month?
Zero per month, since this is a "pay as you go" fee. It is small compared to the cost of the flight, just like the cost of a couple of muffins and a cup of coffee. If you are a business traveler then you can include it into your trip expenses.
That isn't a "simple" solution. Adding that much configurability adds a lot of complexity to code
In Windows it is solved by the registry. The OS and applications are highly configurable, but most of the settings are preset as defauts and written into the registry.
This creates a simple user experience (nothing to configure) and at the same time allows deeper configuration, if required, with a registry editor or with 3rd party tools like TweakUI. This also removes developer's dilemmas of what color scheme to pick, what fields to show and in what order, etc. etc. - just code it with parameters and let someone else to tweak details as they like. A good part of MS's KB articles deals with fixing things in Windows by editing registry; this is possible only because these keys in the registry exist in the first place. If they are hardcoded you need a patch. But the essence of this approach is that you don't need to ship with a GUI that can change all these settings. You don't even expect to need to change most of them. But when one day the customer calls and says "you know, 4 items in the 'recent files' list is not enough" you tell him to just change a certain value in the registry.
A registry and a bunch of .config files aren't too different, in general, but the registry benefits from the shared, reused and well debugged code that manages it. There are also advantages in fact that some parts of the registry are available to drivers through a kernel level API (this is much appreciated by driver developers.) And of course the registry supports concurrent, safe, atomic access by multiple processes (try that with .config files...)
Why would anyone who really cares about security use a device for which there is a known back door?
There are many companies that are legally required to protect the data. Thieves won't be able to decrypt anything, and the government already has access to the data. Outside of the HIPAA crowd every business would love to have an HDD that can't be stolen and then read on a separate computer. Again, this is not a protection against the government - if the latter wants the data it just sends in the police and takes whatever it pleases.
So to summarize, only the people who have something to hide from the government will NOT want such a HDD. There could be some users of this type - most notably, political parties (see Watergate,) then individual rebels, and finally criminals. This is a drop in the bucket, compared to all the businesses in the country who would love an extra protection against theft.
but is it that hard to wipe the screen every now and then?
I don't want to pay several hundred dollars for the privilege to carry a cloth and wipe the screen like a cleanliness-obsessed mental patient. If the device is designed to be dirty then I don't want it. Hardly any loss to me, by the way - I have little use for such slow and small devices (that's where my other 17 reasons for not using them are coming from.)
Her response when I told her about the iPhone 2g? "Why would anyone use that? Won't it get finger prints all over it?"
Believe it or not, this is one of my several reasons to not use any of those finger-oriented touch screen devices. I guess different people perceive it differently, but for me it is disgusting to look through fingerprint smudges.
In the metric of deaths per TWh for which nuclear has 0.04 and coal has 161.
Coal doesn't have a tendency to poison huge territories for millennia. Mining is dangerous, but the baby on the surface, above the mine, is not in any danger. We also have a good idea how to make mining safer (by using robots, for example, once we learn how to make them good enough.) A lot of coal is mined in open pits; this method is efficient and not very dangerous.
With nuclear energy you are one accident away from losing your country. Japan is a small country; we are yet to see the aftermath, but I wouldn't be surprised if agricultural activities, if not residence, will be prohibited in some most contaminated zones. They didn't have any land to spare to begin with, so this will hurt.
The chance of such an accident is small. The planet experienced only two large ones so far. But the damage from them {was,is} considerable, counting long term effects and denial of land and writeoffs of huge amounts of materials and resources. The question is simple - is the country willing to bet that nothing bad happens? Note that it's not enough to safeguard against technical flaws and personnel errors. You also need to safeguard against the nature, and against determined terrorists.
Certainly this depends on the size of the country. A large one, like the USA or USSR, can survive an accident with "acceptable losses." If need be, they can throw money, men and resources at the problem because they have all that. But we already see that Japan is overwhelmed by their accident. It certainly didn't help that they had the earthquake and tsunami at the same time. But the previous nuclear incident in Japan was also handled pretty bad, and there was no earthquake to hinder the efforts.
Like Japan, Taiwan does a lot of high-tech manufacturing.
There is more than one level of high-tech manufacturing. It's one thing to take a 0402 capacitor and put it onto the PCB. It's a very different thing to make that capacitor from microscopic parts in the first place. Do you think there are no trade secrets in ceramics that allow you to cram a few uF into an 0402 part? (Murata is a Japanese company.) Even this tiny segment of passives is dominated by US and Japanese manufacturers (TDK, Taiyo Yuden, Kemet, Panasonic, Murata.) Even AVX, a very solid US manufacturer, has nothing to offer if you need 4.7uF in size 0402.
Companies like Panasonic-ECG and Rohm are doing very well, and they are producing very cost-competitive components. If you are looking for a low cost surface mounted aluminum capacitor, Panasonic is the most likely manufacturer.
Because when you've got a hairy performance problem you don't want to find out that it's because of code generated by some "easy to use" wizard.
There are no wizards in .NET, outside of the creation of a new, blank project when you ask for it. The WPF code is as KISS as possible already. Everything that you have is expressed as code - there are no hidden databases of properties that manifest themselves only at compile time. If you want you can write WPF applications in Notepad, and they will compile to exactly the same binary as an IDE would make.
Yes it lets you design the interface with drag n drop components
Even that is no longer true. A drag/drop still exists, technically, but it doesn't do you any good, and I don't even have that panel visible. In WPF you are writing your XAML code (the GUI) by hand, either by typing it in or by copy-paste from a similar window.
Visual Studio "writes" very little code, and only when you ask for it. It can create message handlers for you, and you want that. And it has IntelliSense which autocompletes what you type - again if you allow it to do so. But 99.999% of modern .NET development is done by typing the code in by hand.
I have know idea what .NET is, marketing has provided too many definitions
If you don't want to use the free .NET today, you can always pay for commercial libraries that are obsolete, clumsy and not as good. Or you can write a console application. If you are good at history you can try to resurrect MFC or OWL, but that would be painful and pointless.
C# is not part of .NET because .NET is a library that your code calls when it wants to do certain things. These calls can originate in various languages. However C# is well integrated with Visual Studio, is very functional, and is loaded with metadata (good for reliability) so you will do well if you stick to C# - unless there are good reasons to select some other language. I would say 99% of all software will be fine with C#.
Most of the application is GUI and the "business logic." None of that requires those last 5% of performance; it won't even see it. But what it does require is the speed of development (there is a lot of business logic) and reliability. That means that explicitly called destructors, along with pointers that live their own life, are a bad idea. In C# you still need to be aware of the lifecycle of your objects, of course, but it's much easier than in C++ where you must employ very rigid coding standards to be sure who owns what and when the pointers to objects become invalid.
So that was about C#. The .NET, which is somewhat orthogonal to the language, is something that you practically must use if you code for Windows. And most people use Windows. I have a decent experience with Qt, but it is nowhere as good as .NET simply because it is bound by its cross-platformeness. Such simple things as saving of window size and position become complex because size of decorations differs.
Of course WPF is not easy. You need to know most of it to write anything useful. You can't start with stdio.h and later progress to io.h or something. In WPF you must know it all - or at least most of it; binding is the first and the largest obstacle that you must conquer. Once you do that, though, many things become automatic.
I don't know why knowledge of something - especially of a library that is mandatory for anyone who claims to code for Windows - might be detrimental on a resume. I would rather think that voicing such a viewpoint is telling too much about whoever said it.
Why should you charge taxes on people that have generously left their own homes to come and contribute to the wealth of the US with their own labour, and don't even get to vote on how that wealth is used?
Those taxes are used to defend and protect GC holders, to pay them unemployment insurance and other benefits, to build roads that they use, etc. etc. The only missing piece is inability to select the same corrupt politician that is squatting in the office for a few decades. This is a very minor loss - many citizens don't vote either.
Besides, if GC people are so unhappy they can always leave - and some do, for various reasons. Deterioration of the US society is the major reason among those; taxation is not so important unless you make lots of money. Inability to vote is probably dead last.
The real trick is to fhttp://tech.slashdot.org/story/ [...] Admittedly this is a very rare combination.
Indeed.
You would need to change the direction of the piping twice a month.
The Earth would go bankrupt just on delivery of the liquid for this heat engine, unless it is molten glass or some other local material. But local materials are hard to use.
We can't set up any heavy machinery on the Moon or on other planets without some major discoveries in propulsion. Right now we are like ancient seafarers in a canoe crossing the Atlantic ocean. Can it be done? Yes, perhaps, if you really have to. Is it practical? Not really.
even if it doesn't work perfectly the trauma of killing another person is not an immediate major concern
You shouldn't forget that scene in Spaceballs where the princess is given a gun.
Take the cost of the relationship and divide by the number of days in that relationship.
There are other advantages of hookers. For example:
Some say that a hooker is more likely to give you an STD, but that only depends on what kind of a wife they compare a hooker to.
to me excitement is the emotional response to functionality.
You are in the minority; otherwise the year of desktop Linux would be 2000, not 2020 :-) Most people don't need functionality, and because of that they buy into "smartphones" that are just the next revision of a calculator or of an electronic notebook. In fact, lack of functionality is one of the reasons why I stay away from smartphones - I don't need what they do, and they don't do what I need. However Apple proved that such a geeky approach does not matter, statistically - there is plenty of people who feel the need to update the world on the minute details of their breakfast.
Why is this a problem?
Because the worker toiled for a month, got the money, and keeps it. Money is a token, not a consumable. The worker needs a new $thing but he is not buying one; this means that the month that he spent at work was spent for nothing. He could have sat at home all that month, and the end result would be the same.
From the POV of the phone vendor this is also bad. They worked hard to build that phone, and they calculated that if they sell that one phone on that one day then they all get paychecks and can buy food for their families. But the worker #1 didn't buy the phone, so the phone manufacturers have to go hungry.
They need to exchange their phone for tokens that they later exchange for food. They can't eat their phones. This is what you get from specialization. If, on the other hand, you are talking about a village of farmers, one farmer may want to occasionally buy a few products from another farmer if his products are slightly different, but that sale is in no way earth-shattering, and nobody is hungry.
You can always sue the dumb bitch that was driving her over sized SUV
It's not you who will be suing but your estate. You will be resting comfortably six feet under.
Sure, but growth and waste aren't exactly directly related.
They are usually related, and who cares how direct the link is? If you ship your electronic waste to China don't be surprised if some of that waste comes back in baby food.
With regard to laptops vs. Elbonians: you have $500 and need to decide what to do. You can buy a new notebook and scrap the old one; or you can lend your $500 to an Elbonian student who wants to study in a good US university. There will be a ROI in this case, both financial and moral.
We truly have no idea what it will take to wow us.
Why should anything wow us? A hammer and a wheel don't generate much of excitement, but they are around for thousands of years. A product must be functional first and exciting last.
With regard to the OS, "less is more." MS is working in the opposite direction because they have to sell more bits to justify the sale price. But in general the OS doesn't matter because the OS doesn't produce any valuable output; it's like a janitor that keeps the office building clean so that highly paid engineers can come and do their work.
we can accomplish almost all the same goals via robotic exploration
And if you can't, it means you need to build better robots. You need robots for any work on Moon and Mars anyway - there are no cheap laborers there, and every minute outside (esp. on the Moon) is dangerous (radiation, micrometeorites, damage to spacesuits, etc.)
However exciting a manned trip to Mars may be, it is certainly not justified at this point in time. Humans would be needed there only if we are pretty sure that there is sentient life on Mars and we need to establish contact. But a dead planet - which Mars largely is, as it seems - doesn't warrant sending people just to put boots on the ground. If a person chips a piece of rock away he will carry it to a robot, to do further analyses. If you need a more complex analysis, bring rocks back (you have to have this technology first anyway.)
As an example, if you have some money allocated for Mars and you instead want to divert it to Earthly projects, you can start with things as simple as solar panels for everyone. They last a long time and produce a lot of power (I know because I have a PV setup; my heating is now free, with lots of kW*h to spare.) But there are many other things to do too - clean water, for one, or food, or housing, or a 1 Gbps Internet link for everyone :-)
This is in fact *more important* than a trip to Mars. The human civilization is rotting from the inside; the level of education falls, the level of "I want $foo right now, waa!" is rising. Nobody wants to work, and nobody needs to work, as it seems. Ghettos keep growing, gangs keep growing. Those problems are killing us faster than Ebola; Mars is not even in the equation. We can fly to Mars, but how much good will it do us if the spacefarers don't have a planet to return to?
WinAmp [...] is the best mp3 player I've ever used.
Try AIMP2.
If you are going to be away from that place
He didn't claim that. Besides, it's not necessary for him to be "away" - pipes can freeze while he is at work or asleep.
just close the main water valve and then open all your faucets connected to that pipe.
And don't forget to turn off all water heaters that you have in the house.
insulating the pipe will work wonders
It is important to know that the water is not self-heating (unless it is radioactive.) So the insulation will only slow the freezing process down, but in the end, if there is no flow, it will freeze anyway. In a cold climate pipes are insulated and buried in the ground. If a piece of pipe is exposed it will freeze unless there is a good flow of warm water in it. Also it's coldest at night, and very few people need water at that time.