Agreed. I just looked at the map of Washington for the closest runway, but missed Andrews because it wasn't labeled as such.

I said 'almost.' If you assume money is no issue, getting things there is doable - been done for robots, just needs scaling up. Landing large structures without parachutes (Mars atmosphere is very thing) has been done too - lunar lander module. Higher gravity poses some issue, but doable. What remains is long-term-independant life support systems - something capable of running for years between resupplies. That we don't have the technology for, yet. But it doesn't require any new physics - no need for anyone to invent a warp drive. Just refinements to existing approaches. A colony would be insanely expensive, I can agree - you're looking at sending tens of tons of equipment and supplies ahead before you even send the first humans, so they can arrive to find a generous stockpile of spare parts, construction equipment and tanks of life support supplies. Then many manned missions, each bringing along new structures to deploy (Many of which will require much digging and earthmoving, so you're going to be sending heavy construction machines too, all designed to operate in martian atmosphere). All of which is to absolutely no commercial benefit at all. The question isn't "Could we colonise mars?" The question is "Who in the hell is going to donate enough money to bankrupt a superpower with no payoff at the end?" If money weren't an issue, experts could start planning tomorrow and have the first unmanned prepatory missions on their way in five years.

That's why I drew comparison to the moon landing. Because it was pointless. There was no commercial reason to go. No military reason to go. Minimal scientific reason to go. There was no reason at all, beyond raising the national middle finger at communism. And yet, we went anyway. That's the kind of reckless stupidity it would take to make manned space exploration or settling possible: Screw the rationality, we go because it's cool, and because we can't let the other superpower steal the prestige. It's happened once, so there is always the possibility it will happen again.

The MAC spoofing isn't important unless you believe the router is being monitored*. It doesn't go beyond the router. Segment only.

*If you use any commercial wifi point, it probably is for legal reasons.

I expect some minor refinements to the chemistry could reduce the fumes from PLA considerably. PLA isn't just PLA - it's got other things mixed in. Plasticisers, dye, stabiliser, etc.

It's usually called microgravity, because there is a tiny, tiny bit - the ISS is low enough to interact with the atmosphere, and even outside of that there is always the tidal force. You'd just need very sensitive instruments to detect it.

Launch costs are still falling. Technology is still improving. The technology is almost ready to colonise mars now - all that is lacking is the collective will to spend several trillion dollars and more than a few lives on mega-project that would take centuries to complete. That's a socio-political problem, not a technological one.

Why did we go to the moon? It was hugely expensive and the only benefit it brought was a slightly better understanding of the formation of the solar system based on recovered samples. We went because there was a political drive: A need to one-up the Russians (And develop better ICBM engines as a bonus). Why do we not go back? Because the drive is gone now, and the cost-benefits analysis was never favorable without that non-rational justification. It's quite conceivable that it could be reignited, perhaps by a popular movement or perhaps by a change in political situation. If China were to establish even a small manned outpost on moon or mars, for example, it would create immediate pressure on the rest of the world to join in the game once again. If sixties-tech can get a man to the moon and back, think what modern technology could do with the materials and design refinements available now.

I'm sure their plan doesn't involve rushing him out the front door. There's an old bunker under the east wing, the PEOC - I'm guessing they probably evacuate down there within seconds of an incoming threat, and have some means of further evacuation via tunnel from there onwards by which they can get him clear of the building without anyone seeing him. Probably into an innoculous-looking building by which he may be rapidly taken by either innocuous-looking but armored car or by helicopter to the nearest runway at Dulles International Airport and from there far away from any danger.

From the president's point of view, he'd be in the middle of doing his paperwork when three secret service agents run into the room and start pushing him towards the elevator, explaining as they go. By the time any intruder has covered the distance from front door to wherever the president may have been, he'll be safely descending in an elevator designed to withstand anything short of a nuclear bomb.

Weaponry. The worst you might have had to worry about then was a man with a shotgun or hunting rifle. Now you need to be ready just in case North Korea lost what little sanity they have and sent one of their maybe-it'll-work nuclear weapons over, or some bomb-maker found a way to get the good type of explosive and packed a track full of it.

But war these days isn't one nation attacking another - at least not since the Iraq invasion. It's one nation attacking or being attacked by loosely-organised underground groups, or rebels with no legal recognition. Sometimes it's one nation invading another while pretending desperately it isn't invading. We don't have any more nice simple wars with a clear villainous side everyone can agree needs to be defeated in open war - it's all gotten very complicated and messy.

You don't even need to bring race into it, though it can certainly be a factor. Whoever the president is, approximately half the population voted for the other guy and thus have some reason to want him dead. Though very few of them sufficiently strongly to take action.

It's not just a left-right thing. The conservatives might be a little crazier, yes - but their opposites are no great standard of sanity either. It's the nature of US politics, especially in an age of mass media - it's all about the theater and partisan games, cheering for your team to win.

SMART boards are very nice hardware-wise, but their software is less than reliable. The service keeps stopping - we had to set up a login script that restarts it each session.

The Smarrtech ones are not simple IR sensors. I tried to duplicate their pens. IR cameras, yes - including a DSP processor. The patent outlines some of the maths involved in determining if pen or finger is poking at the board - the preprocessing part I can just about follow, but then it uses a neural network as a classifier.

I failed. I don't know how it identifies a pen from a finger - according to the patent it's on shape alone, but I tried both 3D printing and plaster-casting an exact replica without succeess, so I think there's another element I'm missing.

Those many different models are often just variations.

It's always fun trying to read a service diagram for Toshiba laptops. The diagram is of a hypthetical super-laptop that contains the intersection of all the components of the various models that use that chassis - it'll have a flash drive and an HD fitted in the same bay, two devices in one mini-PCIe slot, and so on. You open it up and find that the diagram shows three wifi antennas, but the model you are working on only has one. Screws are especially fun, as it'll sometimes show two screws going into one slot. You get use to it after a while.

I was drawing attention to MikeRT's obvious mistake (Assuming everything happens in the US) by providing an over-detailed account of why this renders his suggestion invalid.

Barrage balloons. String some blimps up on cables around the property, hang nets from the cables. It's legal, passive, safe - and only the most skilled of drone pilots could reliably navigate the maze without getting their rotors tangled. Plus the studio gets some free drones - somehow I don't imagine many of the pilots will be asking for their return.