The Parrot Sketch reference isn't +5 funny already? Now THAT'S animal cruelty.

Until you consider things like windows and ceiling fans. Even smart birds have trouble with some obstacles, and it only takes one accident to do serious damage.

+1 For a Go reference. +10 for making it relevant to the topic.

This should be in the summary.

More appropriately you can inspire them up from it. After a certain point you can't teach if they aren't willing to learn, and if they are willing to learn, they'll soak it up. Creating that willingness, that desire... that's the real trick. It is, appropriately, one trick NASA has actually pulled off more often and better than any other organization I know of.

I agree with your premise, but disagree with the ad-hominem. I've seen software engineers write some shit code to (for instance, trying to do 20k iteration loops of signal processing inside an ISR and wondering why they were missing interrupts). Don't let the wrong people do the wrong job, full stop.

As an aside, control systems theory is usually taught better (or at all) in EE courses anyway, but maybe you didn't mean control theory...

BUT, GROWTH! How can you grow if your audience is only 10's of thousands? There's millions of gamers out there! We need more farmvilles, more WoWs, if you're not growing X% per month/quarter/year you are a failure! /sarc

Not really. Time dilation is not that difficult to calculate, you would know a priori how much 'ship time' to run the engines to get the appearance of 1 stationary reference year of time traveled. Yes it's relative, but who cares? As long as everyone agrees on who's reference to use as a base, everyone can come to the same results, regardless of what the local clock says.

It wouldn't be unheard of for the field metrics to be named after either whoever discovers them, or the fictional character Cochrane, if the discover has a sense of humor. :)

Ah. You are right of course it's not too much to use residential power. It is enough to be a noticeable power bill (potentially more than the cost of the SDD over the life of the computer). I got the impression from the ggp that he was referring to reasonable, not absolute max possible. 38+ Watts in a mobile device of any kind is certainly not reasonable. In a desktop that doesn't absolutely need it, seems overkill as well even if will run just fine.

It's not a big deal compared to say a space heater, or microwave, but compared to the power usage of an SDD? Not to mention any additional active cooling that needs to be done. Personally, I'd rather have that other CPU than a bunch of RAM that mostly won't be used.

Sure, but what's that got to do with Tesla's ideas? Not much in fact. Just because there is a superficial resemblance: "power transferred without wires" doesn't mean he was anywhere near reality. Anymore than the Startrek writers should get credit for being computer scientists or physicists if they happen to guess lucky. As they saying goes, even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

Uhm... what?
Tesla's ideas and theories for 'broadcast' power were nothing like reality.