If someone wants something comparably capable to the Wii U for running homebrew, why doesn't he just buy a slim PC, such as a Mac mini or Intel NUC, and connect its HDMI out to a TV?

The 3DS has one big advantage over smartphones and tablets: it can handle games in genres that need directional controls and trigger buttons. A touch screen is good for racing games (of which runners are a subgenre), shmups, and point-and-click, but not much else.

From TFS:

If it does work, it would eliminate the need for expendable fuel (just add electricity).

Always left out of these discussion is just how much electricity they need to produce useful thrust. While in theory, even a micro-Newton can eventually get you anywhere you want to go, practical considerations (E.G. the desire to not spend months in the Van Allen while spiraling outward, or the need to decelerate to enter planetary orbit) usually dictate a higher thrust level.

Power is, for example, a huge Achilles heel for the much vaunted VASIMIR - it requires much more than can currently be efficiently delivered in space.

Because apart from Hairyfeet, most people don't have the PC next to the TV or any other monitor big enough for 4 people to fit around.

But between when the PC didn't die and about 2009, how many people had gaming PCs in the living room where more than one player could comfortably fit around the monitor? How well would something like Mario Party or Smash Bros. (with different characters obviously) have done on PC? I know you're an advocate of living room PCs, but until very recently, not enough major publishers of local-multiplayer games seem to have got the hint.

I'm inclined to believe that runners like these are an artifact of the lack of directional control and discrete trigger buttons. Virtual gamepads don't work so well because the player can't feel where his thumbs are relative to the on-screen buttons. (I tried the free version of Pixeline and the Jungle Treasure and was disappointed with its control until I used a Bluetooth keyboard.) If the player is concentrating on the action in the middle, then the only control gestures that work are taps, tilts, and swipes, and those gestures are more suited to runners like Splashy Fish and Canabalt than to platformers with any sense of exploration.

The winning photo is very nice indeed.
Some of the runner-up images are okay-ish, but overall the runner-up images do not look like contest material to me.

That was my thought as well. The contest (which I'd never heard of until know) may well have "proved" that you can use a Rasberry Pi in photography, to the benefit (read:publicity) of the Pi... But the photographs themselves are generally much less than impressive in both technical and artistic quality.

You clearly have not read the appropriate NASA documents.

Actually, yes, I have.
 

Skylab was in very good condition and NASA wanted to use it in conjunction with the shuttle

NASA was (is) an organization of thousands of people - and cannot "want" anything. A small group of people, who had no funding, wanted to use Skylab in conjunction with the Shuttle, but that was just one of the dozens (hundreds?) of pie-in-the-sky ideas various groups within NASA generate on an annual basis. Very few space fanboys realize this and presume every single dammed one of those gotta-publish-something-to-keep-my-job studies and "plans" (was) is something "NASA wanted to do" no matter how ludicrous the idea was. Actually, the more ludicrous the idea the more the space fanboys love it, because it's just more ammo for their ignorant whinging about NASA's "failures". Ignorant because on top of not grasping the pie-in-the-sky nature of many of those "plans", they fail to realize that NASA is not an independent organism - but rather is a branch of the Executive Department and only does what the Executive approves and Congress fails.
 

Congress did not fund this cheap solution, so we ended-up dumping $100 Billion and ten years of construction time into building ISS to get a similar orbital capability (Skylab had 320 cubic meters pressurized volume, that's more than the US part of the ISS).

What's interesting here is you claim Skylab would provide similar capability - but then rather than comparing capability, you compare volume. Thus, probably inadvertently due to gross ignorance, you reveal the shallowness of your knowledge. In reality, Skylab didn't have a fraction of *any* of the capabilities of the ISS. It doesn't produce as much power, could only support a much smaller crew, and wasn't equipped with but a fraction of the scientific equipment, etc... (Even though Skylab and the ISS have a similar volume, the ISS has almost six times the mass. There's a reason for that.) Nor, given the small diameter of it's hatches, could it have been reasonably refitted to provide significant extended capability. Raw volume is impressive, but it's no more useful than an empty house. It's useful stuff that make a house or a space station useful, and Skylab was grossly lacking in that department.
 

The shuttle could have then flown additions to Skylab (which had a docking adapter for multiple visiting vehicles).

Yes, Skylab had a docking adapter for visiting vehicles. No, they weren't useful for adding additional modules. On top of lacking the structural strength, they had no provision for routing power, life support, data, etc. (Not without running cables through the already narrow docking tunnel - not that there was anywhere to hook them to on the Skylab end anyhow.)
 

When Skylab re-entered the atmosphere it did so under remote control from the ground, with its systems fully functioning until they were destroyed by the reentry.

No, they weren't "fully functioning". The third crew had to use a lashed up servicing system to replenish the freon loops in the air lock module (which were leaking). The also had to perform a spacewalk to install a back up set of rate gyros since the original set were failing. (Etc... etc...) Skylab was worn out, and it's equipment was beginning to fail even while the manned occupancy program was in progress.

A lot of people believe that Skylab was some lunar landing level program, and that in the same vein "tossing it aside" represented the loss of some grand capability. Nothing could be further from the truth. Skylab was a shoestring budget program subsisting on Apollo's leftovers and discards. (To the point where they had to take a hatch off an unused Gemini to provide an EVA hatch - they had no money to develop or build one of their own.) It had a minimal lifespan and modest scientific capability with no capacity for significant resupply, replenishment, refitting or extension.

True, there's a strict counterpart to ==, namely ===. But what's the strict counterpart to < or switch?

In PHP, if you write a program, how can you be sure that it will work as intended with whatever combination of php.ini settings happens to be in effect on the server on which you deploy the program? For example, if I use the LightOpenID library to authenticate users on a server that has open_basedir set, attempts to authenticate users coming from Yahoo! will fail because Yahoo! implements OpenID with an HTTP redirect and for some inscrutable reason, libcurl refuses to follow HTTP redirects if open_basedir is set.

With the MySQLi extension, the only way to bind a variable number of arguments to a prepared statement is by passing an array of references to the statement's bind_param() method using call_user_func_array(). The way this has to be done changed in PHP 5.4, as described in the PHP manual's page about call_user_func_array() . The only workaround I can find for the difference in behavior between PHP 5.3, which is still supported on RHEL 6, and PHP 5.4 and later is to port the entire application to use a library that doesn't use call_user_func_array() in the first place, such as replacing all use of MySQLi with PDO. This can be a pain for a large application. For more information, see Breaking changes in PHP 5.3 and Breaking changes in PHP 5.4. Other languages have managed minor version changes better.

I want to be able to do try { include_once("some_file.php"); } catch (SyntaxError $e) { ... } or try { some_function(); } catch (NameError $e) { ... } both of which Python supports. Likewise, Java's class loader throws an exception when it can't load a class.

Then let him use the warning-to-ErrorException snippet in the manual to turn warnings into exceptions that can be caught or left unhandled as needed.

If a parse error threw an exception, this would satisfy both him (who wants things to be fatal by default) and me (who wants things to be not-fatal by choice).

Imagine if Skylab had stayed in orbit and been used as the basis of an ISS 20 years earlier.

I don't think the substances that would allow me to imagine that are actually legal.

Seriously, by the time of the third occupancy crew Skylab was badly worn out on top of the damage caused by the loss of the heat shield. It would have been much more of a liability due to the amount of work required to resupply and refit it.

If you're trying to imply "still nothing uses Python 3", the version of Blender on my PC embeds Python 3. One big problem (doing the right thing with side-by-side Python 2 and 3 on Windows) was solved when Python 3.3 implemented PEP 397.

Why stick with VMS when you can get the same Dave Cutler design by rotating everything one letter forward, forming the WNT at the core of Windows Server?

So what, may I ask, are your superior points?

I'm aware of that. Say I were to back up my first-generation Nexus 7 tablet through Android Debug Bridge (ADB). How would I verify the completeness of this backup?

Which such appliance is a "GNU/Linux PC"? Video game consoles do not run Linux (except for those few remaining fat PlayStation 3 consoles that haven't been upgraded past system software 3.20). TiVo DVRs run Linux but not GNU/Linux. You keep bringing up "kiosks"; to which kiosks are you referring?

I don't understand what you mean by "break after".

What exactly makes a specification "open"? The specification for Win32 is published on MSDN. Is it solely the existence (or lack thereof) of a promise not to go Oracle v. Google on developers of reimplementations?

I'd imagine that more desktop software targets Windows (and implicitly Wine) than GNU/Linux.

How should I go about determining how a device will feel in my hands through the Internet?