Mars' gravity is well less than half of Earth's gravity. It's not a lot larger than the Moon. To put the same stress on your skeleton on Mars that an obese person does to their own in Earth gravity, you'd need to add about 250 to 350 pounds of radiation shielding.

Seriously? You move my poll and don't give me a Cowboy Neal option? Slashdot, you are dead to me...

Argentina was a special case where an investor rolled the dice on buying up all their debt and then somehow taking them to court in the US and winning a judgement that crippled them financially. Previous to that, Argentina has had a long track record of failing to pay back their debt going back decades without repercussion. So do most other countries outside of western europe. Spain and Greece are two of the biggest examples of what happens when you join a currency union and your economy is not in sync with the strongest players.

Yeah I was going to say, I wrote a crude flight simulator, including the display drivers for my Arduino and SSD1306 OLED display, that weighs in at 31KB. A piece of code to focus a laser should be less than that.

I think the thing about Teddy Ruxpin was that he had always moved. If you have an inanimate object for a lifetime, and then suddenly it springs to life but without facial features or moving eyes, yes that is creepy. But if it's advertised as a moving device from the start, it's not creepy as that's expected behavior. It's when things suddenly spring to life that it triggers stalking predator alarm bells in your brain. If your houseplant started talking to you that would be freaky, but if it said hello and goodbye to you every day when you go to work, and helped you keep track of where you put your car keys or to remember to pick up milk on the way home, that's just another family member. Digital assistants will head in that direction eventually. The British series "Black Mirror" had an episode like this, where the AI was held in an "egg".

At least 7 of those boards have SATA ports, and one has mSATA support. Just do a ctrl+F for 'SATA'...

This is sort of like the minimum drinking age. There's no federal minimum drinking age, yet every state has the age of 21 set as their drinking age. Why is this? Because starting in the 1980's, to get federal highway funding, you had to have a drinking age of 21. In this instance, a lot of states balked and avoided changing it, and their roads deteriorated. But eventually they all gave in. So, you have to have your children vaccinated if you want to send them to public school. The good news is that unlike federal highway funding dollars, there are multiple schooling sources you can choose from, and in many cases are a better option.

No, we're all soulless sacks of meat, fuck the other guys on the other side of the planet, we'll never meet 'em, so fuck 'em. Preach it, StickyPad!

This is the airplane speech about automotive safety devices from Fight Club, right?

Because sometimes it rains and not all houses are built at the top of a hill. My car's hubs got f*cked due to being parked in front of a storm drain during a big rain storm. This is in a fairly well planned suburban neighborhood. There are regions that experience flooding (New Orleans, the entire Mississippi River region, really) on a somewhat frequent basis. Since flooding is a common and very-non-zero event, you need to plan for it and that means putting in requirements like "don't put it on the floor, you'll shock everyone taking a shower in a 3 mile radius if this thing gets wet, idiot" on it.

There are few places in this world that are pleasant in the summer and not frozen hellscapes in the winter. Generally if you want to avoid the snows of winter, you need to endure quite a bit of heat in the summer. Or maybe you haven't had to endure heat and humidity on a daily basis. Humans function a lot better when they're not spending most of their time expelling heat.

First to market (or second to market, with an improved interface) with that control unit is going to make bank. You don't even need a real battery, you just need a small bank of ultracapacitors designed to take the initial hit of the AC compressor kicking in (15-30amp current spike). Ultra Caps are nearly free already. I have space on my fence to mount put up 600w of panels and wire in to a 10,000 btu AC unit which, while wouldn't cool the whole house below about 80F/27C instead of 89F/32C, like you said, would dramatically drop the cost of cooling the house down to a very comfortable 77F/25C.
 
Without the constant load of an AC unit, yes for most people living just above the sustenance level, a couple hundred watts of electricity would meet all their needs and more.

I was island hopping in the Philippines last week. Coal there is very expensive. Oil there is very expensive. Power, in general, is very, very expensive. An AC unit is within financial means of many people who already own a flat screen TV and/or western game console. Yet they live without air conditioning in very hot/humid conditions. Malls there are really popular as a result.
 
The first thing i noticed when I got in a taxi from the airport was the number of Solar + Wind advertisements. Solar has already arrived in SE Asia, and it is here to stay. There's about a billion people in SE Asia outside of China. Solar makes a heck of a lot of sense in the developing world or disconnected parts of the world, where a surprising number of people live. That's right you don't have to go back one sentence, I said a Billion with a 'B'. There's about 30 million people living in the Metro region of Manila without air conditioning because electricity is too expensive. The other half of the country is lucky to have reliable electricity.
 
These places exist, and they're prime candidates for distributed solar in a big way. Solar is already cheaper than mains electricity, even installed, even with big import duties. Now they're just waiting for the products to arrive en masse.
 
Why does this matter?
 
America is still waiting for price parity of mains electricity and home grown solar, but while you can stem the tide of Solar in America temporarily, the price is going to drop like a rock as manufacturers race to supply the third world with Solar, and soon American electric companies will be competing against the price of affordable solar in the third world. It may be five or ten years before Solar truly takes off in the US, but as soon as someone rolls out a $500 "Air Conditioning assist" kit that tells your AC to run at full tilt whenever the solar panels have enough juice to keep it running (who doesn't love coming home to an icy cool house when it's 100F/35C out? especially if that AC was free?), the reasons not to go Solar are going to fall like dominos.

It's not a meme, it's a law.
 
Betteridge's law of headlines

All PS4 and XBones combined = less than 40 million units total, since fall of 2013.
 
Compare that to 130 million desktops, 200 million laptops annually. Not quite, but the latest gen consoles over 18 months represent about 10% of 12 months' worth of PC + Laptop sales.
 
Add to that, tablets, of which 15% are Intel powered (and this will trend upwards over the next three years) which sell about 200 million a year. I wouldn't imagine the console contracts are particularly valuable, as they had to under-bid Intel to get that.