Have you looked at how much robotics parts cost? A cheap servo is $12, an acceptable servo costs $45, and good servos you might use with surgical precision start at $95. High torque high precision motors a human sized model start in the $450 range and go up from there.
 
Six range of motion arms (let alone three digits per finger) means 12 servos for just the arms. It's no wonder people are looking at pneumatics, hydraulics etc for high torque high precision "digitla muscles". Robotics is expensive. And when you wire a servo wrong at 4 in the morning because you've been working too long you end up replacing these things at a fast rate (Ask me how I know). Just getting in to a 5 degree of motion laser cut wood arm, starting the hobby from scratch, cost me about $600. And that's with the $12-20 level servos.

Mensans can masturbate with their minds.

It's also the bottom rung of IQ-snobbery organizations. Best known because least exclusive.

I've seen it go the other way too -- code that has been buggy for years (but nobody noticed because the bug's symptoms were too subtle to easily detect, or because that particular code path was seldom exercised) -- suddenly gets warned about, and (if the developer is paying attention) fixed.

A potentially less messy approach:

int some_variable; // might generate warning if left unused!

#ifdef DEBUG
some_variable = 5;
#else
(void) some_variable; // avoid compiler warning
#endif

Ah, but in C++ that 'problem' is considered a feature. The reasoning is that if you know you're going to assign a value to that variable later on (without reading its value beforehand), then there is no point in having the program waste CPU cycles writing a never-to-be-used default value to ptr's memory location every time the function runs. So instead the compiler leaves ptr's memory location alone unless/until you explicitly request that it be set to a particular value, and thus its uninitialized value will depend on whatever bits happened to be already present at that location in RAM beforehand.

It's design decisions like that that make C++ so efficient -- and so easy to shoot yourself in the foot with.

Social media works great for things I will talk my friends about movies, politics, and occasionally global sports like the world cup or Olympics. Since I don't watch TV I couldn't tell you what's playing right now, especially since most movies are reboots or sequels which really blend together unless you've seen the trailers a few times. I did end up buying a ticket to the Lego movie due to an ad on Facebook. After almost all of my friends had been talking about it for weeks. Ads for dishwashing soap, soda, pizza etc don't even register for me mentally online.

Citation needed on point 1; everything I've read says that football produces about $15 for every $1 invested in the program. This probably isn't true for other sports, but College Football is Big Business in the south for Universities.

That doesn't stop all the motorcyclists and bicyclists out there; they have even less protection than this offers.

Plus in this you don't have to wear stifling leather clothing, and you can drive in the rain without getting soaked.

I think there is a market for this.

If you're paying $$ for custom Intel processors, you probably already have a way to leverage a particular function in parallel on the CPU

Given the product quality and level of support provided by Chinese manufacturers -- if American dealers can't compete against that, then they really don't have any reason to exist.

I wrote and maintain an open-source library whose primary purpose is to support the software that I write for my employer. Because of that, I need to keep the primary copy of the library's source code in my employer's SVN server.

However, I also like to keep the library's source available for public use (BSD licensed, with my employer's permission). Traditionally I've been doing that by creating a .zip file containing the source code of each new release, uploading that .zip file to my public web server, and posting a release announcement on Freecode.com.

If Freecode.com can no longer play that announcement/indexing role for future releases, where should I post release notices to instead? It seems like github.com and sourceforge.net assume that all source code will be hosted by their own source-code-management servers, which isn't a good option for me. Just posting them to my own little web page seems insufficient.

Well, our electricity expenses (i.e. the sum of the money we send to the power company, plus the money we send to SolarCity) went from $1000/month to $650/month.

You're right, that's not quite "cut in half", but $350/month in savings is nothing to sneeze at either, especially since achieving it cost us nothing but some roof space we weren't using anyway.

That's true, which is one reason why not many coal plants are being built in the USA today.

However, solar panels aren't competing against new coal plants -- they are competing against the many existing coal plants which have been running for years, and whose construction has already been paid for. Those plants' only ongoing costs are maintenance and fuel, which makes them relatively inexpensive to operate.

The cost of repairing the damage to the climate that those plants cause, OTOH, may be quite large, but the owners of the plants will not be responsible for paying that cost, so they don't care.

Sure, there are better systems to be had, if you are willing to shell out cash up front. If that's something that you're unwilling or unable to do, however, it's hard to beat cutting your electric bill in half for free.

There's also something to be said for not having to maintain and support the system yourself. Non-technical people feel better knowing that if the system fails or performs poorly, it's SolarCity's problem, not theirs.