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.

Intel trounces AMD in the Laptop, Desktop, Server markets.... where else is there to go? Other companies own the embedded, automotive and industrial markets. It's been half a decade since it was even worth looking at AMD for a consumer product. Maybe they should just join forces with Blackberry...

Do you live in Somalia or something? I'm trying to imagine a place you could live where your statement could be true and that's all I'm coming up with at the moment. That sounds like some sort of libertarian hellscape.

If the target, the target's friends and target's friends friends are all using encryption for 98% of communications, while you can still crack it (presumably?) you have to know what you're looking for in advance, like you would when applying for a warrant. That sort of defeats this huge plaintext scanning system the NSA and English governments have been putting in to place for the last half decade or more. Without all the supplemental background information their job gets exponentially harder and there's more data to decrypt than they have computing resources for.

PGP isn't exactly known for being user friendly. Gmail does not support it out of the box. The average person just can't be expected to understand that kind of cryptography.
 
That said, if you encrypt the device, encrypt the transport method, and the receiving device, that's pretty damn secure in about 98% of situations. WhatsApp just rolled out end to end encryption for their service as well, and they only charge a dollar a year (I think). That's encryption the average person can use. When an 18 year old mother of two in Sao Paulo can review her grocery list with her mother via secure encryption and neither of them know they're even doing it, that's a whole new level of secure. Compare that to the plain text emails I get from my boss about what I might consider vastly more important things at the office.
 
The golden era of unencrypted plaintext email is just about dead, I think, is the problem for intelligence agencies. At least for those people outside of gleaming glass corporate offices.

Leading is a relative term when you're discussing countries capable of human spaceflight. Last time I checked, the United States was paying a princely* sum to space-taxi their Astronauts to the ISS.
 
*When I say Princely, I mean, "the United States pays more to go to the ISS than the King of Malaysia", because that's totally a thing that happened as part of an arms deal, and we still pay more than he did for the privilege, despite our station being connected to theirs.

Who do you think were the biggest opponents against civil rights issues for non-whites during the mid 20th century?

The same rhetoric about gay marriage was espoused back then, only it was targeting interracial marriage. Verses from the bible were even used to justify it as a "sin".

Christians, on the whole, have probably come to accept the idea that non-whites should be treated equally under the law, but that wasn't the majority opinion back in the 40's or earlier.

In 50 years it's not inconceivable to imagine that the majority of Christians will accept that gay and bisexual people should be treated the same as straight people.