Agreed. Also, six rigid wheels was fine for Pathfinder, Spirit, and Opportunity, but now you've got what, one ton? of rover, and still six rigid wheels. Eight or twelve smaller wheels might be a good idea for the next similarly-sized rover.

Problem solved: extrapolating dimension-wise, it should only exist for 16 seconds and then disappear!

Because silly toy languages designed for novices are better to use to teach elementary concepts like variables, branching, and loops without having half the class bogged down in missed curly braces and semicolons. It is also much more instructive to come to the realization that goto is Considered Harmful after trying to hack up your own spaghetti code than it is to be insulated from it by a language that doesn't even have a goto, leaving you with only a vague and abstract notion of the virtues of measuring twice and cutting once.

You know, any task done well should logically have this property, but for some reason you never hear about the years of kitchen catastrophes that go into making an innovative world-class chef, or years of grinding practice that make a gold-medal figure-skating or gymnastics routine. Maybe there really is an image problem that's bigger than we'd like to admit.

I think real men use plugboards, though oddly enough, most of the original plugboard coders in the 40's and the magnetic core ROM knitters in the 50's and 60's were women.

And humans all the way down? Turtles all the way up? Where does the Elephant fit into this theory?

Idunno. It might not be a bad idea to take legal papers drafted in purple crayon less seriously that those typed out in the proper format.

Poking around a large lithium battery with a cheap multimeter at night. That's got Darwin Award written all over it. Maybe try a Hall Effect current probe. Not as cheap, but less likely to kill you.

He must have been using imaginary data.

If you want exact results from a fixed number of significant bits, you want magic.

Whatever calculation you're making, be aware of the dynamic range of the intermediate results. Structure your calculations so that all intermediate results stay well within the dynamic range of the datatype. If you want to compute the standard deviation of 2048x2048 32-bit integers, use a 64 bit or 128 bit integer to compute the intermediate sum(x^2). If you try to use an IEEE double, you'll end up overflowing the 53 bits they give you because 2^11 * 2^11 * 2^32=2^54.

If you can, reformulate your calculation steps so to minimize the sensitivity to random errors on the order of a machine epsilon.

An electronic computer manual from UNIVAC/Boroughs/IBM written for pure mathematicians in ~1953 will tell you the same thing.

Did I code up my interrupt handler on my $2 microcontroller on a $20 dev board? Is it the right polarity? Is the rise time OK with the on-board driver or do I need a buffer IC? The list goes on.

Check out the international GNSS service: http://igscb.jpl.nasa.gov/ This is a NASA-run program that simultaneously monitors GPS and GLONASS signals all over the world for scientific purposes. Not the same as an official ground control station, but it's not fair to say this would be breaking entirely new ground.

One would usually want to get one's crashing out of the way with small styrofoam remote controlled airplanes before we fail with big expensive remote controlled airplanes.

Maybe that's got more to do with having vast mineral wealth, a robust diversified economy, and a well-educated hard-working population than it a wage floor on the books.

Difference is that it's awfully difficult to steal a TV from a store and call it a victimless crime with a straight face.