Doh! The manned airplane is more expensive than the *unmanned* airplane.

Hokay. 1 Predator = 12mil/27 flight hours. Subtract 3 hrs for takeoff/landing and getting on station for 24 hrs, so you get 2 hrs aloft/ 1 million = 500k/hr.
1 Cessna = 200k (or so).
No brainer, right? Wrong: A Cessna has a range of (guessing) 1000km for about 5 hours aloft/fuel tank. Count the takeoff, etc, and now you're down to 2-3 hrs aloft. So that's 50k /hr. So if you want 24 hours of coverage, you need at least three Cessnas to overlap, so now you're up to 150k /hr. If you want to have the same service ceiling as the Predator, each plane probably will cost 500k for something beefier, so you've more than doubled the cost, and your 150k/hr for three planes turns into ~400k/hr. This is already close to a Predator B.

Now let's add the fact that the Predator has a 3000lb optical surveillance package already built in. You're Cessna carries 4-6 passengers, depending on whether you've bought the 200k one of the 500k one, which is only (let's be generous) 1000lb of payload, not counting the pilot. And the you actually have to buy flight qualified surveillence equipment that you can bolt to the bottom/side of your plane without hosing its flight performance.

Big optics are expensive. Infrared and night vision cameras are more expensive. Going from my own experience, a package like the one on a Predator B, even if you bought all the parts and built it yourself, can easily run upwards of 150k per plane, not including integration costs. And you need to pay for three of them (one per plane). So if you've paid 200k for the plane, you're up to 350k, and if you've paid 400k, your up to 550k for two flight hours.

That's more expensive than a small manned airplane.

Uh, basic property rights? If my front yard is so big that you can't make me hear you unless you go onto my front yard, and I can hear you, then you must be on my front yard.

Market force too strong...can't resist urge to live closer to work, work closer to home, or seek employment in different city...

No need for that. In a tightly packed city it's kinda dicey, but in a place where the land in earshot or line-of-sight on your house is private property, any protest that you can hear/see from your living room window is automatically trespassing. The rule of law (and as a last resort, the second amendment) tend to mitigate these sorts of issues. I don't like the nutjobs one bit, but then I don't live in Berkeley or places it like it for that very reason.

Code is a generous word. In most alarm clocks and wristwatches, this sort of thing is likely implemented in discrete logic gates, which I would say goes a little against the spirit of the rules.

I've worked with degree'd EE types who seem to have gotten their degrees in protoboard tinkering and not much more. Technically they're EE's, but soft math skills and limited design capabilities beyond plugging IC's together. Maybe 10-20 years ago, there was a place for them to support the Real Engineers. Today, you buy a plug-and-play PLC-like device or Labview box for a few thousand, and suddenly a lot of the work that used to take one of those degree'd EE can be done fairly reasonably by a technician or an intern.

Bzzt. Mathematically correct but practically wrong. Any real or simulated dataset from which you would want to compute a standard deviation will have the property that it will be a list of (most likely) double precision floating that is finite in size. This data defines a distribution that always has a finite first and second moment, so you will get a number that you can confidently call the standard deviation of the data. Even if it comes from physical process with a nonsense distribution like a Cauchy distribution, the standard deviation you compute will give you a bound on the spread of your data. If it's Gaussian, you can go back to your statistics class and say that 95% of the data will be within two SD's, etc. If it's not, you can use the Chebyshev rule (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chebyshev_inequality) to say that at least 75 percent of the data will be in two SD's, 89% will be within 3 SD's, etc, which is much coarser information, but is still reasonable to look at for worst-case analysis.

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.