There is no reason why this would have to be the case. As the buffer batteries don't have to have the lightweight requirements of a battery you literally carry with you, they could easily be made of a cheaper but heavier chemistry. Maybe even a room full of deep cycle lead acid batteries.

They could have split the 29656 BTC into as many lots as they wanted. They intentionally split it into a few lots worth over $1M rather than more blocks worth less. Arguing over the amount of the surety money is missing the point. $200K is a reasonable amount assuming the final bids will be over $1M, but that is just ignoring the question as to why the blocks are that large in the first place. The intentional decision to auction the bitcoins in the completely arbitrary size of 3,000 blocks presumably simply for the purpose of limiting bids to institutional investors and the otherwise wealthy is what people are arguing is undemocratic.

What seems plausible to me is that habitable planets are overwhelmingly common, while spacefaring races are relatively rare such that there are millions or billions of habitable planets in the Milky Way, and perhaps only a few thousand spacefaring civilizations. Therefore, there is no 'need' for spacefaring aliens to colonize earth as there is an abundance of other inhabitable worlds out there and the chance that a spacefaring civilization happens to be close enough to us that we happen to be on their colonization path is pretty small. No need for them to be specifically ignoring us, just that it is unlikely that they will 'accidentally' cross paths with us.

As far as detecting alien life elsewhere, remember space is big. I don't know the numbers but I think I have heard that without constantly sending out high power radio beacons in all directions, the amount of radio signal that we give off would be below the signal to noise threshold to be detectable even from Alpha Centauri much less wherever an alien looking for other aliens (e.g. us) might likely be. So unless ET beams a very powerful radio beacon directly at us at the moment we happen to be looking in that direction (minus speed of light transit time), we would never know they were there.

I wonder if including the first argument's variable name is an option, and just done in the silly style in the examples because the developer guide was written by ObjC developers who are just used to doing it that way.

I have often wished that somehow including the variable names in method calls was an option in Java, etc.

gives no hint as to what "blah", 42, and true actually mean in context, so you are dependent on the documentation being up to date to know what the arguments do.

makes it much more obvious at a glance what the code is doing.

Not exactly. A reply I made the last time there was a slashdot article about a planet discovered by Kepler that required planet-forming models to be reevaluated is still particularly apropos.

Hadfield is a NASA PR guy (as well as an astronaut), so he is obligated to say all of the political talking points. Even though Dragon will remove US dependence on Soyuz for all LEO astronaut needs, that won't be for a couple of years yet, and in the mean time we can't afford to piss the Russians off to much lest they say 'nyet' and screw us out of access to the ISS before then. Note that he also was sure to cover the talking point of how awesome the Shuttle was. NASA is politically obligated to not admit it sucked even though the shuttle program was cancelled simply because it was a sucky boondoggle, because their funding comes from congresscritters whose constituencies greatly benefited from the shuttle's existence.

Somewhat of an oversimplification, but useful as far as a counterpoint example to the AGW crowd claiming that increased sea ice must disprove climate change.

Not exactly fair to call out how an attack on Americans, done on American soil, which has become culturally and politically significant to Americans is generally referred to by the American format, as an argument that the American format has universal appeal.

You don't think SpaceX has already done the math on return flight requirements? That was the whole point of the Falcon 9 1.1 redesign which has now successfully launched twice. It has an increased size in order to launch the same payload as 1.0 with enough fuel left over to fly the legged booster back to land. I don't know if the fully loaded Dragon spacecraft counts as a 'small payload', but the most recent Falcon 9 launch was an ISS resupply mission that included a successful 'landing' of the first stage in the ocean to check out the legs and landing capabilities.

It takes a lot less fuel to fly an almost empty first stage with no payload from the stage-sep point back to the pad than it does to push the full second stage and payload from the pad to stage-sep. So over 90% of the first stage fuel is used in accelerating the second stage and payload, and the remainder is all that is necessary to turn the stage around and land it.

Try adding new features to your existing simple projects. If for example you are a musician, your beginner project might have been a simple metronome app. You could then hone your UI skills by creating a new interface for easier dialing in a tempo rather than the simple text field widget you used initially. Or you could try enhancing it to accent the downbeat for various time signatures (for which you will also need to come up with more advanced UIs). Then you can enhance the beat generation code even further to play custom rhythms rather than a constant beat. Poke around in the audio APIs a bit to allow a choice of what sound is played for each beat. Before you know it, you have built a beatbox app.

I wouldn't recommend that sort of tinkering on a production app, but for personal projects coming up with new features for existing projects is a great way to hone your skills as you can make each step as big (today I will explore the MIDI APIs) or as little (today I will learn how to use a number spinner widget) as you want.

Apple "famously" didn't pay dividends under Steve Jobs, but they most certainly do now under Cook.

False dichotomy. If you just expect to get a trade job, then yes a degree is worthless. But there are many fields that require advanced degrees because the knowledge required for those fields is only obtainable through years of education, such as medicine and engineering.

Not everybody who counts is a slashdot geek. My in-laws regularly print off crosswords from the internet so they can do them wherever, and still routinely print off directions from google maps. My parents who are incredibly tech savvy often print off emails and such for my elderly grandmother who will go to her grave having never owned anything with a general purpose CPU in it. This Christmas, we printed nice "to/from" labels for all of the Christmas presents we gave. Yes, the necessity of a 2D printer is decreasing every year, but it I don't think it has decreased as much as you think it has, especially among the non-tech-savvy regular Joe and Jane.

But even as the necessity of the 2D printer decreases over the coming years, the point still stands that 2D printers were/are still incredibly useful to non-professionals, and an inexpensive, easy to use 3D printer certainly can be as well.

Most people are not authors or graphics designers, yet nearly everyone with a computer has a need for a traditional 2D paper-and-ink printer. There is already a large library of downloadable 3D printable content, and if 3D printing becomes mainstream there will surely be 3D modeling software made along the lines of Word or Paint that is easy to use and good enough for Joe Homeowner to make that plastic widget he needs for that DIY project rather than going to the hardware store, or to make themed decorations and favors for Timmy's 12th birthday party, or countless other scenarios like that. Most people aren't 'professional makers', but plenty of people out there are casual hobbyist or home 'makers'.

It seems as though while smoking any plant creates a risk for lung cancer as all smoke contains known carcinogens, smoking a particular plant high in cannabinoids has shown to result in a near negligible real-world incidence of cancer, suggesting that while cannabis smoke contains carcinogens, it must also contain substances that have an anti-carcinogenic effect.