Argh - never post before your first coffee.
I meant to say
"How about play a sport that doesn't require heavy physical contact?" of course.

How about poay a psort that doesn't require heavy physical contact?
nearly all athletics events, swimming, baseball, basketball,as well as numerous other field games exist that manage to be entertaining without having to put players at huge physical risk like (American) football does. Same deal with rugby and league, but even those games have rules that avoid the worst of the heavy impacts - and lack of body armor in those sports means the players are required to play more within limits that will tend to have less impact on the brain.

I don't see how a green marker would help.

I think they would have gotten much better performance if they used a Chuck Norris disc though.

Better yet, in the case of shopping centres, you can have solar panels providing shade in the car park to provide the power while also keeping cars shaded and cool. It wouldn't have to be a guaranteed supply - just whatever the sun gives out while you are parked. That might not be much of a draw for customers in Buffalo with all that snow right now, but here It's already hitting 35 to 40 degrees Celsius every day, and it's not even summer yet.

How about inventing a planetary wide gamma ray shield instead?
Surely in a gamma ray prone galaxy there would have to be at least a few systems that had an atmosphere or oceans that would shield from gamma rays? In as little as 100 to 200 years I think we would easily have the technology to sustain a colony deep in the ocean, if it were necessary.

for values of infinity that approach 420.

Either way you cut it, it's just another tax that gets paid by the end consumer, a big fat windfall for consolidated revenue.

I think a much better way would be for companies to bid based on the value they bring to the end consumer public, with the company that promises the best value winning.
If that company fails to deliver within some reasonable time frame, the spectrum should be passed on to the next best offer.
Value wound be measured based on dollars per GBit that they agree to offer the end service for. (voice calls really should be priced this way too, these days - now everything is digital)

if it really isn't practicable to implement something like the above, lt'd be nice to at least see the money spent on a fibre roll-out or other physical media based infrastructure.

The gravitational potential energy in a ton of water - a cubic meter (ie. 1000 litres) elevated 3 meters, the typical 1 storey roof height, is about 8.1 watt hours. you would need a 1200000 litre tank to store the typical household load of 20 kWh., even assuming 100% efficiency in energy conversion to electricity.

Hopefully you can't get antibiotics even after seeing the doctor, if you only have sniffles.
Antibiotics generally don't work on viruses, which is what usually causes sniffles.

I think that while it is iportant that the greatest nation on earth should have it['s own spaceflight capacity, it really just isn't worth the return on investment for Australia - we are better off spending the money on bbq's and beer.

Good idea for the US though.

One of the things that makes US reasearch strong is the ability of it's universities to attract te best and brightest from all around the world. This is nothing new - it has always been thus - though perhals this is incresingly so as the state of secondary education seems to be in decline compared to opter parts of the world.

When researchers stop coming to the US, the state of
research there will go into rapid decline.The US isn't alone though - it's the same story in Australia too.

Given the already established centres for excellence in the US, it's a favoured destination for smart and motivated people from India and Asia, as well as other parts of the world to further their education and opportunities.

Half the world's population is Asian or India/Bangadesh/Pakistan, so naturally you are going to see many from those regions. Be glad for it - or they would be busy innovationg wherever they came from instead of the US.

Wy not just have a simple "remote control" type bot and offload al the computing power via wifi? Systems like ROS easily support having your expensive processing nodes running remotely, and you can even run ROS on a very low powered raspberry PI for on-bot computing for your drive controllers.

Running GPUs is certainly going to eat your power fast, so all image processing, planing, task scheduling and control should be offloaded to a mains powered computer or an off-bot stationary computer powered by solar panels for something like an agri-bot.

Shrimp and prawns are infact two different and distinct beasties, though easily confused, because they look superficially similar.
This handy guude might help:
http://museumvictoria.com.au/discoverycentre/infosheets/what-is-the-difference-between-prawns-and-shrimp/

Since the adds were run in the US, where shrimp was the delicious type of crustaceon ready to throw onto afore mentioned cooking surface, that was the right word to use.
No doubt, when back here in his native Oz, Hoges reverts back to the more locally appropriate 'prawn' nomenclature.

I don't see why causing death by a hack should have any special treatment compared to causing death by an ice pick, a bullet, high voltage electricity, or any other exotic means.

There should be no special legislation needed for this.

As a software engineer that daily works on developing robot control software and algorithms for industrial robots, (yes, I love my job) I can assure you that we are very far indeed from even having robots that know they are scratching their own arses, let alone having anything like the reasoning capacity embodied in the three laws.
Robots of today are dumb - sure, there are clever planning algorithms that make them flexible enough to work in a relatively predictable dynamic environment, but we are no where near the point of having robots implement the first law.
As for the second law - wel computers (and by extension robots) are infamous for doing exactly what they are instructed - even if the result is garbage. Part two of that law is problematic given we can't really do part 1.
For the third law, actually that's almost the oppsite of what we try to achieve - we try our hardest to make sure that the robot will flat out refuse to do something that will harm it, even if told to do so by a human. if the robot gets given an instruction to start plasma cutting it's tracks or the cabinet containing it's drive controllers, it damn well better ignore that order. At bese, we can do collision avoidance of stuff in the environment to prevent harm, but I don't see us any time soon have them having behaviour programmed in to ufulfil the 'inaction" clause - for example, rush over and stop me cutting myself on broken glass, or recognising I am in danger from a falling beam and catching it (or even beeping a warning) , or something like that.