Mars' gravity is well less than half of Earth's gravity. It's not a lot larger than the Moon. To put the same stress on your skeleton on Mars that an obese person does to their own in Earth gravity, you'd need to add about 250 to 350 pounds of radiation shielding.

Seriously? You move my poll and don't give me a Cowboy Neal option? Slashdot, you are dead to me...

"being a socialist and afraid of persecution during the McCarthy period."

My, how things have changed...

Argentina was a special case where an investor rolled the dice on buying up all their debt and then somehow taking them to court in the US and winning a judgement that crippled them financially. Previous to that, Argentina has had a long track record of failing to pay back their debt going back decades without repercussion. So do most other countries outside of western europe. Spain and Greece are two of the biggest examples of what happens when you join a currency union and your economy is not in sync with the strongest players.

Yeah I was going to say, I wrote a crude flight simulator, including the display drivers for my Arduino and SSD1306 OLED display, that weighs in at 31KB. A piece of code to focus a laser should be less than that.

I think the thing about Teddy Ruxpin was that he had always moved. If you have an inanimate object for a lifetime, and then suddenly it springs to life but without facial features or moving eyes, yes that is creepy. But if it's advertised as a moving device from the start, it's not creepy as that's expected behavior. It's when things suddenly spring to life that it triggers stalking predator alarm bells in your brain. If your houseplant started talking to you that would be freaky, but if it said hello and goodbye to you every day when you go to work, and helped you keep track of where you put your car keys or to remember to pick up milk on the way home, that's just another family member. Digital assistants will head in that direction eventually. The British series "Black Mirror" had an episode like this, where the AI was held in an "egg".

At least 7 of those boards have SATA ports, and one has mSATA support. Just do a ctrl+F for 'SATA'...

If they really want to make road taxes usage based, then they need to charge by the ton-mile or something like that. Wear and tear on roads goes by the weight of the vehicle, and if I remember correctly it is a non-linear relationship (square or cube, I can't remember).

It's pretty trivial for a vehicle to compute its own weight, so it is similarly trivial for a vehicle to compute its own road tax as well. Many cars are now coming equipped with GSM modems as well, so your car could simply upload your road impact once/month and you can be billed for your use tax.

Piece of cake.

For an individual business, you're right: you always set your prices to maximize revenues, regardless of costs. For the market as a whole, however, costs obviously do play a part in determining prices. It's an indirect effect; increasing costs drive the marginal producers out of business, which decreases the supply. A decreased supply and no change in effective demand results in higher prices (or shortages). The change in price does not necessarily match the change in cost, however; the extra cost is split between higher prices and decreased profitability for the remaining suppliers, with the ratio depending on price elasticity.

I'm curious to see whether we will see a flood of immigration to cities with the high minimum wage, and a corresponding increase in cost of living that effectively negates the effects of the higher wage through reduced purchasing power.

I'm no lawyer, but I don't see how they could prevent anyone else from suing over the same issue so long as the company remains non-compliant. If you take an action which harms a group of people, you can't make up for it by settling with just one of them; the rest would retain the right to sue for their own portions of the damages. I imagine the same applies to violations of the ADA, even though there is no actual damage on which to base a legitimate lawsuit.

Oversimplified language creates more ambiguity, not less. It may *seem* less ambiguous to people who don't understand the subject matter. But, to people who do, failing to be both precise and descriptive in your language creates more questions than are answered by your text, or worse, sends an inaccurate message.

I think you're right except for a couple of glaring, incorrect assumptions on your part. First, PTC is not new technology. It has been around for a very long time. Second, it is not under "rush" deployment because it has been under deployment for a very long time. In fact, George W. Bush signed into Law a mandate to deploy this technology where appropriate by this year. Finally, the curve in question does not require PTC because the speed limit leading up to the curve is below the maximum safe speed for it. Under normal operating conditions a slow-down is not required beforehand.

The only thing that I find super-shocking about this whole event is that Bush has not yet been blamed for it. After all, he could have sent the Law back to Congress asking for a faster deployment, not that it would have made a difference in this case since it is not a requirement for this curve.

This is sort of like the minimum drinking age. There's no federal minimum drinking age, yet every state has the age of 21 set as their drinking age. Why is this? Because starting in the 1980's, to get federal highway funding, you had to have a drinking age of 21. In this instance, a lot of states balked and avoided changing it, and their roads deteriorated. But eventually they all gave in. So, you have to have your children vaccinated if you want to send them to public school. The good news is that unlike federal highway funding dollars, there are multiple schooling sources you can choose from, and in many cases are a better option.