Obviously the sun is relevant, but the sun does not "radically dwarf" everything else.

Don't believe it? Look up the surface temperatures of Mercury and Venus.

Venus is the hottest planet in our solar system, yet it is roughly twice as far from the sun as Mercury.

Atmospheric composition has an enormous impact on surface temperatures.

Try reading that again.

There were no "customers" involved, just different groups in the same company.

The case is probably connected to the ground pin. This is pretty common practice.

Same thing would happen with a PC connected with a power cable that has live and ground swapped.

Huh? They're all Lenovo branded. The divide between business/consumer is ThinkPad vs IdeaPad (and the super cheap "Essentials" line).

Really? When was the last time you even TRIED waking a computer with a USB keyboard up?

My Asus P5Q SE Plus, a 5 year old board, wakes from usb (keyboard or mouse) just fine.

It's still around because it's the lowest common denominator for mobile phone users.

Congratulations on mistaking a scientific theory - an attempt to explain observed evidence - for a codified belief system.

I'm not a huge fan of many of Microsoft's business practices, but the whole browser bundling issue was always pure bullshit.

Windows includes a lot of other bits of software that step on the toes of third-party software companies, too. MS correctly realized that a web browser was becoming an essential, ubiquitous piece of software. It is absurd to suggest they should have distributed a competitor's software in place of their own, and absurd to suggest that they should simply stay out of the market because there was competition. What business do governments have deciding what should or shouldn't be a core feature of an OS?

Iraq and Afghanistan aren't exactly at a 1700s level of technology or military training, either.

I'd expect the technological gap between a terrestrial civilization and an interstellar civilization to be far greater than 300 years. The reality is we have NO capability of retaliating against any space based weapon system outside of LEO - and even in low orbit a species that has mastered interstellar travel would likely have effectively impenetrable countermeasures for anything we could throw at them. If their goal is simply to wipe out life and harvest resources from our planet's carcass, there is absolutely nothing we could do to stop them. Even if the goal is to eliminate just the human population and leave a habitable planet, what would you propose we could do to stop precisely targeted kinetic strikes from an opponent in orbit?

Things get more interesting if the goal is to conquer or enslave the human population - that's a much closer analogy to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Ridiculous. Robots don't replace engineers, they replace laborers.

Teaching science to children helps create objective, rational adults. Important traits for "voters that don't fall for deception." It's only part of the picture, but that doesn't make it unimportant.

Be fair, there really is a difference between distrusting all ethnically Chinese people and distrusting the Chinese government.

You make a good point, in that schools tend not to teach a lot off important life skills. That doesn't mean we should skimp on foundation skills like math. What point is there teaching someone about real estate, if they can't even handle algebra? Understanding concepts like interest rates requires more than basic arithmetic.

Not sure why this should be a shocker. Ankle monitors need to report somehow or they aren't much use. Makes sense to use existing infrastructure rather than build a new network.

That link is just flat out wrong. LCD "refresh rate" does not work as the author of that article describes. LCDs have no need to redraw their image 60/120/240 times per second, the backlight is always on and the pixels keep their state until changed.

He is describing the way CRT refresh rate worked, and calling it a "new" issue with LCDs.

Characterizing Android as "just a copy" is blatant revisionist history. Work on Android started well before the iPhone was announced, let alone released.