One thing that helps is to specifically look at damage mechanisms and then come up with a strategy that offers the best workaround. As an example, in the first-generation TDMA digital cellular phone standard, it was recognized that channel noise was typically bursty. You could lose much of one frame of data, but adjacent frames would be OK. So they encoded important data with a 4:1 forward error correction scheme, and then interleaved the encoded data over two frames. If you lost a frame, the de-interleaving process followed by a maximum-likelyhood data detector would still properly decode the data.

On a disk, a similar approach might be to use a 2:1 or 3:1 forward error correction and then interleave data over multiple sectors. If you wipe out a sector, you'd still have the data from the other sectors to recover from.

This would, of course, be implemented best at a low level on the disk drive controller. At high throughput rates, the amount of computation required for this scheme is substantial. But you don't get something for nothing.

FWIW, the proper way to measure this is just after you've woken up, while you're sitting down or lying down...

Remember that they all have to apply. This isn't exactly sudo.

Not correct. Of the claims you listed, 1, 2, and 9 are independent claims and can stand alone. A competitive product that incorporated just the elements of, say, claim 9, would violate this patent. A prior art product that included the elements of claim 1 would invalidate claim 1 as an independent claim, but not necessarily the combinations of claim 1 and claim 13 or claim 1 and claim 14. Unless the dependent claims 13 and 14 were subsequently judged to be obvious in light of the earlier product that demonstrated claim 1.

To an aggressive patent prosecutor, "exactly" has nothing to do with it. The approach is "We've got this patent, see? Pay us the money or we'll sue until you're out of business".

Armadillo completed the challenge several months ago, but their landing accuracy was slightly worse than Masten's attempt. Masten completed the challenge only one day before the expiration of the contest, and was able to do it only because another competitor failed and the X prize foundation allowed Masten to use their launch window (they'd earlier used up their scheduled time slots without doing a successful flight). Armadillo didn't have time or launch permits to go back and improve their accuracy.

John Carmack was understandably disappointed in losing the $500K but is taking the long view that Masten needs the money more than they do, and they've already moved on to new projects.

If I interpret this correctly, Jupiter exerts 400 times as much tidal effect as Mars does. So doubling Mars' mass would have some slight effect, but it would still be overwhelmed by what Jupiter does to us.

If you actually had to move Mercury to Mars in real (non-wormhole) space, then you'd have to figure out a trajectory where Venus and Earth were each at opposition when you were trying to sneak Mercury by those planets' orbital radius. And you'd want Mars to be waiting when you got out to that orbit, too. The motion of the four involved planets is out of synchrony enough that there's probably a suitable window every couple of decades... if only you had enough energy available to get Mercury moving and then stopped.

So, you also create a wormhole between Mercury and Mars... and transport Mercury over to Mars. Since Mercury is basically a big nearly-melted metal ingot it will add some much needed mass, as well as enough metal content to hopefully give Mars a magnetic field that will be useful in deflecting the solar wind. It might take a couple millennia for the surface of the new planet to settle, but the impact energy should keep things warm for a while. Boosting Mercury to Mars' orbit and matching orbital parameters with Mars would be quite a challenge. Don't forget that you need to somehow arrange for the angular momentum of the new planet to be correct so that you keep a reasonable daylength.

Collecting exercise data and keeping it for later analysis or comparison can be a great motivational tool especially when you're in the early stages of an exercise program. On a day to day basis it may not feel like you're getting any more fit or going faster, but you can look at a trend line based on a month's data and clearly see that you're going farther, faster, and at a lower perceived effort level (or with a lower heart rate).

Some fitness metrics are hard to quantify based on a single exercise session, so it's worth it to have data for different days, doing different things.

Disclosure: I design and test fitness monitoring products for one of the companies mentioned by several of the posters. As a group we're some of the fittest nerds around.