4 cables in one neat bundle you never need to disconnect, treating telescope mount, camera, focus and autoguider plus the hub as a single device.
One cable to the laptop which you need to manage.

Sorry, but RS232 is far from obsolete in the embedded world.

Newest SBC with all modern gizmos? Boasts 6 RS-232 and 2 RS-485 ports. Initial connection over serial console, as is the industry standard. RS232 to radio for receiving traffic messages from vehicles. RS232 to a GSM module for synchronizing the clock in network-less situations. RS485 to communicate with a board providing central control connectivity. (and hey, the board doesn't even network to the central facility directly! It connects over RS232 to a Tibbo box which acts as "RS232 over IP" bridge!) RS232 debug console, RS485 bus to communicate with other devices in the area, RS232 for in-system-programming of the supervisor CPU, and optional RS232 modem, although usually we provide a GSM router with Ethernet instead.

In the embedded world RS232 is the king and nowhere near to going away. USB is far too cumbersome for developers, Ethernet still needs to be configured before you start working, WiFi is a whole pile of headaches... RS232 works whether you work with a newest I.MX6 quad core or a PIC with 1KM RAM.

It could have thin rechargeable batteries a'la a phone, plus a charging socket.
That way you can either keep it plugged in (at no loss of current functionality) or unplug it and enjoy wirelessness.

I need my mouse maybe once a month, but when I need it I NEED it (really need to edit some graphics quick, and touchpad is absolutely terrible for that.) And the last thing I need then is finding the batteries died.

Oh, also, no internal Bluetooth. Need a dongle. A USB dongle.

The contacts are not a big problem. The wire wear near the plug is. When working with my netbook, the charger plug with adjacent piece of wire needs to be replaced roughly every 20 months.

If I want to do any graphics, touchpad is really a horrible input device for that. I carry a small mouse just for that purpose.
And the other port is usually occupied by the USB modem.
Yeah, I could download whatever graphics I need, unplug the modem, plug the mouse in, make the graphics and switch the devices again. But that's damn cumbersome, especially that the modem needs some 2-3 minutes to start and connect.

It's a subject far too touchy to be critically analyzed by any scientist who wants to retain their reputation. In case the results don't fit the current political agenda, too bad for the results and the scientist who obtained them.

I'm pretty sure IQ tests that are gender and ethnic background neutral (e.g. developed by a mixed team of all backgrounds) are entirely possible. It's just a can of worms nobody wants to open, because *POSSIBLY* - similarly to how different races, nationalities and genders have different predispositions in sports (take the separation of men's and women's leagues in almost all sports) - so do human brains.

But in this case objective truth will not be known anytime soon. Any initial research is bound to contain faults, as is standard for every single domain of research. But while in other domains the faults are detected, pointed out and corrected in incremental research phases without any fuss, in this case they mean totally ruining the career of the researcher.

The same *distribution* of skill levels over a bell curve.

Have two sets: [1 3 5 7 9] and [1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9]. They have the same distribution, the same averages and medians. Pick 4 highest elements of each set. Compare averages now.

I am familiar with the concept. It's a concept of trying to fit data into preconceived idea. It's bad science and it produces faulty results.

It's like you were performing drug tests with use of a test group and a control group but ditched performing any tests on the control group assuming it's 'default' and none of symptoms appearing in the test group ever happen in the control group.

Any gender bias studies are entirely fallacious if they are gender-biased.

I'm not a native speaker. I'm sorry but I don't know the subtle nuances of what is considered politically incorrect at given moment in time, especially that it changes month-to-month.

"Maleness is defaultness."

The heck?

You are comparing two groups. And a'priori you assume one group is "default" and the other is "exceptional" despite their population giving a percent or so of advantage to the other. You don't analyze symmetries and asymmetries but only "experiences" of one of the groups, completely disregarding the counterpart. And then you draw comparative conclusions without performing actual comparisons.

I'd say your research method is flawed from moment one.

Problem in numbers available.

that's like saying that increasing the number of minority coders will decrease the overall quality of code produced.

Imagine you have a company that is to hire ten new employees. There are 100 white applicants and 10 applicants of minorities. Their skill lies on the same bell curve; no difference in distribution.

If you perform tests and pick 10 best candidates, statistics say one of the hired ten will be of the minority.

Now if your company policy says "50% must be of minority" you end up hiring the top 5% of white and top 50% of minority. Of course the new white employees will outperform the minority ones simply because you got crème-de-la-crème of the whites and merely "above average" of the minorities. And of course the disparity will cause frictions, rift in the team, disparity of handled workload and worse code quality on the average. Oh, and the company policies will protect the minority employees, punishing the whites who confront them for worse performance.

Trying to enforce a higher percentage of accepted minority products/employees/students than what percent of the applicants they are is in fact discrimination against the majority. In the above example a white guy who got 93% on the company test will be rejected in favor of a colored with 55%, simply because of skin color.

This *might* be an avenue alternative to ion engines for flights that don't stray too far from the Sun. LEO-Moon, Lagrangian Points, inner planets. And it could be combined with ion and rocket propulsion.

You can't store all the propellant at extreme pressures simply because the tank needed to contain these pressures would be extremely heavy. There's a fine balance between weight of the tank and savings on storing pressurized fuel (both energy stored as pressure and more fuel fitting in). We're at "state of art" here and can't push that much farther.

But we can afford a *tiny* extreme-pressure tank, and we have weightless unlimited solar energy at cost of fixed-size, fixed-weight solar panels.

Run the pump with solar power, gradually pressurizing the fuel to quite extreme pressures in the dedicated, tiny, very durable tank. Release it through a narrow nozzle at extreme speeds. Speed it up even more through combustion or electric field of ion propulsion. You're converting solar energy to extra delta-v with no extra fuel usage. You have just the fixed cost of the pump+buffer tank infrastructure and they can be kept really tiny, since we don't try to get a high throughput of the fuel (and have limited energy input anyway), just to increase the propellant stored energy by transforming electricity into pressure.

Moreover, copyright timer starts ticking from the first publication date!

If you discover an unknown script by DaVinci that was hidden in a wall and never shown to the public, it will be copyrighted starting the moment it's published first!

I felt a certain need to point out these two parts of your well written post just to remind you of your own words when it comes to the second quote.