You might as well have it operated by trained rats, or maybe marmosets for full on cute.

Chaff falls out of the sky quickly - you'd probably want proximity shells full of it (plus some BBs), or a flail drone.

Since there are also systems that will shoot down the incoming round, the return fire is probably in the air before the first round even hits the ground (if it makes it that far).

Find an engineering job at a place with a large campus where you have to walk to meetings a lot. I normally work at a site that's built on the side of a mountain, so there's maybe 500 feet of elevation change from bottom to top, and I've typically had to walk a couple laps nearly every day to meet with people, plus various shorter walks for things. Right now I'm temporarily at a subcontractor site that's also a large campus, but it's dead flat and it's not nearly as nice.

Especially if you don't light the cigarette.

Smoking is one of the few things where you can look at study after study and it's unambiguously very, very bad for you. They don't have to tease correlations out like in the "latitude of birth correlates with risk of hangnails" kind of studies, it just jumps right out of the data.

So take a smoking break, but don't light up. Or at least don't inhale.

Used to. I have a house full of ancient macs that are still running stuff for me that doesn't require sitting in front of the computer actively interacting with it. Then there's the 2011 Macbook Pro with the GPU problem. We have two of the late 2011's and they started showing the GPU desolder problem about the same time and then both failed to boot into the OS at all within a few weeks of each other. It's a widely documented, well defined problem, and Apple has pretty much refused to acknowldege it. The best they seem to do is give people "depot" repair for $300 where they swap out the motherboard with another one that's been reflowed and will start to show the problem again in a few months because the design flaw is still there.

I install all sorts of open source packages on OS X and have for years-- I just got a new MacBook with Mavericks on it, and stuff installs just fine. For things like perl and ruby I've been using perlbrew and rvm so I can have any versions I need. For most libraries, I typically install them from source rather than the package managers because there often ends up being some issue with other stuff I want to use if I do the package manager versions. It's usually pretty quick and painless.

That said, I also have VMware installed so I can do stuff in windows or linux when I need to, and it's very convenient. Plus, Yosemite is bad enough that I'm finally interested in looking at linux as a long term option to get away from the increasing number of bad decisions and serious bugs that apple has been making lately.

I was lucky enough back in the 80's that when there were 4-5 of us in the computer programming class who knew more than the instructor that he also knew that and was cool with it. We didn't cause trouble, and he would ask us stuff that he didn't know occasionally.

It eventually led to a summer gig doing some programming for the school district. On the first day, the district programmer (smallish district, there was just one guy) took me into his office and said "I know you can get in and figure out how to get in and change grades. Please don't." and left it at that.

You'd want it in dense, slow traffic. Go drive the LA freeways at rush hour some time- stop and go traffic that creeps along with the cars just a few feet apart. It takes a lot of attention to drive in, but it really shouldn't be hard for a robot car to do. There's some lane changing (which is what slows traffic down- people trying to find spaces to get to the exit or merge on) but everything is very predictable. The autonomous car can safely drive closer to other cars, will have less lag before moving when the car in front moves (or stops) and can better negotiate lane changes with other autonomous cars because it isn't limited by the viewing angle, reaction times, and interpretations of other drivers to detect indications of what they're trying to do.

The release version has a lot of issues with sending mail. My partner has Yosemite that came on a brand new mac and OS X mail is unusable. I got a refurb that came with Mavericks and that version is fine.

Except they broke their own mail app that comes with the OS when they released Yosemite. It sends mail when and if it feels like it, and there's nothing you can do about it. There's no excuse for your OS updates to break apps that you provide with the OS and update with it.

You pretty much just made the case for Palm Springs/Palm Desert being the first community that puts in driverless car infrastructure. It's relatively isolated a couple hours east of LA, and there's already a second "limited access/limited speed" road system: golf cart lanes (usually shared with bicycles). There's a large reasonably well-off older population who already get around town on golf carts, so adding autonomy to the carts and infrastructure to support it would probably be effective and widely accepted.

Enceladus is probably a better candidate-- there's reason to believe that it's as little as a few meters to get to liquid water that's already known to have most of what you need for life. It's much farther away though, so it's a lot longer to get there.

It's not that clean an environment around space station. It's more llike the space equivalent of Pigpen from the old Peanuts comics- a station with a cloud of contamination floating along with it. There was a microgravity facility that was very loosely coupled to ISS, but it still has to be coupled so that when the space station maneuvers your things keep up. If you really need microgravity it tends to be easier to make a free flyer and stick it in a higher orbit. The possibility of re-usability is appealing, but it rarely seems to work out to be cost effective for anything large-- the cost of making the stuff is usually much less than the cost of all the testing and verification that it will actually work when it gets there.

The movie analogy is one of my favorites. I like to point out to people that you can send a small rover to Mars for the same cost (or less) than making a couple of really bad movies about sending people there. You can send a large rover for about the cost of a James Cameron extravaganza or two about it.