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Um, wait . . .

Build ships which vaccuum up jellyfish, puree them, and use the proteins as feed stock for 3D printing of food. The stingers can get filtered out, or just left into the low-grade product used in prisons and orphanages.

I'm sure that Red Lobster can come up with some clever marketing term for this stuff. After the actual lobsters, cod, and king crabs die off they'll have plenty of motivation.

Interesting Geek-culture historical note: In the 1973 movie "Soylent Green," the titular product is supposed to be made from krill scooped from the oceans. The underlying horror of the movie isn't that the crackers are made of dead people, but that the ocean ecosystem has collapsed due to pollution. The movie also has Edward G. Robinson bitching about how the greenhouse effect has made it hot and damp year-round.

I don't recall if I saw this scene in the theater, during "Jedi's" initial run, or in preview clips shown on TV, but:

There's a scene in Return of the Jedi in which Luke goes mano a mano with a storm trooper riding one of those cycles used to zip around Endor.

Luke knocks the guy's helmet off, revealing a dark haired guy with a rather skinny face.

I do know that this brief reveal was cut out of the sky cycle chase as it was shown on the Laserdisc.

Could it be on this new find?

. . . and suddenly masks will be deemed a threat to Free Enterprise, and wearing one will put you on a terrorism watch list.

Anyway, you'd better wear gloves too, because shopping cart handles will eventually have DNA sensors and galvanic skin response detectors.

You are correct sir! I didn't realize Arduino had released multiple new boards.

The Galileo is pretty cool, though.

SF author / design maven Bruce Sterling picked up one at the Maker Faire and posted an Unboxing photo set:

https://secure.flickr.com/photos/brucesterling/sets/72157636182707015/with/10085336073/

Scroll to the bottom for the first picture in the set.

The display box is rigged with a sound chip that plays portentous music when the board is removed.

. . . the backdoor for the NSA is really well protected.

. . . the targeting algorithms will be vetted by legal teams every bit as diligent and committed to human rights and Constitutional law as the people in FISA courts who have helped keep the NSA from misusing their powers.

In related news, if you have legitimate business in areas of cities frequented by anti-war protestors, you can purchase a RapidPass Trusted Citizen(tm) badge which will eliminate time-consuming drop-and-freeze inspections by SecuriCorps (tm) PeacePal(tm) hover-drones. F%$ing hippies need not apply! (We'll know.)

Make the battlefield robots look like gnarly insects, with stink generators that make being around them unpleasant. If they can "talk," make them sound like tedious doofuses.

Of course, the enemy could counter by making their robots able to shape-shift -- as soon as they are out of site of their own side -- into beautiful, elegant shapes that no one would want to kill.

Uh . . . .

Cripes, I just wrote the background for an anime series, didn't I?

I only read the first Artemis Fowl book, and it didn't make much of an impression.

Was a later one set on Mars?

. . . to fertilize King Barsoom II's lawn and flower gardens! MARS NEEDS MULCH!

But seriously: Initial training for the would-be colonists will consist of living for five years in trailer homes buried beneath the soil of Antarctica's "dry deserts." People who can't cope with the psychological pressure, or who are judged insufficiently entertaining by the casting group of the MARS LIVE! production company and its advertisers and charter sponsors, will be summarily kicked off of the program. (They will receive copies of the home game, which consists of a refrigerator box equipped with fake controls and a framed color print of a Mars probe landing site.)

View them from the right solar system and the nebula spell out WILL YOU MARRY ME SQUARDANTELLA?

Amazing what a few dozen carefully arranged nova bombs can do.

Yup, the marriage proposal that wiped out 17 promising young civilization.

Well, really my only Sid Meier encounter, if you don't count sitting in an audience.

So, I'm at . . . COMDEX? CES? One of those big-ass electronics trade shows. Might have been Chicago, might have been Las Vegas.

I got away from my booth for an hour, and I head for the area where computer games are being shown. I'm totally jazzed to see a dummy box and demo of Colonization. I look over the material about it, and to another totally jazzed gamer next to me say something like "Cool, it's like someone did a decent remake of Seven Cities of Gold!"

A voice at my shoulder says "Good, that's what I had in mind."

SQUEEE!

The reptoids will stop at nothing to prevent humans from finding their homeworld!

But seriously, bummer. Many years ago (1997!) I went to a NASA Ames / Moffet Field open house. Various working groups had set up displays showing the mission concepts they were working on. One of these was Kepler.

If you read the Mars One, you'll see that they're counting on revenue from a reality program to fund the project.

So, the candidates must not only be emotionally stable and qualified, but be photogenic and charming enough to sustain the interest of viewers.

Imagine the horror if, after three years, all of the surviving colonists turn out to be phlegmatic, agreeable, no-drama workaholics and stable family-minded folks.

"These rating are terrible! My God, it's turned into The Waltons in space! Can we ship in some ninjas or a killer robot to liven things up?"