It costs an absolute fortune to sent something to another planet (regardless of weight), so why does NASA spend so much time and money designing and building rovers that are only expected to last 3-6 months?

It's like a person complaining about having a food budget that is too small, when they buy nothing but high-price, pre-packaged, ready-to-eat meals.

You definitely need to press your case further with the Weights & Measures people, because this falls squarely into their territory. At&t is clearly selling you a specific amount of product for a specific price, and the main purpose of the W&M department is to test the accuracy of commercial measuring equipment.

If you are actually able to get a live person with relative ease, just keep calling back until you get someone that agrees with you.

If W&M can test the gas pump, why can't they test the internet pump too?

It doesn't matter anyway, since China will have hacked the encryption keys within minutes of generating them.

Or the NSA will have hacked them, passed them them on to Israel (NSA gives Israel raw intelligence access), who will then sell them to China in exchange for whatever weapons they can't get from the US.

Cats explore everything. They will eventually go where you want if you wait long enough.

This sounds like a modern cyber-warfare version of the Soviet anti-tank dogs or the American bat-bombs.

If a cat collar can sniff wifi, it can run an automated exploit script too.

It's not necessarily a new form of energy.

It's possible that there is a 5th force that we don't know about, different from the 4 forces that we already know about (gravity, magnetism, strong force and weak force.)

It could be a very weak force with an extremely long range that only manifests when the other 4 forces are beyond their effective ranges.

Does the WRT1900ac still use open-source code in the stock firmware?

The only reason the WRT54G was opened up in the first place was because of the GPL requirements. If the stock WRT1900ac uses entirely closed-source code, then there is no GPL requirement to post the source code

The next Tesla model will be a big metal box full of batteries that you park next to your house, and permanently connect.

My first PC had a 200 watt power supply
The next one was 400 watt
After that it was 650 watt, which lasted until I need PCIe connectors.
Now I'm up to 800 watts, with a PC that also doubles as a space heater whenever I play a game.

I'm pretty sure most of us lack the tools and materials to build a photovoltaic panel.

However, Solar thermal (hot water solar) is well within reach of anyone who can solder pipes and use a saw.

Sony tries too hard to be completely in charge of every tiny aspect of their products, even when they lack the expertise to actually accomplish it.
They could have partnered with Amazon or B&N right from the beginning, and they would have been a part of something big. But instead they have a tiny part of nothing, all to themselves.

This is what happens when you don't share your toys Sony. Everyone eventually decides to get up and go play somewhere else.

How is a child raised by a robot any more traumatized than a child raised by a television (AKA the electric babysitter)?

How is renting a book for a month any different than borrowing that same book from the library for a month (as far as the publisher is concerned)?

As long as Amazon has bought enough "copies" of the book to cover everyone who is reading that book at any given time, then the publisher has already made their money.

It's possible that amazon IS screwing over the publishers, by either paying too low of a price per copy or by not paying for all the copies in circulation, but that has nothing to do with the legitimacy of the rental service itself.

I have seen video advertisement captchas as well, where you actually have to watch the video (or atleast most of it) to answer a question.

It's easier to fix alien tech if you are living in an alien junkyard.

I don't know about those areas specifically, but there are many extremely poor areas of the world that are drowning in 1st world waste like plastic bottles and broken electronics.
Maybe the solution could use those "resources"

Some of this already exists, like the 20oz-bottle skylight (fill bottle with water and 2 cap fulls of bleach, drill hole in tin roof, stick bottle half-way through, and seal it somehow) The end result is a bright light that fills the area like a light bulb, and lasts pretty much forever.

If this new hydrophobic layer could be cheaply painted onto bottle plastic, it would take care of a large part of the raw material cost, especially if the hydrophobic layer could somehow also be made from whatever chemicals are in those old electronics.

It's cheaper to make lemonade if life hands you free lemons.