The challenge is a challenge. The goal is clearly to produce usable power, not to need more filtering. While the requirements for this contest don't require grid-tie, that's something that can be implemented later.

Yes. Don't listen to the sibling comment, which ignores the well-known fact that deforestation in fact was a contributing factor. Of course, if you actually wanted to know the answer to your question, you would have found it with google, dozens of times over.

You don't get points for giving up what you can't hold at the time anyway.

Well, I'm not sure how long I would have had to wait to get a better player for $20 at a yard sale.

I have the world's slowest blu-ray player, an original Sony. BDP-S300, I think. It lacks both ethernet and performance. Sadly, the Raspberry Pi lacks SATA, which is what the unit uses to connect to the optical drive. That gives it hack value, though not with R-Pi. I'd probably have to shoehorn something Micro-ITX in there, or use a laptop motherboard, as the optical drive is smack in the center.

I've bought just one Blu-Ray movie because the player is so godawful slow and I have to use a crappy remote with it. Ideally I'd be able to run XBMC on Windows (XP or 7) on whatever I stuffed into the case, and then I could use the android remote app. Right now my entertainment system is a mk908 running Finless 1.4 or so and it leaves a lot to be desired. Playing discs is one of those things.

If you aren't already working on this, or don't already have a pretty good idea with at least a fair chance of succeeding, then you're probably not too smart if you decide to take this challenge on. So what? There are those who are working on solving this problem already. If they have the means to produce a product, they're already doing that. If not, then this will give them some money for production of prototypes for larger systems, and probably attract some investment dollars from Google.

Then you can't afford not to have a backup server and a development server. This point needs expansion :p

It can be disabled, but can you trust that they won't "accidentally" turn it back on with an update? If you must use Chrome, use Chromium instead. The only practical difference besides that it doesn't spy on you for Google is that you need to install a Flash player (if desired) manually.

Stupid objection the first: "This is worth a lot more than a million dollars."
Response:

Does Google own the intellectual property created during the competition?

No. Google is not requiring any IP or licenses be granted except a non-exclusive license to be used only for the purpose of testing the inverter and publicizing the prize. [...] However, in the spirit of advancing this power electronics community, Google may choose to make public some or all of the teamsâ(TM) high-level technical approach documents

Stupid objection the second: (something stupid about 12 volts)
Response:

Will be taking in 450 V DC power in series with a 10 Ω resistor
Must output 240 V, 60 Hz AC single phase power

I know that slashdotters don't RTFA, but seriously, all of you jaw-jacking about 12 volts or about how a million is chump change are a bunch of Useless McToolbags. STFU already.

It was a good place to hang a scanner, of course.

If your goal is to play games, the obvious answer is a better disk interface with some non-resetting RAM on it that you could use for a RRAD:. That's a lovely thing to have in your system.

Interrupting food shipments in order to deliberately keep an oppressed populace consistently underfed isn't just the opposite of peaceful, it's illegal.

And Israel has demonstrated that they are dedicated to control of the entire region, through border expansion. Don't really give a shit about propaganda on either side.

Yes, and the goal of Israel is to claim the entire region for the Israeli state. Two border expansions and an ongoing campaign of semi-starving the besieged populace next door suggest that this is in fact the case. And there is a sizable group of people who suggest that all Jews who do not feel the same are some sort of traitor, and that anyone who does not support Jewish dominance of the region is not just anti-Zionist, but an anti-Semite, making rational discussion impossible just as surely as invoking Godwin.

Meanwhile, this war is really not between the Jewish people and the Palestinians. The entire conflict has been reframed as a battle in the war between "The West" and Islam, or perhaps simply a shot, fired by the UK when they created the nation of Israel. You will note that the Jewish people already got kicked out of that region once. They laid claim to it, they attempted to take it away from the people who lived there already, they met with some success but were eventually ejected. The history of that region going back as long as we know about has been people killing other people for control of it, and now just look at it. Formerly lush and rich, now it's a bunch of sand and rocks over which people kill one another. It's lost all practical meaning, since it's now not particularly good for supporting human life. Of course, one meaning remains. As long as the people living there are fighting over some shitty sand in the shitty desert, they're not causing problems for anyone else.

This situation was deliberately engineered and now Israel and Palestine are playing precisely the game they were meant to play, for our benefit. Why else do you think the USA pours money into that hole? It's not because the leaders of the USA give a shit about Jews. They're largely the same camp of assholes who presided over WWII and delayed our entry into that conflict for economic reasons. Notably, we were selling Aluminum to Japan so they could make it into Zeroes, and selling fuel to Germany so they could drive across Europe — and yes, these profits were a minuscule drop in the bucket compared to the subsequent benefits of building up our manufacturing systems while our "allies" were bombed.

tl;dr: $

Hamas didn't exist on day one. Hamas wouldn't likely exist at all without the extent of the occupation.