I don't know where you get your numbers from, but a normal laptop uses about 35W or less 95% of the time (idling).

In my experience people who complain about back/arm problems are the people who are stressed most. Relaxed people change position often and don't force anything.

For my vacation I'm working on a "heavy duty" beer-bringing robot. It's basically a moving platform with a beer crate on top. You can "call" it by clapping once. I'm still designing the electronics but it will probably feature 4 microphones, 4 PICs, 1 ARM, 1 accelerometer, 1 gyro, 2x 120 RPM motors (differential steering). I've just finished welding & painting the frame and I am about to mount the motors. Looking forward to the finished product :-)

OTOH a lot of users are already invested in to the steam platform. They of course want to be able to access their games on Windows 8 so they will install steam one way or the other, ensuring steam's survival.

I know FreeBSD does that, using the CAM (Common Access Method) subsystem. Presumably other OSes do something similar.

Actually, in the Netherlands there used(?) to be a "pedophile" party. Its goals among others were the lowering of the legal age of consent to 12 years. As long as the party itself acts within the boundaries of the law, they are free to promote any political opinion, even if these clash with the current law. This is very important for a healthy democracy.

I too found Oblivion to be boring. Once I set foot outside the starting dungeon I felt lost, without sense of purpose or direction. I liked skyrim a whole lot more due to its faster pacing and sense of urgency. The improved graphic fidelity also helped a lot. Other open world games that worked for me were the new Fallout series. Another example of an interesting single player game is obviously (the golden standard) Baldur's Gate 2, where none of the encounters are scaled and everything is unique.

Since their seems to be much confusion about this point I'll try to explain it in more detail.

The article is both right and wrong.
If the train needs to actively push itself along the track (using powered wheels) we have to deal with the following formula (for the purposes of this though experiment I've set the mass of the train to 1kg):

W = F * s

Where W is the work/energy (in Joule), F is the force (Newton) and s the distance travelled (meters).
Suppose the train is already going 100m/s and needs to accelerate to 200m/s. Using its wheels it exerts a force of 10N on the train. So it will take 10 seconds to accelerate to 200m/s (V = a * t, a = F/m). In that time it will have travelled 150m/s * 10sec = 1500m. In ideal conditions it would have taken the train 10N * 1500m = 15kJ/kg. Accelerating from 1000m/s to 1100m/s would result in an energy expenditure of 1050m/s * 10sec * 10N = 105kJ/kg, much more energy.

On the other hand, if the train is powered by a rocket, it doesn't have to push itself along the track but instead it pushes itself by pushing rocket fuel at high speed out of the back.

Why is this not more efficient? Because you need to accelerate the rocket fuel as well (and lots of it). In a way the rocket fuel does what the earth it self does for a normal train (a diesel train even uses combustion like a rocket to push itself forward). Because the normal train doesn't have to carry the earth with it it is more efficient. However, there is a point (very high speed) where a rocket train becomes more efficient, because the speed difference between the exhaust gases and the train are not dependent on the trains "absolute" (relative to the earth) speed.

Can you give a concrete example where the GC fails to detect a cyclic reference? IIRC Java's garbage collector eventually traces through all stacks looking for live objects; any objects not referenced on any stack, directly or indirectly through other live objects, are then deleted. Regardless of any cyclic references between dead objects, the outcome should be the same.