Senator: "What good is electricity in the house?"

Engineer: "Senator, in 20 years, you'll be taxing it."

In time, governments will try to tax and control it, perhaps even stopping colonization or private enterprise, probably even cheered on by some around here who, one presumes, were completely down with Europe looting the New World to feed their governments' voracious appetites for cash, dead-set against any colonies not their own, much less independence.

And if a doctor is asked to treat a tortured prisoner so that they may be healthy enough to be tortured more?

But DARPA pie-in-the-sky projects are but a drop in the bucket compared to the budgets and industries involved directly in "designing a missile system to kill lots of brown people on the other side of the world," including the number of engineers employed.

And you and your customers always agree who the "bad guy" is in all situations? Or do you try to avoid asking too many questions (and all mention of Wikileaks)?

And does your employer only sell weapons to customers you are morally comfortable with, or do those weapons end up being sold to just about anybody the government wants to placate at the moment?

Can you guarantee that the weapons you're designing are being deliberately used to threaten someone else's sleeping baby girls, if not your own outright?

And did those rough men design and build their own weapons?

Medical companies refuse to export drugs to the United States that they know are used in executions. But nobody will stop selling arms to someone else unless and until international law gets involved, and sometimes not even then.

It seems pretty clear that those in the field of medicine have a higher moral standard.

"State electrician" isn't just a euphemism.

Actually no, the Founding Fathers seemed more Dieist than Christians and there is a constitutional prohibition against the establishment of an official religion in the US. The number of Americans who are Christian by default far exceeds the number of Americans who are Christians by choise, many more Americans are Christians for Baptism, Wedding and Funerals than are continuously practicing.

Perhaps the point is that once you already own a tablet, "a bunch of crap to turn it into a desktop" is cheaper than a desktop.

Perhaps, but certain dosages, typically in the above 10Gy have a stupifing effect on people, which may mercifully reduce the awareness of the horrendous gastrointestinal reactions to the radiation.

True, but how much of time spent writing and editing a document is done in text selection? Besides, when I don't have a mouse available, such as while riding the bus, I can use keyboard keys to move the cursor by a word or line at a time. This works on my laptop's built-in keyboard or on a Bluetooth keyboard paired to my Nexus 7 tablet.

Granted, that's fine for FPS and RTS. But plenty of genres that aren't FPS or RTS don't benefit from a mouse. Take a cooperative platformer for example. I don't see how a platformer would benefit from a mouse unless it's a Contra clone like Abuse. On a console, you'd put player 1 on the included gamepad and player 2 on another gamepad, either one sold separately or one included with player 2's console and brought from home. On a PC, you'd put player 1 on the keyboard and player 2 where? (It'd be possible to put player 2 on a USB gamepad, but only if player 2 learned how to play on a gamepad and not on a keyboard.)

HDMI cable distance is pretty far.

People tolerate a cable coming out of a computer mouse.

Well if you consider projectile vomiting and diarhea a superpower.

How mch dose will kill, say, 50% with cancer wothin 10 years? Or just 20%? What if it is a slow release rather than literally a bomb, and takes days or weeks before detection?