Depends on the project.
I built a cheapy 4 line lcd/arduino interface for my custom security system for around 60 bucks. It was butt ugly because good cases are hard to find or expensive to custom build. My wife HATED it. So I found a cheapy android (1.5) ebook with wifi and rooted it for about $90 (could probably find it for 60 now) and wrote an android app. It looks WAY better than my butt ugly lcd and is also going to be an interface to my weather station (when I get around to finishing it) and a few other home automation projects.
The really nice thing about the whole thing was that when the company I am working for decided to develop a mobile app, my boss (who knew I had done the android security interface) threw the project to me. Android apps are pretty fun.

One of the interesting things that came out when this first was announced here in Utah was that this one facility would use about 65 MW of power. 40-50 thousand homes worth of power. That's as much power as all of Salt Lake City. That's a freakin lot of power for a "bunch of servers". ( and the AC to cool them. )

Picowatts are very very dinky. 65 pocowatts of light would be useless for a display, but what about fiber optic processors? What kind of light do they use? One of the problems in normal processors is heat. It would be nice to use the heat generated to produce more light (that you are using to do your processing).

It is interesting that the poster used the power compared to SLC. The NSA is building a new server farm south of Salt Lake and when it was announced they talked a lot about how it would use as much power as Salt Lake City. I wonder how the server farms compare.

I don't get it. Why mars? How much more science could you do in 6 short hops to the moon vs. 1 monster hop to mars? Then once moon trips become commonplace you start to build manufacturing facilities and build your big components there. Just haul out of this big gravity pit that is the earth the things you cannot get or build easily there like electronics, some raw materials and mostly people. Once you are building things there you don't have to worry about escaping earth's gravity and I would think things could get lots more efficient. I think that it kinda sucks that once we got there we didn't stay there.

What if I am just a clone? I guess the only thing worse would be a clone with a red uniform.

I actually saw last night that the Science Channel is going to be showing the Firefly series reruns starting in march. Too bad they won't produce new episodes.

Ever heard of Orion app server? Didn't think so (8 years after oracle "took over" the open source project). 8 years from now we will probably be saying "Sun? BEA?" never heard of them.

For some reason every time I see this robot I think of a taxi cab on mars. What movie was that anyway?

Wasn't it Al Gore?

Our filter here at work blocks netindex.com under the category "Sex". Being the conspiracy theorist that I am it occurs to me that the best way that an ISP that didn't want you to see this info could keep you from it is to throw it into their filter lists under that category. I am not going to my admin to ask them to whitelist it because the first thing that he is going to ask is "what category is it in?" I don't care about the info that much.

Problem is that it only increases AFTER it is thrown away. Until you do that it is an almost useless piece of junk.

The superintendent has posted a "LMSD response to 'invasion of privacy' allegation"

http://www.lmsd.org/sections/news/default.php?m=0&t=today&p=lmsd_anno&id=1137

pretty typical politico. totally avoids or ignores what caused it all in the first place.