Leaving that out is an advantage. Adding in an LTE radio would lower the battery life, jack up the price, and make it so parents wouldn't want their preteen kids to have one, meaning the market would shrink and the price would go up again.

I WISH google voice let me make wifi calls. They don' allow that since their cell carrier partners would throw a hissy. I can do it from my PC, but not my actual phone.

Besides, packages don't care about seating arrangements. If it saves them money, FedEx and UPS will buy enough of these to justify the design.

Besides, packages don't care about seating arrangements. If it saves them money, FedEx and UPS will buy enough of these to justify the design.

Scientific cameras are intensity-only photosensors. They capture a broad range of visible and infrared light as a single channel. Unlike a digital camera for broadcast or stills that you might buy that either has three detectors or a filter grille over the single sensor. To get color images from cameras like these…

Beyond that, the Dutchy is part of the royal family's private land holdings which are leased to the government in deals going back to the 16somethings. It's complex, a bit like a corporation for whom the head is the next in line to the throne.

Thermocouples. If you put two non-identical metals together and heat the joint, you get a voltage much like a battery. They are mostly used in things like digital thermometers as a way to measure heat, not make power from it - they make voltage relative to temperature, which a digital circuit can measure. They are not…

That is Prince Charles. He owns a prison. (Dartmoor is owned by the Dutchy of Cornwall) so he visits it on occasion. This shot, however, is from an official visit to Belmarsh, the top-security facility in London.

How does the rover keep track of its position? Stars? Inertial navigation? Surveying landmarks? I assume there's nothing like a "Martian Positioning System".

One million dollars would buy you a top quality Dyson vacuum and a human to run it for you for about 180 years (assuming 8 hours of vacuuming a week and paying the operator a living wage of about $12 an hour)

That's a valid point, the toilet's seat isn't made of porcelain, after all.

I for one am not too concerned about the power-to-weight ratio or g-loading of my house.

At that point, you just put a GPS guided bomb on the drone, and then you don't need to worry about the target being near the mortar. More likely, what you get is a remote controlled mortar turret placed in concealment, and a remote operator that operates like a sniper team. Instead of striking the targets with his own…

More like drones don't kill people, bombs do. In all the hullabaloo around the remote-control aspect of it, people lose sight of the real problem: our military blowing up buildings to kill everyone inside instead of being selective. It doesn't matter whether it's a manned aircraft or a helicopter or a marine with a…

The B-1 is fast. The B-2 is hard to spot. The B-52 is paid for already and we have thousands of them. I suppose if we wanted to replace the 52's role of cost-effective dump truck we'd just ask Boeing to put bomb bays on a 747.

They aren't just doing it for the calorie burn, they're doing it to actually go somewhere. If they were only in it for the calories they'd be indoors on an elliptical. They also want to maintain a higher speed to keep up with traffic and keep the airflow over the body up (for cooling). If they intentionally made it…

Well, yeah. When you are trying to use up as much food energy as you can, of course it's going to be inefficient. That's what exercise is. It's like idling your lawn mower to burn off the last gas before you store it, waste for a purpose. (and I know you don't really need to do that before you store an engine.)

I applaud the comics artists for their style choice, actually, assuming the interior pages look like the cover. It'd be so easy to use flat-color vector art and look exactly like the show, like the Simpsons comics (except when they deviate for stylistic effect). Using reusable cut-and-paste flash objects for the show…

Swapping out a 1000 pound component isn't unthinkable if it's designed to come out, or is broken into multiple units. The bigger problem is getting a variety of manufacturers to standardize on a battery design that can be swapped by a machine with no human input. Probably the first customers for such a vehicle would…

In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!