We'll just put Donald Trump on it. He'll find a way to force Juan de Fuca to fix the problem and pay for all of it.

I bought myself a Kindle Keyboard and have gotten great use out of it over the years. It's handy having a physical keyboard for when I do want to do text entry, whether that's using the Silk browser or looking to buy a book directly through the device interface. Amazon has gone all-touch with the Kindle line these days which I think is a shame. I'd definitely buy a Paperwhite with a keyboard.

Remember, descent is the highest form of patriotic.

There's the idea (to some degree) in Allen Steele's "Coyote" series as well. The initial colonists weren't beat to the planet (actually an inhabitable moon of a gas giant) by later colonists with FTL but still only arrived about a year before the second wave. It's what sets up the conflicts for the second and third books. And the first two books are mostly just the short fiction published in Asimov's.

After all, if nobody wants it, the servers wouldn't be slammed and hard to get to.

Why not? Apparently it never needs maintenance, never runs out of gas, never takes any damage, and never gets dirty.

Can't happen. Animals like lobsters can't carry prion diseases.

I'm a chemist in the US, and I routinely use about five different taper sizes. Then again, I'm also a process chemist, so I routinely work on anything from 25 mL to 22 L or more.

My family had a computer for years (the first was a 286 around 1987) and about 1992 bought a fancy new 486 from Gateway. It was an even bigger day when Dad got us a 4X CD-ROM drive to replace the 1X that the computer came with. About the time we switched to Windows 95, Dad bought a copy of Encarta. Over the next few years, one or two more versions were purchased. We also got a copy of Encyclopaedia Britannica (don't ask me when) and one of something made by Grolier before the acquistion by Scholastic. My parents weren't against large volumes of printed references (they own a condensed OED) but Dad saw the potential of the CD format (DVD as well) right away. The fact that Encarta was much cheaper was a bonus.

He's gone in 2012. Seriously, he's retiring. Almost manged to get rid of him in 2006.

I used to have a tiny application that was a leet translator. Could translate into or out of leet with three varying degrees of complexity.

I'm sorry, "tends to be" isn't what I really meant. There have been many deserving laureates, but the questionable ones stick out more in the Peace category.

The Peace Prize tends to be a joke anyway. I mean, it's not like Kissinger or Arafat or Rabin or Peres work really stood the test of time.

I found that I enjoyed the old platforming side-scrollers more than Duke3D. How about getting rid of the FPS idea and making a 3D platformer instead? It can keep the humor and tone of Duke3D, but make it play like Ratchet and Clank. I'd be far more interested in that than DNF, which I have no interest in purchasing at all.

I've never really understood why I should get a smartphone. Sure, there are times it'd be nice to have the Internet capabilities, but I hate using a smartphone as, get this, a phone. I've got a 6-year old simple phone that just does that, making phone calls for the small amount I use my cell phone for. The plan is still dirt cheap for virtually unlimited calling. I don't use SMS of any kind, so why do I want any of that bundled in? The only thing I want a smartphone for is mobile internet. But no carriers seem to want to just sell me a data plan, even if I come to them with an unlocked phone they can support. And now that even more caps are going into place, my desire to spend multiple hundreds of dollars on a phone and a plan drops even more.