Wouldn't an external USB drive be more practical? You can even make your own by simply buying a $10 case and 2.5" disk drive. Anything up to 500 Gigabytes of storage in your pocket.

You can shift it by +/- 180 degrees. That's good enough for a sinusoidal wave.

Given the magnitude of energy involved (every level on the Richter scale is 10x the one below itI think it would be easier to build floating cities like Buckminster suggested. Build a skyscraper frame using a hollow superstructure, get enough sealed air in the superstructure and you actually end up with a structure that will actually float in the air due to differences in air density.

In London, there are enough taxis in the area, that all you really need to do is raise your arm and hail a cab, when ones passes with a "For Hire" sign.
You couldn't make an app that simpler. Some hotels and conference center receptions have a hotline telephone straight to the taxi cab office.

If the taxi cab dispatch offices brought out there own "app", they could cover every other part of the city.

By that logic, asking a friend or relative if they could give you or someone else a ride would constitute an illegal transaction.

Not so long ago, many Californian toll booths would only cars to travel across for free if there were two or more passengers, and they were actively encouraging ride-sharing to reduce traffic loads.

I would imagine tobacco or nicotine constricts blood vessels, and gives the white blood cells traveling along the lining of those blood vessels more chance of detecting and trapping the West Nile virus particles.

Brain size is larger than the theoretical size given the body mass. But most of the brain is used to manage body function with only a small area doing the actual logical thinking and planning. That's larger that the theoretical size. So they must have some logic there to handle the concepts of tubes, tunnels, sticks, pebbles. Given that they feed on insects and just about anything else that lives in trees, they'd have evolved to figure out out to get them out of holes in trees.

Rosetta has the Osiris CCD camera onboard, which can take 4 megapixel images (2k x 2k). Unfortunately, the data transfer speed is at best 1K/second, which is going back to the days of 14K modems. Since it's been a decade between the time that the satellite was launched in 2004, and the present day, huge advances in image compression size have taken place. So the researchers will want to upgrade all the compression algorithms. Think how much web browsers have improved in a decade.

http://pdssbn.astro.umd.edu/ho...

So much of San Francisco is actually built on land reclaimed from the sea using compacted landfill and other materials. There are maps which show what San Francisco Bay looked like back in the 1900's and what it looks like now. The assumption is that with the next big earthquake, all that land will undergo liquefaction as underground water is pushed upwards, and the shockwaves bounce around.

It's a fundamental rule of geology, well documented in a 1960's book called "The Exploding Metropolis".

The most productive agricultural fields happens to be land which has a near constant groundwater level, which is best achieved from being away from hillsides, mountain canyons and river flood plains, ideally raised plateaus formed from river sedimentation. Everything else then has a lower land value, due to the dangers of landslides, avalanches, flash flooding, subsidence and sinkholes. Downtown areas will have already been built on stable dry land. And guess what the land developers are left with?

It's the same principle why homes get built next to chemical plants, oil refineries, under power lines and under airport flight paths. At the time of an economic boom, newcomers are desperate to live anywhere, and so desperate that they would go begging to city hall to get planning permission exemptions for just this one special case and time. Then the homes get built. Decades later, there's a tragic accident and explosion causing hundreds of homes to be evacuated and declared unfit for habitation. Then everyone asks, "Why on earth were these homes ever built here in the first place?"

When Quake was being written using a software renderer running only on the Pentium CPU, he wrote the texture mapping triangle rasterizer function in assembler that took advantage of the parallel nature of the Pentium's integer and floating-point units. This gave them the float-point division calculation required for perspective projection calculations for free. Thus software based texture mapping API's were the state-of-the-art of the time.

That led to a whole cascade sequence of strategic moves by SGI, Microsoft, 3Dfx, Nvidia, and 30 other ASIC design companies to build GPU's.

Communists had Zil lanes. Lanes on the roads reserved exclusively for the ruling class being driven around in their bullet-proof limousines. Olympic officials did the same.

San Francisco International airport has shuttle buses - tell them where you want to go, and they would dynamically create a route that went through all destinations. Other cities offer shuttle buses booked in advance - tell them where you want to be picked up, and where you want to go, and they would dynamically create a route.

Some taxi services would allow multiple drop-off points. It was up to the customers to decide how the each segment of the route should be paid.

Communism required central planning to work. The government would decide it needs a new airplane factory. Then all the resources to be provided to build a new city, apartment blocks, schools, hospitals and so on. But there wasn't any incentive to modernize if the existing equipment did the job. Sometimes the politicians would instruct factories and companies to take on as many staff as possible to reduce unemployment.

To me, social network stuff is the current new layer of the internet and computing...

80's - 8-bit console systems & home computers (basic graphics and audio),
              X-windows/TCP-IP set the foundations for GUI and the internet
90's - multimedia home computers and console systems (true color graphics and stereo audio),
mid 1990's - the internet became accessible to home users. Web page design became a career
2000's - the dot-com era, where startups created online companies like Amazon, Peapod that sold stuff to individuals
mid 2000's - the iPhone and other smartphones come out, allowing multimedia technology to go mobile
2010's - the increasing numbers of users allow for services that allow individual-to-selected-people communication rather than business-to-customer or individual-to-individual.
So now you see all these startups all geared up to particular social events; tech meetings, presentations, talks, technologies or companies.