I agree, the synergies here are obvious, and everybody benefits.

I'm betting that the bet in the story is either a fiction (to get journalists to cover the story) or a regular part of some lab's cultures "That'll Never work!" "Bet you it will!" "How Much" "10 gets you 100, I'll put it in writing" "You're on!" "Ooh, that's interesting..."

The summary even deals with the question of why. The sea floor there is fragile and vulnerable to small temperature changes. We're warming the oceans, a small change is making the sea floor less rigid, presto more gas is leaking out

Also, don't just Ask the end users, actually watch them work. Google, MS, Apple, etc., they actually setup labs and watch how people interact with their products. That way you can See if they're having problems with your software, you don't have to rely on the problem being big enough for them to remember and write it down. Some/many users don't want to seem stupid and ask silly questions.

Exactly, when I saw Access and Excel I thought I had mistyped the URL and was reading The Daily WTF again!

But many people don't realise this, and are still causing problems.

In most western nations, your family also has to agree for your organs to be donated upon your death

Having Ethernet cables running all over the place is probably a greater measurable hazard than the WiFi. Tripping over a cable and injuring yourself Is a real danger, most workplaces are required to cover any cables running over the floor with heavy rubber mats or something like that. Or they could put in cable boxes into the floor of the rooms, very expensive, and very limiting to room geometry, which teachers Love to change!

Perhaps they got China confused with North Korea, where there are regularly huge problems with famines.

I agree. The user should be allowed control of their experience, autodetect is often broken. Some pages I'm subscribed to on FB love to post links to mobile news sites, possibly because think their followers are mostly mobile. But for someone like me who prefers grunty desktops, I have to keep editing the URL. We need browser-based options to turn auto-detect on and off. Website-based ones would require logins, which wouldn't help your private browsing needs, and then you'd have to set it for Every site!

Much simpler to set it once in your browser.

Ballmer is leaving next year, I wonder if stack ranking was his brain child? Sounds about his speed. Real fail of a system.

Exactly, self-driving cars aren't a replacment for taxis, not with the current level of technology. We're not talking Jonny Cabs from Total Recall yet, we're looking at reducing the amount of effort the average commuter needs to get from point A to B. I wonder if self-driving cars would allow better ride-sharing arrangements?

They twice mentioned in the article that the Texas Legislature won't meet again until 2015, is that right? They're all going on holiday for a year?

It's not snow-related, but the Japanese used Lots of bicycles to move infantry quickly through certain parts of Asia

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zMAWztZ6TI This guy in Brazil thought it up in 2002 during a blackout, I'm pretty sure that's more than 2 years ago. This story keeps getting recycled as writers and editors forget that they've already covered it before.