That's a valid concern, but in theory pallets are marked so that you can identify what they're made of, and some of them are just made of untreated wood. I would imagine that this mostly applies to domestic-only shipments.

Yeah, zinc vaporizes right around a mere 500 degrees, you can easily exceed that by burning a stack of pallets. Whoops! Been to that bonfire already.

In some cases pallets or even containers are just not allowed into certain ports after leaving certain ports, increasing the destruction rate. Better to just stop using wood. The plastics are very recyclable.

Steel with too high a carbon content to be magnetic is called stainless, unless it's over 4% and then it's called hypereutectic and it's very difficult to produce and nobody is making nails out of it, just like they aren't making nails out of stainless — especially not for pallets.

...someone might actually try to carry out your plan, and then destroy their lungs with zinc from galvanized pallet nails from china.

Seems to me like you're both right and both wrong, because pallets aren't going away, but I can see more conveyors being used to move pallets. You're more right than he is, though, because pallets aren't going away.

Fuck, put some shredded cheese and some old bay into some bisquick already, what year is it?

Who told you that? The Nook Simple Touch has a two-point capacitive multitouch display. I've got one right here.

The oldest tech like this had straight beams and receptors on the other side and was totally digital, but now they can read reflections, so in theory they can have resolution higher than the resolution of the scanning grid.

I remember seeing this technology used on a screen at a zoo or maybe marine world, something like that, when I was a child. I'm pretty sure it's older than 20 years.

No, it cannot. Regular buttons stay in the same place all the time, and you can feel for them while not looking at them. You can't feel for touch controls.

Fact is, that's only true if you take your eyes off the road, and keep them that way until you're done.

If you still miss it, you stopped using it because it became useless. And that's what happened to it before it was shut down, because it had no meaningful concept of relevance. It just searched for your terms and produced whatever were the first results. It didn't try to do anything clever on your behalf, which is now necessary due to the size of the interwebs. It just returned pages and pages of too-similar results.

It was in the Sears & Roebuck catalog. The fashion today is to underestimate just how great S&R was back in the day, because Sears is so godawful terrible today, but you really could get pretty much anything from S&R. You could get a doorknob, for example, and a house to go with it.

Hotels are older than schools. Maybe the hoteliers should teach the schools a thing or two, such as how to run within budget. Hint: reduce administrative staff, everyone needs to do actual work

No reason? How will their citizens afford new phones?

Cellular is pretty much the only reasonable option given the lack of infrastructure. It can be installed completely wireless, aside from power. And finally, an answer to where the old phones can go.