Actually the Kindle 2 (non DX version) now supports PDF files natively without conversion as of a recent software update.

Unfortunately as others have mentioned, PDF is a really shitty format for ebooks. You can't reflow the contents to do things like change the font. Plain text, ePub, or mobipocket are better formats to have ebooks in.

Which really sucks because I already have problems when I try to search for "Go" the board game. Now I'm going to get results from a programming language mixed in as well.

That's not exactly where the problem comes in actually. It has more to do with large datasets.

I know that people have mentioned Oracle and other large DB vendors that make databases that will scale to terabytes (or maybe even petabytes), but as some others have also pointed out: those are REALLY expensive.

I work for a particular purple company that deals with web searches and scalability issues. Even on some of the 'small' apps that run on DB servers eventually run into scalability considerations when reaching a certain size. The main bottleneck that you face is IO latency. While for most applications you will have the bulk of your data sitting on disk and a smaller index for that data sitting in ram so that you can find the tuple your looking for quickly, when the database gets too large that index becomes big enough to no longer fit into ram. When you have to perform a disk seek to access the index, access times go way down.

Also, with systems such as MySQL you can horizontally scale for reads which helps a lot. You add slave machines that replicate the data, and you can even set them up in tiers so as to not put so much strain on your master server. All of your read requests go to a slave that's behind a load balancer, while all of the writes and read critical requests go to your master. Unfortunately when you've fully saturated your master with writes, you can't just add a second master without sharding. Sharding can be a pain as it often requires you to rewrite the data access portion of your application to deal with the sharding details. Also, you can't perform joins over data in two different shards, which means you'll be joining that data in your application. Messy.

The only way to scale write databases in a MySQL setup is vertically, with a bigger box. That works for a little while but eventually that will be saturated as well. What is needed is some way to utilize a lot of commodity (cheap) servers to store and process all of your data, and currently implementing SQL on something like Hadoop has a lot engineering challenges to overcome.

Actually there was someone there who interviewed a bunch of the women hackers at the event. A lot of them thought it was funny watching the awkward guys up on stage going through having a girl dance next to them. Even more said they didn't even notice what was going on on stage. Apparently the dances only happened twice during the multi-day event and each dance was for about 5 minutes.

There's been a lot of outcry from women in the US about it, but none of the women who attended the event had anything negative to say.

If you want to be a part of the future right now you can download Dungeons and Dragons Online for free (used to be a subscription MMO) and do exactly that. Free to play, but you have to pay real cash to unlock races, classes, and quests.

This micropayment crap is starting to get really annoying. It's not even just that the customer is getting gouged, it's having to remove yourself from any immersive aspect that a game might have to go to some store, pull out a credit card, and do a whole transaction to continue playing. Especially in an RPG, that really jolts you out of the experience I feel.

Actually before Braid, or even Prince of Persia Sands of Time as someone else pointed out, there was Blinx: The Time Sweeper which used the original XBox hard drive to record all actions and allow you to replay them back again.

You could do several time related actions, one of them being record where you do something for 10 seconds, then time reverses and replays again with your green "ghost" going through while you played your character normally. There was also the ability to slow down time, stop it, speed it up, and retry if you died.

Blinx was released in 2002 and is the first game I know of with that concept fully realized. It was a really good platformer that sort of didn't get as much credit as I think it should have.

Ok, where the hell did you learn math? $200 million divided by 300 million people = $0.66 per person, not $0.02. (I have no idea where you came up with this number).

For $40,000 in health care for every person, every person would have to pay.... $40,000. Now I understand that you're assuming 100 million rather than 300 million to take into account children, unemployed... probably something else to account for the fact that you assume only 1 in 3 living people in the US pays taxes (which is a really low estimate I might add). So yes, for 100 million people to supply $40,000 in benifits to 300 million people, which assumes that all people, including children, will need a full $40,000 worth of care every year, it would in fact cost those 100 million $120,000 per year. Simple math there, but I think your base assumptions are really flawed.

Why would everyone require $40,000 in care every year? Shit I might get a cold or the flu once or twice a year and have to buy $50 in over the counter. My fiance has type 1 diabetes and spends around $100 a month with insurance for her insulin, which is around $600 a month without. So even without insurance someone with a medical condition that requires constant medicine (which is not most people) would only cost $7,200 a year, leaving $32,800 free of that $40k allowance. I just don't see the average cost of health-care per person per year as being so high, which makes me believe your argument, besides being mathematically challenged, is also a straw man set up to prove your point without any basis of fact.

Actually in the US the age of consent varies by state. Only a few states is it 18. In NY for example the AoC is 17, so Frida would be legal.

I actually did a lot of research in this area when I was 17 and dating a college girl. It seemed important at the time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ages_of_consent_in_North_America#United_States

The wiki page lists links to the related state codes for most of them.

It isn't actually as easy as all that as some others have stated. There was actually an interesting website set up just for this sort of thinking though:

http://qntm.org/?destroy

We have enough nukes to kill all of mankind, and probably even a majority of the complex species as well (complete sterilization would be difficult as there are certain bacteria that thrive in radioactivity and would probably survive). But to actually rend a 5.793e21 ton ball of iron in two would require some serious energy beyond just our current nuclear arsenal.