Insensitive clod, etc. I recognize the winter holidays but don't have any friends or family. I would like to give and receive, but alas, there's nobody here to enjoy it with. Maybe next year/decade/life.

Happy Holidays.

I'm willing to bet that on average, the people that fit in the workout group also ate healthier food, didn't smoke, and kept their excess weight down. If you completely ignored the workout aspect (or selected a test group where they were all equally inactive) and looked at just eating and smoking habits and body fat percentages, would you find the same three year difference? (Rhetorical; I know the answer.)

Don't get me wrong; as an Alaskan, I'd love to see this go in, but it's not going to happen.

First, the seas of the Bering Strait makes the English Channel look like a backyard swimming pool, especially in the winter months - that is, most of the year. Boats simply don't go there. Good luck operating any kind of floating construction equipment with colder than -100F wind chill, ice bergs, and 1-2 knot constant water currents.

Don't underestimate the difficulty in putting a rail system across the land in those areas either. Between Fairbanks and Nome is literally five hundred miles of permafrost, swamps, silt, fault lines, rivers, lakes, mountains, and simultaneous combinations of the above. There isn't any infrastructure or construction-friendly ground here. Even with ten thousand people living in Nome we can't even build a dirt road out there. I can't imagine the other side of the Strait being any better.

And let's not forget the environmentalists. If we can't drill ANWR, then this rail is out of the question.

To call this a pipe dream would be an understatement, especially for a measly $65 billion.

Why do people do that? What started this trend?

I'm right in the middle of that age group and I see it all the time. More often than that, though, is taking out a phone to play games or update Facebook right in the middle of a conversation or lunch meeting. Then all of the sudden I'm the obtuse one for getting up and walking away when the rest of my peer group is sitting around tapping away on their phones at one another. Why even go out if you're just going to fiddle with your phone the whole time?

The worst part is, I see it at all levels. This isn't just something the lower class is doing. It might be the way I was raised, but I find the whole thing impossibly rude. If I took out a Gameboy during dinner while I was growing up, it would've been slapped out of my hands into the trash can. I'll be doing the same favor for my kid, if I ever have one. Too bad there's nobody worth my time to procreate with in this day and age.

I'm not even old, but get off my lawn anyways.

If you're going to be pedantic, at least check to make sure you're right. The two words (extrovert and extravert) are both correct and interchangeable.

I hope they exclude trucks from this new average requirement, or automakers are going to be in a real pinch. A four wheel drive one-ton work truck capable of towing equipment or fuel wouldn't get 30mpg on gas or diesel even if it ran at 100% efficiency. Those vehicles still need to exist unless you think you can build roads and houses with your Prius. The old trucks won't last forever.

And what about all wheel drive cars? For more than half the year here, I absolutely need one to get to work, and I'm certainly not an exception. That's not an area the US manufacturers are behind on, either. Nobody makes one that gets better than 30MPG in town. Regulations aren't going to magically make it so.

Just how tiny are they going to have to make the front wheel drive commuters to balance against the cars that are actually useful?

Am I reading this right? Is the author of the article really comparing $300 to $500 receivers from 10, 20, and 30 years ago with $300 to $500 receivers from today? Of course you won't see improvement if you ignore inflation. A $20K car from 1980 is certainly higher quality than a $20k car from today, too.

Compare a new $1000 receiver with your dad's thirty year old $300 receiver and you'll be more likely to see the improvement you'd expect with technological advancement. You can get high quality audio equipment without all the iPod docked XM-radio bluetooth garbage, too. The companies that recognize that those will be antique technologies in ten years are able to put the bulk their development costs into developing higher quality components. These are the companies that serious audio enthusiasts are buying from. NAD Electronics was mentioned earlier - yep, that's one of them.

I was thinking battle suits. I wonder if a special forces troop could benefit from having a couple extra lungs grafted in? With this form factor, it might actually be feasible (and removable). Better throw in an extra heart too, just to seal the deal.

I drink and play video games when I'm not at work, and I play Slashdot Troll when I am at work. No books involved. I got enough of that "reading" nonsense in college.

The car on the site you linked ran sixteen (plus) second quarter miles. I suppose it is technically faster than some Porsche if you include every model they ever made, but I think saying that might give people the wrong idea. It's not faster than a modern 911 by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, that's not much faster than a Prius.

Your coworker also didn't design a vehicle from the ground up - it looks to me like he just put an electric engine in his car. There's no way you can start from scratch and fully design and prototype a mass production ready electric trike for a half million. That kind of scope is what this company failed at.

No huge surprise, though. Just like nearly every other "green" car these days, that thing is ugly.

I don't get it. 500GB in an hour would be about 140MB per second (yes, I am rounding up). Most of the enterprise level 15K drives are right in that range without any overclocking, with a couple well above that. Do I win ten grand for buying a Seagate Cheetah 15K.7 for $450 and bringing it in to show that it works?

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/enterprise-hard-drive-charts-2010/Throughput-Read-Average,2156.html

No, I didn't look at the page. It's Slashdotted.

I wonder if any of that money will go towards moving away from uranium 235? If anything, France would be a good candidate to show the western world that thorium 232 is a viable fuel source. All we'd lose is the plutonium and we really don't need more nuclear weapons anyways. Just about everything that sucks about using uranium nuclear fuel (scarcity, goes critical if not cooled, needs to be enriched, unusable waste) would go away.

The first time I drank beer, it surprised me. It turns out that my bile has roughly the same bitter taste as beer, just with varying degrees of vinegar flavor mixed in depending on which beer. Domestics, imports, micro-brews, home-brews, malt liquors, wheat beers, porters, pale ales, honey lagers - they are all roughly the same. All have a completely unbearable taste followed up by a strong gag reflex. I'm done with "maybe next time". It's too bad people feel insulted when I turn down free beer; it makes me look pretty damn unsocial in a place where beer is the defacto beverage.

At least there's always room for a designated driver.

On the contrary, the "computer illiterate" group you're talking about is growing, not dying off. While it's true that more and more people own computers every day, there is a considerably larger market share of "casual" users than there was ten years ago. With operating systems getting easier to use and more tailored to the general public, the amount of real understanding any given user needs in order to mistakenly install malware/scareware is continuing to go down.

I think it's going to get worse (more profitable) before it gets better.

The EPA estimated city and highway mileage rates aren't referred to as the minimum, though. If there was legislation to require car manufacturers to publish their "guaranteed minimum" mileage, that would have to be zero as well. "Average driving conditions" isn't the same black and white rule set this poorly written bill is referring to.