If you've only been exposed to cell phones and retail-level cameras you might think it's just a gimmick Nokia is using, but...you'd be wrong. The Nikon D800 DSLR is at 36; Hasselblad/Mamiya/Pentax/Leica medium-format bodies are anywhere from 50 to 80. Have been since 2006 or so. Give it another two generations on the DSLR front and you'll be getting a $499 50MP Nikon or Canon at Wal-Mart.

Anyway, even on my D5100@16MP I can pull recognizable images if it's a frame-filling portrait, anything more is just making it easier.

Sure, most downmarket cars don't have the ability to switch off the stuff, but then again who wants to zip a Fiesta around like Vettel? (Well, the ST is amazing, but I digress). Funny thing though, most of the high-end vehicles still offer plenty of ways to shut down all the aids. Hell, most of 'em come with a Big Red Switch conspicuously labeled "RACE MODE" that handily switches everything off and resets the suspension for performance. I take it that should all be banned, no?

Come to think of it, why should ANY car capable of exceeding 75mph, or getting there in 15 seconds, be legal? Seriously?

Also, if you enjoy a sports car with anything other than TC and ABS (both of which make it faster) you have no business wasting money and fuel driving it.

Looking at the pictures, it's pretty freakin' obvious the driver went "Lemme show you what the car can do - I got skillz yo, no worries!" and pegged it on a public street. Regardless of any risk to others, it's insanely moronic to drive like that off-track simply because there's zero margin. You fuck up, you die. No nice kerbs or runoff or gravel pits or SAFER walls to hit...just trees and lightposts. At 45mph, that car was perfectly safe, probably safer than anything else on the road that day because it's designed to go, and crash, much faster.

But it wasn't exactly going 45 now, was it? Even IF something in the car broke, and that was why there was a loss of control - there was a loss of control at MASSIVELY EXCESSIVE SPEED. The gearhead-hooligan in me is sad, but the Responsible Adult is pleased these idiots sanitized the gene pool.

I, along with most other "enthusiasts", wholeheartedly appreciate all the electronic gear and realize that a lot of it does make for outright faster lap times - but at the same time, I'd like to be able to switch it off should I choose. There's something to be said for hanging the ass out with a healthy jab at the throttle and shrieking around a parking lot trailing smoke, or slip-sliding around a corner on an empty gravel road in the boonies. OTOH, with extensive winter driving experience, there's also something to be said for having every driver aid known to man spinning a set of Blizzaks in the middle of a wicked nor'easter - all that skulduggery has gotten me home with far less stress than my reflexes and skills alone. There's a time and a place for everything, but a lot of manufacturers these days are eliminating the choice.

I'd have put en.wikipedia at at least a couple of terabytes. Not inconceivably large, but with some housecleaning I could actually get 100GB free.

As in sits in a wheelchair or bed sort of looking around vacantly, with a 10% chance of even cracking a smile on seeing me. Can't speak, move, or do much of anything. It's one of the more unpleasant life experiences I can imagine.

That being said, she has a proper living will, so when she's finally unable (well, actually, forgets how) to swallow that will be it. But, from what I understand, since death by starvation/dehydration is painful and unpleasant, she'll be given a morphine drip...perhaps calibrated wrong, whoops. I can think of worse way to go..

When I was a kid, we heated with wood, I used the fireplace and stove in my college house, lived in Maine for seven years burning wood by the cord. It definitely affected my lungs...my hematocrit was over 55 at my physical last month, my VO2max is north of 50, and I run half-marathons in well under 1:30 and getting close to a sub-6-minute 5K. That pack-a-day COPD inducing toxic brew I grew up in was sure horrid, uh huh. Come to think of it, we pretty much all had woodstoves growing up (small town in CT) and our running teams were state elite, bred a couple of national-classers. I'll say that breathing all that smoke and doing sprint workouts outdoors in the winter at 15F actually developed our pulmonary systems.

That being said, woodburning on a large scale can be a particulate pollution problem, and if you have a really smoky, leaky stove I can see a problem. I know there's massive issues in the 3rd world with respiratory disorders from nasty sooty unventilated indoor cooking fires...but really, developed-world woodstoves don't fill your house with noxious fumes any more than an oil or gas furnace.

The Vignelli Map. A triumph of minimalist, functional design - and pure beauty to boot. The original had some geographic information (parks, major landmarks, etc) but when he redesigned it for the Weekender he stripped even that out. Now it's just lines and stops, as it should be. You need to worry about geography on the street, not in the Land of the Mole People.

Massimo Vignelli redid both the signage and the map for the MTA in the 70's. Minimalism all the way - the signage remains to this day, white Helvetica on a black background, simple colored circles for the lines, and almost nothing else...there's barely even any arrows.

And his map...oh, it's a thing of beauty. "It was not a map. It was a diagram. It was not about what happens aboveground. The purpose of the diagram was to show where the subway lines go." So perfect that when the MTA wanted a weekend-service-change map they had him reissue it (and this time he eliminated ALL geographic information, and people love it)...and a copy of the original ,a href="http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=89300">still hangs in the Museum of Modern Art

If you could get isotopically pure Pu-239, which doesn't exist, it would work - but even the tiniest traces of Pu-240 will spoil it. Quoth Wiki: "The presence of the isotope plutonium-240 in a sample limits its nuclear bomb potential, as plutonium-240 has a relatively high spontaneous fission rate (~440 fissions per second per gram—over 1,000 neutrons per second per gram),[20] raising the background neutron levels and thus increasing the risk of predetonation."

Long story short, all those extra neutrons make a chain reaction far more likely to occur - so likely that if you use gun assembly, supercriticality is reached long before the two pieces are physically together and they just blow back apart with a negligible yield. Granted, "negligible" in the sense of nuclear weapons means anywhere from a few to a few hundred tons, and there's still an intense load of radiation and fallout, so for terroristic purposes it might suffice...but you aren't building a city-leveling device with Pu and a surplus artillery barrel.

  Anyway, breeding it with a neutron tube would be slow, Like building a skyscraper with a set of Craftsmen tools slow. Reactors are the *only* way to synthesize >mg quantities of any transuranic. If you have those resources, a simple (albeit large) implosion system is pretty much trivial.

My midrange-consumer camera (Nikon D5100) makes color images at ISO6400 that are roughly comparable in quality to "consumer" (say Fuji drugstore-brand) color film at ISO200. It captures 5 stops, 2^5 times more, light for the same (or better) overall quality. If by "capture light" you mean dynamic range or tonality or something other than raw ISO sensitivity there's more to discuss.

Started with a PCjr (haah), upgraded to an SE, then a Performa, then another, a G4, and a MacBook Pro that I'm posting from. Also Win 3.1 through 7, NextStep 3.3, Rhapsody DR2, BeOS 5, Haiku, and a few other odds and ends in VMWare.

44.080/46.233/48.631/1.866 ms from NYC on TW.

It's LTE so it should theoretically be global. Slide-out keyboard and all the other bells and whistles...1.2GHz dual-core A9, 1GB RAM, microSD slot. Slightly lower-res screen (4" 960x540, still entirely reasonable) but other than that it's entirely adequate. Runs 4.1 stock, I'm sure Cyanogen or AOSP is up to date though.

Specs