In 1970, gasoline cost 35Â/gallon($1.65 in 2011 dollars). The OPEC crisis caused prices to more than double by 1980, but accelerated inflation meant that the cost rose to $2.03 in 2011 dollars. By 1990, gasoline hit $1 ($1.57 in 2011 dollars). Fast forward to today, and the average US price is $3.27. In other words, after adjusting for inflation gasoline is roughly twice as expensive as it has been historically. When you factor in the increased cost of high-tech cars and a sluggish economy, it's not surprising to see reduced demand.

I know that the US has long resisted a shift to SI measurements, but since when does JPL measure things in jelly donuts?

For the sake of argument (and because I like round numbers), let's assume that a diver needs about 1L of oxygen per minute on average. The amount of oxygen in seawater varies by salinity, pressure and temperature. Assuming 35 g/kg salinity (most likely less in costal areas), 2 atmospheres of pressure (equivalent to a diving depth of 10 m) and nice 20 C water, you're looking at an oxygen level of about 11 ml/L. Consequently, you'd need to process 92.59L of sea water each minute to extract 1L of oxygen. Heaven help you as you surface, because skimming along a meter below the surface would require the system to process almost twice as much water. [in fairness, oxygen concentrations increase as the water temperature decreases, but the difference between 20C and 0C water is only about 30%.] So there you have it: Your face-mounted breathing system would be a terrifying water vacuum machine that hovers only inches from your noggin, sucking 1.5L of sea water and gunk per second through a tiny mouth-mounted system. I'll leave someone else to calculate the energy density required of the 5 x 5 cm fuel cell that has to power this magical device...

You have obviously never configured an exception table.

The credit card company charges the merchant about 4% to accept a premium credit card, and the merchant pays that fee with your money. They give you a quarter of the discount back as a "reward" and you think you're gaming the system. Just pay cash, especially at small businesses who pay the highest rates.

You're missing the point. Eventually, the incandescent bulbs installed in low use areas of my home will fail. At that point, I will be forced to purchase a more expensive replacement.

Most of the heavily used areas in my home have already been retrofitted with CFL bulbs, but there are a few places where traditional incandescents make sense - the closet under the stairs, the furnace room and the basement storage room are all excellent candidates for cheap incandescent bulbs. In each case, the light is only turned on for a couple of hours each year and the cost of replacing those bulbs with LED or CFL equivalents far outstrips the potential energy savings pver the next few decades.

The 4 year old was actually pretty smart. She figured out how to open the door. It's not her fault that the vehicle was moving and she didn't have the life experience or cognitive reasoning skills to realize that it was a bad thing to do. That's why child locks were invented.

Company introduces new version of an established form factor, except slightly faster. Not really worthy of mention. The disruptive (or potentially disruptive) products are the ones /. should be covering -- like the tiny new laptop chargers from finsix (complete with built-in USB port so it can charge your phone at the same time). Let's hope for something extremely clever to come out of the upcoming CES show. I'm not holding my breath, though; we may have a decade of iterative improvements in tablet tech ahead of us before the next big hardware shift.

England, obviously. Around here, you're more likely to find a gaggle of Schreiners, Schusters, Bauers and Maurer.

Actually, I suspect that tapping the mic would yield far more useful intelligence. After all, the camera will simply capture hundreds of hours of your poorly lit head and glazed eyes. The mic, on the other hand, will capture every single conversation in the room.

Umm. Malwarebytes is a *removal* tool that doesn't offer real-time virus scanning. It's only useful after the machine is infected. It scares me when a "how-to" post has only 4 points, and one of them is so blisteringly wrong that it makes you suspect the OP doesn't actually know how to drive a computer.

A $1 incandescent bulb that lives in the downstairs storage room or closet of my house will only get used 2-3 hours a year at most. With a little luck, it will last a decade or two. There is no rational reason to replace it with a CFL or LED.

In the year leading up to the termination of the Xserve line, Apple sold 42,414 units. They were a money-losing niche product.

Umm. Dude. I think you meat to leave this little manifesto in the comment section of the Toronto Sun.