And indeed, some of us are. If you drive an electric car and live near a nuclear power plant, you might be one of them.

Ah, that brings back some memories. Thanks :)

Ad hominem attacks are tedious, so for the sake of argument let's take it as given that I'm both. Now that we've got that out of the way, I'll ask again: how are Uber's high prices ripping anyone off? Does anyone actually pay those prices? If so, why? Is Uber pointing a gun to their heads?

I've always kind of wanted a bank account with built-in credit-card functionality. No overdraft fees possible, rather you pay credit-card style interest when your balance is negative, and earn bank-style interest when your balance is positive.

Of course, this is unlikely to be offered for just that reason... to the banks, overdraft fees are a profit center :(

In a particularly lame move, somebody put Bing search into Thunderbird. When searching your emails, you can also get irrelevant web search results via Bing. What the use case is for that I have no idea.

Nobody is being forced to pay Uber's prices. There are still taxicabs in Sydney, are there not?

You don't give Apple programmers enough credit -- the USB transfer routine includes a surreptitious Bitcoin mining thread. That's how Apple builds up its cash reserves.

Is the latter action illegal? If so, under what circumstances?

Off the top of my head, I can't think of any particularly compelling reason why company X should be required to permit a competitors' software to make use of the company X's servers.

Personally, I miss the ohnoitsbennett tag that used to get applied to all his submissions. I still tag his walls-of-text with it, but I think it's been blacklisted along with most of the other fun tags.

Well, it might help indirectly. Every hour the developers don't spend trying to debug the OS is an hour they can instead spend on making the user interface work better. I suspect that a lot of mediocre products appear simply because there were so many showstopping bugs to chase down that there was never any time to smooth out the rough edges.

If there's any justice in the world, Keurig will be getting a lot of post-Christmas returns this year, when people realize that the coffee machine they just upgraded to is incompatible with most of the coffee they wanted to make.

When polled on this question, the number one response from consumers was: "What is DRM?"

Agreed, but the hope/expectation is that as the user base grows, the valuation will become less volatile, making it more useful as a currency.

San Francisco already did this. Almost all the masonry buildings in SF have been reinforced since the 1989 quake, and now the rules are being tighened on wood buldings. If you've been in an older building in SF, you've probably seen huge diagonal steel braces. That's what it looks like.

All new big buildings meet very tough earthquake standards. The bridges and freeways have been beefed up in recent years. Overpass pillars are about three times as big as they used to be. Two elevated freeways were torn down after one in Oakland failed in the 1989 quake. The entire eastern span of the Bay Bridge was replaced with a new suspension bridge. The western span was strengthened, and there are now sliding joints, huge plates of stainless steel, between the roadway and the towers.