The Aurora Borealis are not "are an electromagnetic phenomena that can adversely affect power grids and communications and navigation systems." They are but an effect of the solar wind, intensified by a solar flare pointed in our direction, interacting with the Earth's magnetic field.

I read most everything online (fiction and non-fiction), so "book" reading these days is dwindling down to next to nothing. There is a book on my nightstand. It is written by an economist. Calling it "non-fiction" is a stretch.

Add my cynical prediction to the list:

• Driverless cars will put suicide bombers out of work.

You're an idiot. G+ is one of the tools people who actually make stuff use to communicate with their peers. It is very relevant to its users. Besides being relatively easy to use, it has one very important characteristic: a decent S/N ratio.

I was pretty young when I first read THGTTG and my vocabulary was still developing. Being an American, I had no idea what a "biro" was at the time. The gist of that section went completely over my head. It wasn't until re-reading that book later in life, with a suitably expanded vocabulary, that the true humor came through. Re-reading those books at that point was like reading them anew.

Why? What do you use? The facebook? (snicker)

One of the tell-tale signs of the quality of a country's democracy in the internet age is the difference in upload versus download bandwidth allocated to the average internet user. Do the people get a voice, or is the internet a receive-only medium?

Cost of living (COL) is one thing... quality of life (QOL) is another. I moved from Colorado to Chicago. I did that because the pay was better and it seemed that the COL was about equivalent based on a number of online COL calculators. What one realizes when one gets here is that the COL for the same QOL is actually quite a bit higher. Now, I feel like I came out ahead, but not as far ahead as I had imagined.

Here's the deal: the COL is based on the average cost of housing, food, energy, transportation, taxes, etc; the stuff that makes up the average household budget. Housing and taxes typically account for the largest factors in COL differences. For Chicago, housing prices includes some real hell-holes, where the likelihood of getting shot is higher than some places in the world we consider war zones. This accounts for a surprisingly large part of the city's south and west sides. Buying a home in a "safe" part of the city is rather expensive, or one lives way out in the suburbs and spends hours and $$$ commuting each day. Overall, the average quality of life for the same income in Chicago is much lower.

So, if you consider moving for money, take into account not just COL but also QOL.

I have yet to see an online COL calculator take both into account. If you know of one, post a link.

10000? Are you sure?

Who knew that PL/I was still a thing? Hell, even IBM is releasing a compiler update for this language. Somehow it is about as popular as D.

Really? For 4W TDP? Versus the top tier Intel i7 @ 47W? It depends on what you are measuring.

In Soviet Russia, Beowulf cluster imagines you!

Some lawyer is going to make a boatload when he organizes the class action lawsuit against CNET and download.com. There's money to be made here.

You no longer hear a skipping record as the needle hits a scratch and bounces out of the track. Or pops and clicks from dust. Or the pop of the needle jumping the groove every other second when you've reached the end of the record.