First by rank (13 buckets) then by suit (4 buckets). I can typically sort a well-shuffled deck of bridge cards in about 85 seconds. That's far from the world record, but significantly faster than most people can do.

Specifically, Algeria, Iraq, Yemen and Myanmar are known to still sell gasoline containing TEL at the pump.

In the 1920's and 30's, "ethyl" (leaded gasoline) was the more expensive grade. By the 1940s, virtually all gasoline contained TEL and manufacturers designed engines with higher compression ratios to take advantage of the fuel. So, by the 1970s, unleaded gasoline required more expensive octane boosters to work in modern engines.

Today, lead additives for vehicle fuel are banned in almost all countries.

Under the proposal, the donor of the egg would have no parental rights. That is logical, since mtDNA carries very little information, compared to nuclear DNA.

There is no genetic modification involved so there is no "intellectual property" vested in the DNA of the offspring. From that standpoint, this is no different from conventional in-vitro fertilization.

Not everyone accepts the assumption that "wants" are infinite. They are certainly variable and, in many cases, conditioned.

I was in design engineering for 30 years and had about ten managers over the course of my career. One of them was excellent. Of course, he got promoted...

Ah, lead. Sugar of Lead (lead acetate) has been a popular artificial sweetener since Roman times. If your ancestors were anything more than peasants, they drank it.

My great-grandfather graduated from Milwaukee High School in 1878. He first attended a "normal school" with the intent of becoming a teacher, but found the opportunity to learn stenography and to operate a writing machine. The Scholes & Glidden machine had been developed in Milwaukee in 1874, and the manufacturers set up schools to teach students how to use them. These were very temperamental machines and were tricky to use. (At that time, you could not see the text that had been typed without lifting the platen). His first professional job was as a type-writer for the Winchester Repeating Arms Company in New Haven, Connecticut. Meanwhile, his long-time pen-pal in Chicago had learned how to use the machines at her father's office. They began exchanging letters in type-written form, which must have been considered, for that time, as high-tech as any Internet romance would have been in 1995. They were married in 1883. My great-grandfather and his brother-in-law went into business together, selling the machines across the Midwest.

Beat Gates and Osberg at duplicate bridge and you'll have something to talk about.

This is not news. Natural gas lines leak--they always have. It has nothing to do with whether the utility is public or private. It has nothing to do with US politics. Natural gas utilities all over the world operate their systems at low pressure to minimize the leakage and fix significant problems when they're detected. It sounds like Duke students discovered something that civil engineers have known for 100 years.

Interesting. No, DEC did not ever pay a dividend. The IPO was 375,000 shares at $22/share on 18 August 1966. I'm not able to compare that to later market caps, since I don't have a record of all the subsequent secondary offerings and splits. DEC's market cap peaked in 1987 at $26.6 billion. It fell dramatically from there, to $6.7 billion in December 1991. The sale of the company to Compaq for about $9.6 billion ($2 billion cash plus stock) was announced on 26 January 1998.

To an investor, the value of a share is the discounted sum of all future dividends. It is expected that companies will not pay dividends while they are in their growth phase. That does not detract from the valuation; it enhances it. However, if the company NEVER intends to pay any dividends, then one would purchase a share only with the intent of selling it to some greater fool. That is speculation, not investment.

Yes, that is the usual course of successful companies. The difference in this case is that Amazon's president, chairman and CEO all seem to be oblivious to the inevitable transition.

Amazon went public 16 years ago. Any capital still invested in them at this point can no longer be considered "venture capital".

The article does not really address the end-game. Will Bezos ever allow the company to return value to the shareholders or is he truly "not wired that way"? There is no value in holding shares in a company that NEVER shows a profit. Shareholders can have lots of fun trading them, as long as the promise--or at least the hope--of future earnings is out there, but that's just a "greater-fool" game that usually ends badly.