Confirmation of the death isn't a problem, there are all sorts of efficient ways to do that. There are other reasons that people aren't being reported as deceased.

One of my very close friends died recently and the reason none of his Facebook friends have filed is because Facebook will delete all of his status updates. Maybe it is painful to see his name or face pop up every once in a while on my Facebook page, but it's much more painful to see all of our conversations on his wall get deleted because of Facebook policy.

Oh, for anyone who wonders - we have video from a sonogram that distinctly shows the kid scratching at his groin at around 7 months gestation. It's time we dragged that out and showed it to everyone again. LMAO

You need to put that on Youtube. For progress!

I have a long distance relationship, several states over, so I don't get to see my girlfriend often. This summer I'm moving out to be with her, so last Christmas I tried to make things go extra well. To prepare for Valentines day, when I knew I wouldn't be able to be there, I hid ten slips of paper all over her room with passwords on them. I gave her clues to find the next one each time she found one, in the form of little riddles. She's found all of them now, and I'm about to send her a box with a microcontroller/display that won't open without the passwords. Inside are some personal things, and candy, a letter, etc.

I was inspired by another project that was location-locked. It had a GPS and merely displayed the distance to the unlock location when a button was pressed.

FYI, fly-ball governor.

Of course the format ages, but what formats are there that can't be converted? Just the modern ones. If I wanted an mp3 of a Led Zeppelin song and you sent me a wav I wouldn't be the least bit upset, because there are a myriad of conversion apps out there. In ten years a digital copy doesn't have coffee stains or torn pages. Even if its format is proprietary someone will reverse engineer it, so sorry, that argument doesn't hold up.

Most tech is useless after 3 or 4 years, let alone ten years.

Most data, however, is not. That's what we're talking about with e-books. So long as there isn't any outrageous DRM the book can last as long as you want it to.

Sounds about as useful as a CueCat.

Nobody is in a library with 20 shelves in front of them. Computers do it better.

Get creative with parts. Use cardboard or sheet plastic for the circuit board material (careful not to melt the plastic with soldering irons). Use a cereal box, or some other small box, or PVC for the project box. Get the kids to bring creative parts from home.
 
  Build a metal detector.
 
  The Electronic Goldmine and others offer assorted parts in an unsorted box for cheap. You could buy bulk parts like this and have the kids sort them (make them learn how to measure components in the process). As a warning, sometimes you get a lot of what you don't need and very little of what you do. Resistors and capacitors can be combined to get what you need most of the time, but not always the case with the ICs. Get those from Mouser or Digikey. Read Make Blog for ideas, they're good. Recently they linked to a guy using a sponge and ferric chloride to etch circuit boards cheap, easy and fast.

What will I get if I pick fast and cheap? If lack of "good" means that a few extra rockets blow up then all we need is a decent escape module on top of the cheap rocket. Sounds good to me.

Someone hasn't ever watched footage of a rocket blowing up.

You first!

Good Fast Cheap (Pick two)

Where? What kind? What purity? I've never seen any nearly that cheap, unless you meant gram, not kilogram. I wonder if maybe you're talking about the lowest possible quality with some serious contamination.

There are a significant amount of Sierra and LucasArts style new-release games coming from hobbyists using Adventure Game Studio. There are only a couple of re-makes of classics, but if you just appreciate adventure games in general give it a try. Windows only? I remember someone there talking about Linux games a while back but don't know what the support is like for that.

I know this is totally off-topic, but my parents also claim to have had huge roaming areas when they were kids, and they also restricted mine a lot. How come you do that, knowing that you did alright? Do you live in a high-crime area, or maybe are afraid of kidnappings?

One of my other problems was that my dad was always trying to do things for me. I.E. not letting me use power tools. Even when I was as old as 18-19 he'd try to do stuff like that for me. I feel like a lot of it hurt my development as an independent.

Left out of the story was the gamers' unusual tendency to repeatedly crouch and stand over the top of victims, rather than drag them to safety.