A lot of cities have an all-red time. And it does reduce the number of accidents for a few years, although the effect deteriorates over time as drivers acclimatise.

Most cities are installing magnetic sensors at intersections to reduce "stupid stoplights", as you put it. That's why those "push to walk" buttons are becoming ubiquitous. But it's expensive to tear up pavement, so it's only generally done when other road work is done.

Short term studies show that increasing the length of the yellow light decreases accidents, but longer term studies show that the effect disappears over time. As drivers acclimatise to long yellows, they run them more often, which is a dangerous practice.

Actually, Firefox has done a lot to improve addon compatibility. They now have a bot that checks the API calls of all addons in their repository and automatically marks those that don't use any changed API's.

I used to leave Firefox 2 open with hundreds of tabs on Linux for months at a time. Firefox 3 forced me to restart it every week or so. However, it has worked great for me since Firefox 7, and 8 appears to be even better.

Once Chrome gets the breadth of plugins that Firefox has, it'll be no better than Firefox.

Modern Firefox is virtually as fast as Chrome and actually uses less memory than Chrome. `The problem is that many Firefox extensions leak memory and really slow Firefox down. The reason that Chrome's plugins don't is that Chrome plugins simply aren't allowed to do a lot of the things that Firefox extensions do.

It's no surprise that those black people you've met in Silicon Valley are exceptional. Not only have they learned the skills necessary to break into the IT department, they've also overcome the cultural barriers put up by their own community, and any institutional racism that still exists. Pretty much anybody that makes it through all of those three filters is going to be exceptional.

Paradoxically, the answer is more industrialization, not less. History shows that pollution reaches a maximum for a country around when GDP per head reaches about $10,000. Below that number, citizens care more about the fundamental basic needs, and would rather have more money than a cleaner environment. As the citizenry gets richer, they start to care more about the environment they live in and demand that their government does something about it, and are willing to sacrifice some income to achieve it.

Luckily, China can take advantage of technological process, and will likely never be as bad as countries that industrialized earlier. No place ever has been or ever will be as polluted as London was in the late 1800s.

It's hard to beat the Motofone F3 for "simple, elegantly designed, work-as-advertised, and constructed with quality". It's indestructible, the battery lasts forever and it's dirt cheap. It was designed to be used by people who can't read, so it uses a really annoying icon menu system. And it really sucks for text messages. But you just want a phone, right? Engadget calls it the "zombie apocalypse survival phone" (mostly because of it's 2 week+ battery life).

You've just turned me from a 3d hater into a 3d lover. I'm not a big fan of 3d, but shaky cam is even worse. Thanks!

Actually, a lot of people who play farmville DON't like the game. They feel trapped and socially obligated to help their friends out. That's why Farmville is evil. It's OK for those who like the game, but for those who don't but still play, it's pure evil.

By the same measure, Civ V is partly evil. I love the game, but dragging at work because of "one more turn" hitting 4AM is just nasty.

Which just goes to show you how useless those little boxes are.

Sure, Ritalin is a stimulant, if you don't have ADHD. But if you do have ADHD, Ritalin acts more like a depressant. That's one of the differentiators between true ADHD and normal hyperactivity.

And yes, alcohol is technically a depressant, but unless you're living in a cave you know that alcohol can have effects that are very similar to those of stimulants.