Hearing aids are still crazy overpriced, but perscription glasses can be easily purchased online for $10 or even for free. Before I got my LASIK a few years ago I got a new pair two of glasses for free every few months using coupon codes from Goggles4U or clearly contacts.

Nuclear. If it can power a sub for years, it can power a station on Europa.

It seems a lot more feasible to me to build a permanent off-world habitat on Europa beneath the water, than to build one on Mars. The ice and water would shield you from the radiation normally absorbed by Earth's atmosphere and ionosphere. You can extract oxygen easily from water using known processes. And there is no need to MAKE water since it is everywhere. Furthermore, we are already well-versed in making underwater habitats and the habitat would be easily testable here, so there are fewer unknowns.

You would not even need to sink the habitat very deep to protect from the radiation, it could achieve neutral boyancy somewhere in the middle of the water column, and then rotate itself in the water to achieve 1G via centripetal forces.

Facebook explicitly says they do not allow you to delete your account. They simply DO NOT ALLOW IT. And all data you post on facebook is theirs, they claim ownership of it. So no wonder they don't allow you to delete it.

Google allows you to delete your account and tells you exactly what happens when that occurs. http://www.pcworld.com/article... . And they claim ownership of nothing.

The companies attitude toward privacy and accountability are so different it is not even in the same hemisphere.

- Google lets you export ALL OF YOUR DATA, 100%, in full, in open formats.

- Google lets you close your account and delete it, leaving no traces. This includes Google Plus and all posts shared.

- The majority of Google's services offer open APIs and follow open standards and allow third party integrations.

- Heck, many of their products they fully open source and give to the whole community, including Chrome, ChromeOS, Android, GWT, etc

Compare this to facebook. You can't export anything out of facebook in any kind of open format. You can not easily delete your account, even when you do your pictures and images remain on other people's accounts. Facebook offers very few open APIs to integrate with it, they want you to instead write apps that run ON the platform so they can control and monetize everything you create.

The Model S has a 300 mile range so not sure why a ~70 mile round trip would be a problem, or even your quoted 300 mile max trip.

As far as someone who can do work - you need to remember that because it has no gas engine at all, there is little to no matience needed on a Model S. There is no oil to change, nothing to inspect since it monitors itself. You don't need yearly checkups to maintain warranty. And if anything DOES go wrong, and there is no local service, they send a Tesla Ranger TO YOU, not the other way around.

Unless you subscribe to unblock-us or unotelly or one of the other DNS VPN providers, then you can watch all of that in Canada as well.

It's called AppOps. Was in Android hidden, then removed, but still ships in standard Cyanogenmod.

If the Moto 360 is halfway as capable and slick-looking as has been shown thus far, any iWatch is going to have trouble keeping up.

The 360 is the first smart watch that I would not be embarrassed wearing at a client meeting or in the boardroom. With the full OLED screen, customize-able bands (metallic and non-metalic, black, silver, colored...), Moto has a winner with this product.

I already replied to this above

- If you get 1% back in points on your CC, that means a 0.5% interchange fee for merchants, tops, due to point writeoffs.

- If you think that lowering interchange fees by 0.5% will result in 0.5% lower prices at the till on average across the industry, and not just more profit swallowed on average, I have a bridge to sell you.

That is not how insurance or any of these points systems work. They are value-shifted based on the idea that only a small percentage of insurance is cashed, that a lot of points go unredeemed, etc. IE, your 1% cash back would turn into 0.5% reduction in interchange fees saved.

Furthermore, do you HONESTLY expect Walmart to reduce all your prices by 0.5% if their interchange fees go down by 0.5%? If you do then I have a nice bridge for sale.

Expect your travel insurance, extended warranty protection, points, cash back, and other credit card features to dry up rapidly if interchange fees are reduced. These perks that have been built up over the years are not free, they are paid for by interchange fees.

The majority of cities don't even have "taxi medallions" so I think you are looking at a limited set. The only cities that have medallions according to wikipedia are Boston, NYC, and Chicago.

There usually is not any said restriction. There is a licensing fee and your service provider has to comply with the regulations, and then you are allowed in.

Now, New York and some cities actually restrict the number of cabs on the street. That, I think, is silly, and is indeed crony-ism.

You are touching on some very, very good points on inflation, and why comp-sci majors should learn more about economics before going all balls-out making a new currency.

The whole idea that BTC can't inflate past a certain point is why it is guaranteed to fail. Fiat currency and inflation **is not bad**, it is in fact good for many reasons when it is under control. You outline one of those reasons above - inflation encourages people to spend money, thus keeping the economy alive. Another reason inflation and fiat currency is required is because the GDP of the planet is not some static sum. Every day the earth spins around, there is another day of work that needs to be quantified. The currency that quantifies that day of work has to come from somewhere. Where does it come from when you can't make more currency? You need to devalue all other existing currency. How do you do this without inflation?