My kingdom for some mod points for this man. Thanks for the historic anecdote. I love tales from the old uni comps like this.

So we should be afraid of the Eiffel tower? Ooo, how about the statues of Moai?

In terms of asking for metal instead of plastic - My car. I outright refuse to drive fiberglass POS when i have any such option. I much prefer having steel parts, steel body, steel frame protecting me and keeping everything running than the plastic replacement pos that wear out and can't drive worth a crap.
That being said, yes i rarely get to buy anything after 1998, why do you ask? :P

Also on the list - My keyboard has a metal core and actual springs, I love my model M.

I like the idea, however your problem is you will always come across trolls on the internet, or people who just like screwing up systems. I would say this percentage on facebook is quite sizable, so i would propose these alterations(to be taken individually or all together or mix/match):

Assign a trustability value to each juror, that is hidden and modified in one of two ways(or both):

Have a pool of pre-existing cases(I'm sure facebook has tons of examples stored in their history banks).
In this situation facebook knows what the outcome should be according to their standards.
Have any prospective juror have a mix of "real" cases and these pre-existing cases mixed together for a trial period, say that first 20 cases they review have an unknown mix. This way they can't guess which ones are appropriate or not.

Use their verdicts on these existing cases to assign a juror a "reliability" factor on their verdicts on the non-example cases in their batch.
That way jurors who don't quite get the rules, or are causing problems, are easily weeded out and their vote counts less in the total verdict weight on their real cases.

Alternatively:
Trustability starts at 50%, so new jurors get half votes.
whenever a juror disagrees with the majority opinion by the polar opposite choice, lower their trustability rating.
Likewise when they are in the majority and it is not a middleground, increase their trustability.

Both of these improvements will lower the odds of troll or mob mentality, even if the control a decent size of the juror pool because their individual votes will be worth less, while being invisible enough to the end-user that they won't be able to tell they aren't being effective.

Why are we having exams that require a calculator?
I did all of calculus and most of linear so far(sufficiently complex equations were done to allow for matlab use, but the test stuff could be done without), and even statistics(yay longhand division!) without one just fine, and most problems can easily be done without them if the proper setup numbers are used.

Also, they are NOT crippled enough. Even when i was in middle school there were program packs to download your textbook onto your ti-83 (I had a ti-80 and i could still type the formulas by hand) so they are still too advanced to not cheat with. And don't tell me you can just wipe the memory, any sufficiently smart cheater would have a ti with a different spare battery. You can find easy DIY's for those online nowadays easy.

Allow a calculator with a 10 key, if they need to graph something, then they should be able to figure it out enough by hand and not need a calculator.

All testing with a graphing calculator does is let more students pass because they don't need to learn, they just need to throw thier notes on the calculator memory. (Yes you'd have references in real life, but the point of most math tests is it's so basic you shouldn't NEED references, it should be the core material you know by heart)

Correct me if i'm wrong but I thought space, while being cold, was relatively shitty at cooling things, since the only way to transfer heat in the relative absence of atoms was radiation which is very slow?

I mean surely i'm not the only engineer who's joked that all they really need to do is catapult and parachute to get over the border, with no need for a parachute if they're launching hard projectiles. I mean the range on old catapults and trebuchets was quite well, and could be scaled as a simple matter of physics.

So I suppose next we might find a tunnel that is one mile down and 40 miles under the border to breach the "castle walls" of the united states?

Umm, why a kinect? Any camera could give you basic visuals, and likewise an IR rangefinder would be much more useful at avoiding colissions on your path, the gps gives you position data.

I just don't see how this is new

It is well worth the $100/year to shell out for an online webspace to store your photos if you want to keep them for life.
10 gb is nothing, just setup a background process to sync and limit it's upload bandwidth, and it'll do it over a few days/weeks, no matter how big your file is.

That way even if your external dies, or gets stolen, you have that ace in the hole.

Peace of mind, especially for valuable memories, is worth the money, plus it has the added benefit of giving you a way to share photos with friends/family easily. Plus any other things you want to do with some webspace.

The reason i recommend buying a full webspace somewhere rather than dedicated backup utilities is because you can normally get more storage/cheaper, and have a little better direct control over your data, with the added convenience of access through http!

This is then foiled when pirates spend $10-20 on a pair of tinted glasses that filter out red light.
I've always thought lasers, while useful, are a very bad countermeasure to human eyesight, being as they are very narrow spectrum.

Next!

Touch keyboards cannot keep speed with physical keyboards due to a lack of tactile feedback, space requirements, and hand-strain when typing due to jamming your finger into a solid surface repeatedly (guess its not much different than laptop crappy keyboards, but still). That's assuming you've overcome the software limitation of slow processing that plagues most touch keyboards.

That being said, they will probably replace keyboards for applications(such as mobile phones) where a keyboard would be a waste and inefficient use of space while not being very effective anyway.

But in a laptop? God no unless you're going for lightweight style rather than a useful work space.

Disclaimer: Typed on my model-m.

Now imagine if they can't see the runway.
If they're told to land on runway 24, and they're going by instruments oriented 24, and suddenly the runway is 25, they'll be shooting off it after too long.
Likewise, if they're told to land on runway 25, but they see 24 painted on the ground, they might be confused.

Basically, i'm betting the change is because they have to go by the RIGHT designation due to instrument assisted landings where visibility is poor, and therefore are updating the visual designations so there is no cognitive dissonance

Ok, i'll give you that maybe the top 20% of that money could be fluff for people with inflated salaries, but that still leaves 12 million.

You're talking a website that uses roughly 50 terabits of bandwidth a month, and that's not cheap consumer level bandwidth but corporate expensive bandwidth. We'll be generous and say they get a good deal and it's only 100k/year. Now we have the actual hardware.

Wikipedia is a relatively large system that has very good response time, so you're talking a nontrivial server setup
So considering failure rate and expansion of systems, since their usage is probably only going to go up, i wouldn't be surprised to see them sink a few million into regular maintenance of those server farms, such as building rent, cooling, and the system operators who run the darn things will prob add an extra mil onto it, again being generous.

So we've already located around 4 million of the roughly 12 million in non-fluff.

Keep in mind they have server locations on different continents.

Now lets add in the required overhead for a corporation, again we'll be conservative here and say they only have a couple layers plus accounting for various countries in operation. That'll easily be a million or two. Of course the buildings and support staff will probably be at least another million.

So we're up to 7.

We've covered basic site maintenance, basic corporate overhead, and basic connectivity.
Keep in mind these numbers are just for wikipedia, ignoring everything else the wikimedia foundation does.
And keep in mind, these numbers are ultra-conservative, without any expansion or growth, and ignoring staffing for multiple languages, and a larger legal department, etc etc.