Yes, a healthy portion of the subsidies could be considered tax breaks and write-offs. Part of the argument is that these tax breaks should not be in place for such a profitable industry in the first place. Our dear friend Wikipedia distills a few research reports that indicate a large percentage of subsidies also went towards credits for "non-conventional fuel generation" which I expect is mostly ehtanol and biodiesel, as well as direct compensation for exploration costs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_subsidies#Allocation_of_subsidies_in_the_United_States

The oil industry receives AT LEAST $10 Billion per year in US subsidies. If you think the government shouldn't be "picking winners and losers" then you should support reform of these.

Florida Man, the world's worst superhero.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdi6E-qzS1c

According to the review, the X1 RAM is soldered onto the motherboard and is not user-modifiable. Do you have a reference somewhere?

You do know that the retina display in the iPhone is designed an manufactured by Samsung, right? The only "innovative" thing Apple did was to lock the supply chain by buying every single one of them, making them unavailable for anyone else until manufacturing capacity ramped up.

The primary question is: why are you trying to do this? Is it to make sure you have an off-site backup in case all of your electronics gear gets stolen? Redundancy can be best covered with extra hard drives.

Another consideration is what kind of photos you are taking. If you're shooting RAW with a modern DSLR, you're going to have images of 20-30MB each. At 300 pictures per day, you could be looking at a data footprint of up to 9GB per day. I don't know what kind of coverage or data plan you have, but in my opinion that's a lot of upload data for a mobile connection. In this case, you may want to consider batch processing the images to a lower resolution before uploading, just to have some record of the images online.

Before everyone chimes in about how you might as well ban Google and Bing too, I think that there is a valid security concern for using Siri when you consider that many people use it for making appointments. Search history is much easier to obfuscate. I can understand if IBM doesn't want Apple to know who it is having "top secret" meetings with.

Here's a cool video showing all known asteroids with a time-lapse revealing the year they were discovered: http://youtu.be/cKT1VGIDEd4?hd=1

The only current-generation one I'm aware of is the Motorola Droid 4, which isn't GSM. Or the Droid 3 which is about 8 months old. I wish the list of options were longer since I prefer physical buttons too.

http://www.gsmarena.com/motorola_droid_3-4036.php
http://www.gsmarena.com/motorola_droid_4_xt894-4418.php

As Anrego says, I'd suggest not actually handing over the domain. Instead, rebuild the site under a new domain while updating key content such as contact links, and then set up an "HTTP 301: permanently moved" redirect to the new site on the new domain. This will transfer your pagerank to the new domain and makes search engines happy. Then, you can keep your email and other domain services under your own control.

Here's a picture of the StarTac, circa 1996: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MotorolaStarTAC.jpg

It, like almost all mobile phones since, has a green button to call (go) and a red button to hang up (stop). I would wager most people have this association.

Yes, but Kinect mocap data is very low quality in comparison to what most studios use for professional production. Also, the skeleton tracking doesn't include rotations of the head, feet or hands. On top of this, it doesn't track props, fingers or faces so it is quite limited. If you watched the video you hear the narrator talking about the Kinect getting them 70% there with lots of tweaking (he specifically mentioned adding head animation). The great advantage with Kinect, of course, is cost.

For high end work, equipment from Vicon or Motion Analysis is the way to go. I use a 24 camera Vicon T160 system daily at Motek Entertainment, which is also where Brekel works. He's developed the plugin for which allows the Kinect to stream skeleton data directly into Motionbuilder.

I had assumed the lesser value of 1440 (HDV) versus the greater (1440p). Mark me as corrected, and pleasantly surprised.

You may be correct in this case since it does seem that 1440p is a different format than what I was describing. However, my referenced format does indeed exist, it's the HDV1080 standard, which is 1440*1080 with pixels at 1.33:1 (anamorphic).