You missed out. Yesterday the Simple Touch went on clearance at Radio Shack for $20, and the one with GlowLight was $30. The scum of the Earth, I mean, eBay resellers, will have cleaned them out by now, unless you get super lucky. I snagged the last regular Simple Touch at my local one for a grand total of $20.97 and I'm going to Nooter it this weekend..

I signed up and proofread a few pages when I saw someone mention this site in the comments a few weeks ago. It's pretty interesting stuff and is mostly intuitive, but there are some tricky corner cases, e.g. hyphenated words that span two lines. Back in the day, publishers were pretty inconsistent about what words were hyphenated (e.g. to-day), and Project Gutenberg is (rightly) adamant that the text maintains the original spelling and hyphenation.

The only thing I completely missed was that I didn't put an extra newline at the top of the page when the first line was the start of a new paragraph. Those instances were found and corrected by the second-round proofreader. There is a third round of proofing, two rounds of formatting, two rounds of post processing, and then an optional "Smooth Reading" round that anyone can do. I've checked out a few of the finished products, and they are much, much better than the naked OCR'd texts of old.

My 60 GB first generation PS3 begs to differ! Just a month ago I was looking through my games and I realized I never played Growlanser 3 (which came in the set with 2, which I played through twice), so I've been going through that one. As a bonus, it takes some of the load off my aging furnace.

Used to be you could get a big bottle of Amoxicillin tablets "for fish" from Amazon for about the cost of a co-pay, and they'd last a lot longer than a prescription. I just noticed today that Amazon pulled all those listings down some time last year, but you can find them elsewhere. So really, is it any wonder we have this problem in the US? Why would people bother spending the time and money to go to a doctor when you can spend a minute online and less money to have a huge bottle of antibiotics shipped to them in a couple days? I've never tried them (I try to avoid medications and other drugs like caffeine as much as possible), but speaking as a frugal person with crappy health insurance I can see the appeal.

Some other senses. Athletes, for example, almost certainly have better sense of balance (equilibrioception) and a better sense of the position their own body (proprioception). If you could augment that, you could become more athletic and graceful. The ability to disable and re-enable certain senses has been mentioned, and that also includes the sense of pain (nociception, which is intertwined with touch but is not the same). There are also internal sensors that tell people they're full, which is something diet pills try to target chemically. But if you could control them via implant, weight loss would be much simpler.

I hadn't heard of this so I looked it up. It turns out that the "Grand Tour" was for Voyager 2, which received gravity assists from Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. It's true that those four won't be in a similar alignment until the next century, but Voyager 1 only received gravity assists from Jupiter and Saturn (and Titan). I haven't done the math or anything, but those two should line up at least a couple times each century (see the Cassini trajectory).

Some dumb, back-of-the-envelope calcs with existing tech: assuming a 50 mN Xenon ion thruster that can run continuously for 3.5 years (NASA's NSTAR did this) spacecraft, right now we can add about 11 km/s to a 500 kg spacecraft per thruster. New Horizons is 478 kg, so I figure 500 kg is a decent guesstimate (it would need a much bigger RTG to run even a single ion thruster for that long, though). Also, New Horizons will be traveling 13 km/s when it reaches the same distance as Voyager 1 with only a Jupiter gravity assist, so even with a less-than-optimal gravity assist I think we can easily beat Voyager 1's speed (turning on the thrusters after the last gravity assist, of course). It would still take us decades to pass it, but we could.

Still, that wouldn't take us to the Oort cloud in any decent amount of time. If we used a different nuclear fuel with a longer half-life we could stretch our ability to power it, but probably at the cost of peak power.

Spending money to get more eyes on the design is not necessarily a bad thing. Okay, it's probably not worth wasting money to start training astronauts (which Mars One is supposedly going to do this year) since we already know how to do that. But design studies tend to build on themselves. For anybody keeping score:

Mars Direct: the original mission to Mars plan by Robert Zubrin, which included a return flight, first developed in 1990 and expanded upon in his book The Case for Mars. Elements of this plan, which Zubrin proposed to replace the full-up, half-trillion dollar, new-development-for-everything Mars mission developed back in 1989, have been incorporated in pretty much every design since then, including Mars One and NASA's Design Reference Mission.

Mars for Less: a modification of Mars Direct that used currently available launchers -- not relying on a Saturn V-class rocket like the original Mars Direct or Falcon Heavy like the others (including a modified Mars Direct). One criticism that came out of this that also applies to Mars Direct is that the estimation of aerobraking was too optimistic.

Mars to Stay: a more generalized policy that says any mission to Mars should plan for permanent settlement, with only an emergency return system. Supposedly there are more concrete designs out there, but they don't seem to be readily available. They seem to advocate going more through the official channels, with the hope that the US Government will pick up the tab. I believe /. had a few discussions about this when Buzz Aldrin spoke in favor of one-way missions. A lot of the latest designs, including Mars One, have picked up and ran with this idea.

Mars One: the project by Dutch entrepreneur Bas Lansdorp. This year they're supposedly going to select 24 astronauts and begin training, and they claim that they'll have 20 of them on Mars by 2033. Note that Zubrin has looked at this, and he is quite doubtful at their ability to raise the necessary funding (which relies heavily on merchandise, advertising, reality TV, etc.).

Those are just the proposals that are getting lots of press, or have impressive people backing them. There are tons of others that are just as far along (only paper designs), e.g. by MarsDrive, DevelopSpace, etc. And of course you also have Inspiration Mars, which is Dennis Tito's plan to send two astronauts on a flyby mission in 2018. Maybe it's hype, but Mars One does feel like it's a bit further along since they aren't waiting on government funding to move ahead with some aspects of their plan. Although, Zubrin's own Mars Society has bitten off small chunks of necessary development, such as the Mars Analogue Research Stations [1] and [2].

This is the important bit. At this point, the only people this type of thing matters to is government and corporate users that handle sensitive information. And even then, social engineering is far easier and more effective.

If it was perfect, then it'd already be law. But it's almost certainly better than what we've got if the point is to stop frivolous lawsuits.

I assume you don't mean "exploiting" because that's exactly the point. I couldn't have said it better myself.

Almost. Of course, this bill is full of weasel words so it'll never pass, and we're still dancing around the two things we need:

1) Software patent reform.
2) Loser pays for every kind of lawsuit, not just patent troll suits. You know, like every other sane country on the planet.

It's not quite the same these days. Cost of Dartmouth:

For the 2001-2002 school year, full-time undergrad tuition was $26,400. Combined tuition, room and board charges was $34,458.

For the 2012-2013 school year, full-time undergrad tuition is $43,782. Undergraduate tuition, room, board, and fees is $57,998.

Not saying it's not worth it for some things, but it's a lot more painful now than it was back then. I went to a public university that was less than $10k/year for tuition, room & board when I started in 2001, now it's over $20k.

They never seem to care when they break stuff, either. I remember a conversation I once had with a rather chipper mail carrier over a beat-up box clearly marked FRAGILE:

Me: Sounds broken.
Delivery guy: Most likely, sir! I'll bet it was something nice though.

And then he stole my dog.