If it was as easy as you make it sound, the Forbes 400 would be full of the 5th and 6th generations of 19th century industrialists.

There are 0 Carnegies, 0 Crockers, 0 Flaglers, 0 Morgans, 0 Stanfords, and 0 Vanderbilts. There is 1 Rockefeller.

There are a few 1st generations of mid 20th century industrialists, like Waltons, but history shows they won't be on the list in 100 years.

Shoplifting a loaf of bread is a misdemeanor which California's 3 strikes doesn't cover. Prop 36 only covered non-violent felonies.

Prop 36 didn't change the penalty for a two strike offender that shoplifted a loaf of bread.

While the electoral college margin seems large, It's still smaller then normal. Since Alaska and Hawaii became states, this is the 6th closest, and two that were closer had electoral votes split 3 ways. The closer ones were both of Bush Jrs, Carter, Nixon, and Kennedy.

Since 1960, the mean electoral votes for the victor is 382 and the median is 367

If the swing states were fair coins (50/20)

If I had a 50/20 fair coin, I could make a lot of money.

Ray Kroc sold restaurant equipment, which made him enough money that he could pay 2.7 million to buy McDonalds.

Walmart was Sam Walton's 3rd store brand. The first he was a franchisee, and was so successful that his license wasn't renewed. He then bought a store, and was very successful. Walmart was founded after that.

The Iowa Electronic Markets put Obama at a 74.9% chance. These are the people who put money with their predictions. http://iemweb.biz.uiowa.edu/graphs/graph_Pres12_WTA.cfm

The two largest parades in the country, the Rose Parade and the Macy's parade both take place on streets that are 60 feet wide, which isn't nearly wide enough for the shuttle. The only route that would have been wide enough for both the shuttle and a lot of spectators would have been a freeway, which would have incurred significant risk getting the shuttle onto the freeway.

Even without the ticker tape treatment, a million people still viewed it along the route.

You should have a public figure (eg) fan account.

Unity is unusably slow on my netbook. Gnome 3 is fine.

Turn by turn navigation. (New to the iPhone!)

The computer does give turn by turn navigation on the ship

There's a really simple way to stop the WinRAR evaluation period notice.

When curiosity starts driving, it will leave JPL written in morse code in the sand. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Curiosity_wheel_pattern_morse_code.png

This is an opinion piece in the New York Times. The views are those of David K. Shipler and not the New York Times. The NYT often runs opinion pieces that their editors do not personally agree with.

The new GLONASS signal is CDMA, so FDMA will slowly be phased out.