Networked Life: 20 Questions and Answers is a new book by Mung Chiang at Princeton which picks a few major features of our modern technological society and explains them in some detail. Doesn't require math, very clearly written and also relatively cheap.

This is just hipster crap - science because its cool or whatever (see maddox's recent discussion).

Also, for the love of god, http://www.parashift.com/c++-faq-lite/using-namespace-std.html

(in this case, I guess its OK, but can we stop putting that globally?)

Crore is a counting number i should say. 1 crore of something is 10 million of that something, not 1 crore INR = 10 million USD.

1 crore is 10 million, so this comes out to be 875 million USD roughly.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/with-16-petaflops-and-1-6m-cores-doe-supercomputer-is-worlds-fastest/ says that livermore spent 250 mil on sequoia (which seems like a bit of a lowball to me, given the K computer's price at 1 billion), so throwing a lot more money at the problem would seem to give better performance.

Aside from cracking open a window, some tech is designed to withstand this sort of conditions.

My Casio GZ'one Ravine 2 has (from casio's website):
High Temperature MIL-STD 501.5 Procedure I 85C 96hrs
Low Temperature MIL-STD 502.5 Procedure I -25C 96hrs

among other things (theres also a Casio smartphone called the commando which has the same test results).

Panasonic's stuff (Toughbooks) is also designed to deal with high temperatures: http://www.panasonic.com/business/toughbook/why-heat-resistant-laptops.asp (140 F operating, 160 F non-operating)

So on, so forth - you can find versions fo a lot of devices (for a price premium) designed to work or be left in rather high operating temperatures

Isn't this roughly BMW's track trainer? http://www.autoblog.com/2007/12/11/bmw-330i-races-around-the-top-gear-track-without-a-driver/

Seems like it did impressively well on the top gear test track, but a 330i is much slower than a TTS... (Clarkson does mention you can fit it to a M3 though)

USB seems inane and insane for that level of data. How redundant is this 24 tb of data as well? Running it through a data de duplicator (possibly to reduce storage requirements depending on the type of data) and then a tape drive or raid array may be a cheaper and more time effective option.

Most medical doctors are MD's (or something similar), not PhD's. If your local PhD in philosophy is prescribing you pills, chances are you shouldn't take them.

http://www.kotaku.com.au/2010/11/why-do-videogames-cost-so-much/ is somewhat relevant - its not just the publisher's faults, its your government's faults as well.

if its on steam, chances are its better than the alternatives (origins, blizzard's always online thing, etc).

Bioware had "leave the dvd in" if you played Dragon Age, but now that a lot of people are using laptops and dvd drives may be disappearing in the forseeable future (see: retina mbp, mb air), an online option is desirable. (they even were relatively reasonable on selling used copies - just that you wouldn't get some DLC which was desirable)

Good luck with your not buying into DRM - its not going to wither away and die, because frankly, not enough people care. I'll still buy a good game so long as it works and isn't overly intrusive.

Uh...: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automotive_industry#Top_vehicle_manufacturing_groups_.3Cby_volume.3E (which does put Toyota #1 and GM #2)

If you had bothered to read the article you copy-pasted that from, "Volkswagen has retained its place as the number one car company in the world, according to the Forbes Global 2000 companies survey.
The report ranks the world’s biggest companies across an equal weighting of sales, profits, assets and market value. The result is a company ranking in order of size, with 66 countries represented in the mix." (http://news.drive.com.au/drive/motor-news/rankings-worlds-biggest-car-companies-20120420-1xc14.html)

Think of the brands VW owns versus the brands that GM owns.

Well, we have the zero punctuation take: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/1569-Final-Fantasy-XIII

FF13 was too linear and the battle system runs itself (auto battle everything)

Its not just HuffPo, but other sites as well (see: http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=ranker_sucks)

A rooted android device or even an ipad + 3g (possibly rooted) would fulfil this with a keyboard case.

Motorola atrix is also another option, but your main concern when traveling is room and you cant fit an ultralight laptop (thinkpad x series, macbook air, netbook, etc.) you probably need a bigger bag or to talk to other business travelers on how they're packing (cause you're doing it wrong)