I'm doing a complete makeover of our new house and was shopping around for new roof tiles.
I was pretty surprised to see that there are roof tiles available which do exactly this NOx conversion (http://www.braas.de/dachsteine/frankfurter-pfanne-titanox.html). And I asked myself, who exactly would be the target market? I can't imagine the average home owner paying a premium for this.

You'd be surprised. My health insurance (in Gemany) pays for all homeopathic treatments up to the age of 12, and only for specific treatments after that. The caveat is that the treatment is only paid when prescribed by a certified physician which has had additional training in homeopathy.
Treatments from "natural healers" without medical schooling or certification are not allowed.

I also never understood the MM part of Uru.

How is interaction supposed to be? I ask where I have to go, somebody tells me, and we each go our merry way?

The iMac G5 was the first of the all-in one iMac designs that Apple sold. I got one and still regret it.
It's a good computer - no question about that. But it's frigging LOUD! I took it to the shop, phoned support but it apparently was by design. That's just what happens when you take hot G5 processors and stick them in an inch-thick enclosure. Figures that it took them only half a year to update the line.

School's been a while back, but if I remember correctly, water vapor is a by-product of photosynthesis?

Erm. Could it be that pretty much every media outlet does that? It's not like all the news sites pipe out AP feeds verbatim.

I know the tone on slashdot is more on the humorous side, but seriously, stop belittling this.

After the war, Liberia had no functioning utilities for over 14 years - no sewage system, no water, no electricity, no telephone. Nowhere - not even in the capital!
Without painting a stereotype, Liberians aren't exactly known for their entrepreneurship. This man should really be applauded for what he is pulling up despite difficulties.

I'd argue that the reason that trackballs disappeared from laptops is that trackpads are just so much thinner.

As a trackball user of many, many years I'd like to plug the Kensington Slimblade Trackball http://slimbladetrackball.com./

Best trackball, no, best input device I have ever used. Get this: to scroll, you twirl the trackball along the z axis. Hardware is wonderful, the extra software is crappy but there is no need to install it.

Is this that stupid bill where they wanted to display stop signs before you access pornographiic websites?

As if a stop sign would prevent anybody. This is so very, very brain dead.

For a moment there I almost thought Raskin came back from the grave to criticize the iPhone.

Happy to fuel your fascination, but it was just a typo. Chill.

So, I'm reading here that they convert the XML into proprietary metadata and compress that.

Why not use EXI (Efficent XML Interchange) http://www.w3.org/XML/EXI/ which has been tested as more efficient that gzip and requires less memory to parse? Especially since the XML processing can remain the same, since the nodeset is the same.

Using vim on a Mac keyboard is a pain exactly because the ESC-key is so small.
I'd say that in vim the single most used key is ESC!

Often, when researching into old-ish (70s-80s) cameras and lenses, I stumble on really extensive pages on geocities or some other free service.

The resources we often enough unique and extremely informative. I should have considered mirroring them right then and there - now might be too late.
Is there any chance that the "good" stuff might have been mirrored to archive.org or something like that?