Nice.

Amen! (in lieu of mod points)

Hopefully they keep trying to outdo each other; they've got plenty more money to give away.

http://www.geek.com/geek-cetera/bill-gates-loses-worlds-richest-title-after-giving-28-billion-to-charity-1324573/
28 > 1.
And that was 2011.

...please check out the jet plane on a treadmill that I'm auctioning off - free shipping if it gets airborne!

From TFA: "...his reign lasted just 26 months and ended with his death on the battlefield at Bosworth in 1485. He was given a low-key burial in the church of Greyfriars in the center of Leicester, but the location of his grave was lost when the building was demolished in the 16th century. A team of historians, though, were determined to find the body. Archaeologists used ground-penetrating radar on the site of the former priory, and were able to locate the skeleton beneath a parking lot after only a few days of digging."

Google didn't write the pre-ios6 Maps app, Apple did. It just used the Google Maps API.

Steve, is that you?

sitting in my basement; not the pretty white ones, but the brown ones they send you when you need to send your poorly-produced, unreliable, overpriced, first-generation Macbook Pro back for AppleCare service. I got tired of sending it in, so I had a few extra boxes.

The two standard printing materials for the RepRap family of printers (and their descendants, like the MakerBot) are the biodegradable PLA, and standard petroleum-based ABS. PLA will degrade over time, but only under certain environmental conditions; it's unlikely to fall apart in normal use (most industrial thermophilic composting processes run at pretty high temperatures (60C and up). I guess you probably shouldn't use it to print an industrial composter.

ABS is ABS, and whatever you make with it will be around forever, so print your PLA composter with this instead.

Ha ha ha.

The language in the book is an essential part of the storytelling. I generally don't like that sort of thing either; however, Hoban used it very intentionally as a pacing device, as well as to reveal things to the reader that the limited narrator didn't understand. It's very effective, although it does take some getting used to.

Also, the late, great Russell Hoban's post-apocalyptic masterpiece, Riddley Walker. And if you want non-fiction, I really enjoyed In the Shadow Of the Moon, part of Francis French and Colin Burgess's People's History of Spaceflight series. And then there is always SkyMall.

Seconded. Murakami is fantastic.

There is a lot of work being done (and maybe some field trials already) on short-range vehicle-to-vehicle communications systems . I'm not sure if there are plans to integrate pedestrian nodes into these networks, but it's certainly a possibility.

The motivation behind this is not to protect oblivious smartphone users, but for people with visual impairments who have traditionally relied on engine noise to identify approaching vehicles at low speed. The smartphone users will still be in danger, because they're invariably wearing headphones too.