As a professional car hacker who's spent years reverse engineering automotive embedded systems and writing the software you speak of I take offense to your statement!

iPod movies are a great way to pass the time on airplanes, or on layovers in airports. I always take the AV cable when I travel so I can hook it up to the TV when I get to the hotel room.

A friend of mine invited me to linkedin by using my personal email address and lo and behold I started getting a ton of spam relating to owning a business.

Never EVER EVER type your (or a friends') email address in to a website no matter how reputable they seem.
They will change their privacy policy the second they decide to make a buck.

And I hope the linkedin people go to hell because now that email address is about useless.

Back when I was in high school my father was the chairman of the historical society in town and someone had at one time donated a pretty large moon rock to the museum.

We looked in to selling it because the interest of the money in the bank would pay all the museums bills indefinitely.

Turns out...

NASA is the only place that can verify the authenticity of a moon rock. They would not guarantee that they would give it back. A moon rock is a national treasure. A national treasure can not be owned so it can't be legally sold.

What's funny is I had no idea of the potential value of the small object we had in our house. The rock was almost the size of a small lemon.