It's true that aluminum is the most profitable of residential recyclable resources. This is so well known that every evening when we put the trash out, a fleet of recyclers/looters make their way through our neighborhood in the dead of night and remove every single scrap of aluminum from all our recycling trash bins and recycle it directly. Waste Management then comes in the morning and collects all the paper / plastic / cardboard and has to do something with it. And we're surprised the programs are losing money?

This just seems like another gimmick to inflate the price. This book actually uses less resources to make than a standard paperback, so you'd think it should cost less, right? But no, it costs more!

"The mini versions of Mr. Green’s novels — “Looking for Alaska,” “An Abundance of Katherines,” “Paper Towns” and “The Fault in Our Stars” — will be sold for $12 each,"

Take 'The Fault in Our Stars' which they are offering in this tiny less-expensive-to-make format for $12!! What a deal! The hardback is currently about $12, the paperback about $7.50 and the kindle format is $10. So basically a hardback price with a paperback production cost.

I remember one time a friend asked me to help her figure out some website and pointed me to her macbook. I've been doing computer stuff more or less since there were computers, and it took me a couple minutes to figure out how to "click" the mouse. The macbook had removed the physical mouse button below the track pad, which was no problem for me, I just needed to hard tap on the track pad like on every other touchpad I'd ever used. Except that didn't do a damn thing. I'm sure most of you know this, but you had to apply about three pounds of force to the entire track pad to discover the entire thing was the button. This is the same company that would only give you a single mouse button because multiple mouse buttons would confuse users. You know what's more confusing than two buttons? No buttons.

So what, you ignore the entire ChromeOS part of my post? Chromebooks outsold MacBooks last year and ChromeOS has a presence far greater than a rounding error and is also increasing every year. But Google should probably just... what? Encourage everyone but Apple, Microsoft and Samsung to invent their own stylus tech so there can be 50 competing standards? Get all their ChromeOS vendors to license the tech from one of those three companies who each have a reputation for not licensing? Just give up? Develop their own from scratch? Or maybe... I don't know... get all the people who don't have proprietary stylus tech but together make up the vast majority of PC sales to pool their resources so they aren't all left out? I don't know why I'm even explaining, I guess maybe someone else will read this who has an open mind.

No skin in the game? I mean aside from them making their own devices that might want a stylus in the future, they also make an OS deployed on devices from all those partner names listed above. You don't see a point in Google ensuring styluses developed for use on ChromeOS devices can be used with other ChromeOS devices that support a stylus? It's all just "attacking"? Come on.

I don't know what they are investigating, but I for one would be looking for documentation (emails, meeting minutes, etc.) that people inside Apple also considered this as having the bonus side effect of getting people to buy new phones and if there was a plan in place to avoid disclosing the nature of the change, not making it a user selection on purpose, etc. And I don't know where I draw the line between big-brother being nosy and big-giant corporation taking advantage of their market position and nerfing hardware customers bought out-right to trick them into buying more.

Haven't seen it mentioned yet, so I'll chime in. It only takes a bit of T.V. watching to notice that nearly every single drug commercial is actually TWO commercials. One to promote the drug and a follow-on spot to list every single side effect and remind potential customers they should tell their Dr. about their medical conditions prior to getting them to prescribe the drug. This seems to more or less double the cost of all drug-based advertising (even print ads must be larger to include all the disclaimers and fine print) while adding no value. You HAVE to talk to your Dr. to get the damn prescription and the Dr./Pharmacy has to inform you of the side effects. Imagine how much less they'd have to spend if the rules simply stated that all side effects and cautionary tales must be published on the company websites, rather than broadcast along side every advertisement.

Well, they read the comic, but then thought, "Damn, thinking of random words is hard! If only we could make a 37 page document and use dice to pick words!" And then someone else shouted, "Genius! I own shares in Yahtzee! This will totally increase sales!"

I'd suggest looking into user profiles, which you can use for your kids and hand select the apps you want them to be able to use (like YouTube Kids: YES, YouTube: NO). I'm guessing you'd want Chrome/Browser disabled also. If you think Youtube is full of garbage, you should check out this whole internet thing. I think this only works for Android Tablets, though (as of 4.2 I think). They added user accounts for 5.0 for phone, but not the limited profiles part.

Yeah, that's pretty much the routine because your license and registration have no inherent value. Your phone on the other hand, is a VERY personal and rather expensive device. It would be pretty insane to devise a policy where you *wanted* all your police officers to take temporary possession and responsibility for expensive fragile devices to accidentally drop on the asphalt and what not. If such a policy was created, no one would use it because no one would hand their phone to the cops. How would they occupy their time while waiting for the cop to write the ticket? I appreciate paranoia for paranoia sake, but no implementation that has you surrendering possession of your phone just to show ID will ever fly.

Right? So don't hand them the phone. Hold it up so they can scan the QR code on the display. I don't hand my phone to the TSA Security guard validating my boarding pass, I just hold my phone over the scanner.

It says in TFA. They specifically don't use an orbiting probe to reduce cost. The thing would transmit directly from the surface:

And how did they know to stalk him until they found him with his laptop open and unlocked to begin with? I haven't followed the case closely, but from the article I didn't see what technological failure led them to him to begin with. Every point seemed to be: Once they had his laptop, they could prove he did XXX because of this technology. Maybe I missed the part where they explained how he became a suspect worth stalking to a library to begin with. Until that's explained, seems like secret NSA method is the most likely.

This article seems to agree there's something odd about the investigation: http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...

I've only been around one person with Glass and I never felt self-conscious or worried that they might be recording me. I constantly see cellphones in positions that *could* be recording me, but probably aren't. I wonder why we're okay with people always having their phones out, but seeing someone in fancy glasses makes us paranoid? Sure, it's more subtle with Glass, so? I suspect people only care because the media made such a big deal about it, enough so that they had to coin the term "Glassholes". But most people have never seen a Glasshole. I haven't. I mean the penetration of Glass is so tiny, how could you encounter people wearing Glass enough to form a stereotype about them?

That said, maybe next iteration could feature a bright white LED that flashes to let everyone know you are recording. And Google can then make a big push to inform people that No-Light=No-Recording. Would that reduce the creepiness? I'd hate to lose the camera, it enables a ton of awesome use cases. I suppose then we'd just hear ghost stories about people crippling the LED so they could once again be creepy.

I was curious about this, also. Basically anytime shows a graph that's supposed to compare men and women, yet actually graphs women vs. some other factor (like time) is suspicious to me. (Btw, this isn't a man/woman thing, just a data correlation thing.) I found at least this site which has some data on majors and you can actually break it down by men, women, or both.

http://benschmidt.org/Degrees/

I'm not drawing too many conclusions, but there's clearly a peak for both genders in 1985. Yes, it seems a sharper decline for women (dropping from 3% to 1% over 10 years, vs. men who fell from about 5.5% to 3.2% in the same time). More interesting than the decline in the 80s to me, which seemed fairly uniform between genders, was the short peak of women returning to the major in the early 2000s, where men surpassed the high point from '85 (5.5%) to go up to 7.5%, while women never recovered to their high point from '85 (3%) and maxed out around 2%.

TLDR; maybe someone should make a study trying to figure out what happened during the revival in interest in CS in the early 2000s and stop blaming the 80's.