Spend the money on the van. Especially the DVD players. I was like you, and thought “Who the hell do my kids think they are, getting to watch TV while I’m busting my ass up here driving?”. Now I want to put whoever invented the in-car DVD player on the one dollar bill.

This is really interesting... but I hope any commercial product will have the “key” securely screwed into place. I’m already picturing someone crossing their legs at the dinner table, kicking out the key and the whole table and everything on it collapses into a pile of pieces.

re #7 That would be Sisyphus, not Tantalus. Tantalus’ punishment is to be eternally hungry and thirsty. He’s stuck in a pool of water that, when he tries to drink from it, drains below his reach. Above him is a fruit tree that moves out of reach whenever he tries to eat from it. Thus, the term “tantalizing.”

To go along with whatever gift I give my dad, I give him a card. It’s a fact cards are worthless, so I always to add something special. One time it was a card in Spanish, he took it to work and had some coworkers translate it. Apparently it was very nice.

Man Does Rude and Not Difficult Thing

The ability to delete BS apps like Tips and Apple Watch.

I’m a Californian and the distinction means little to me. That would be like if you said, “So and so was from San Francisco!” and me saying, “Um, actually, he was born in Oakland.”

What the fuck is wrong with Mexican, gringo?

i can’t fucking wait to try this.

on the one hand, this makes a lot of sense. On the other hand it’s horrifyingly expensive if you don’t have local babysitting help from grandparents so some caution is really in order before you just sign up for this 100%

In this day and age, you don’t have to sit inside a giant fucking metal robot to fight alien monsters. You can easily do it remotely with drones carrying enough firepower to fuck shit up, or some kind of bio-weapon that specifically targets the kaiju nervous/immune system and brings it down within minutes.

I think that if we could travel through time, that would mean that we couldn’t effectively change anything - in other words if we could travel through time that would mean time is more like a place than a time (if that makes sense) and it wouldn’t matter what we did because we would find that our actions have already…

Star Trek style teleporters. For all the the issues with them not being able to work without teleportation pads on both sides the biggest issue for anyone using them would be the fact that each time you use one it KILLS YOU and replaces you with a duplicate on the other side.

I’m saving for a 56kbps modem!

You know, even if the Empire were to attempt an invasion of Earth, their technology is fairly limited, even for a space-fairing, you know, Empire. Earth’s nuclear arsenal, as well as our jets would at the very least buy us a little bit of time against landing craft, stormtroopers, star destroyers and even the Death…

I would talk about Cryptonomicon more, but but it's hard when I'm surrounded by non-geeks who don't read that kind of thing. It's so good.

Anything by Neal Stephenson and William Gibson-but particularly Cryptonomicron and Neuromancer. And ANYTHING by Tim Powers but especially Declare.