ditto.

Self Drilling SMS screws are also commonly referred to in the trades (at least down south) as "self-tappers" as the tip acts like a tapping tool

@catizback: While macs can get viruses, the simple fact is that it's really not that lucrative. The obvious comparison is to darwinian pressures on a species, the vast majority of the species being much more likely to be targeted than the minority variations. If you have a virus that can attack the underpinnings of…

Cloud Atlas is an amazing book but I'm still scratching my head at how they plan to turn it into a movie....

It's a heck of a lot easier to build their case on Facebook than through other methods, consequently it's become much more popular. Consider other methods are things like written communications (that someone saved?), hiring a personal investigator, or getting friends (better yet the kids) to testify. It's basically…

@GeorgeDW: Please, name one thing besides tethering that's actually useful. And as for your windows argument, Windows is completely riddled with spyware, malware, and viruses primarily because there was so little in the way of stopping any third party from doing anything they wanted with the OS.

@The5thElephant: Right, well given that no one has to verify any part of the code before it gets into your grubby little hands, I'm sure it's completely safe. Also, you guys can act holier than thou about the whole jailbreaking isn't illegal, but aside from a few quirky feature utilities the reason anyone does it is…

I think it's rather funny that this advice is coming from the same folks who regularly advocate jailbreaking the iPhone, possibly the single most obvious way to get your data compromised, using pirate software. Good job not mentioning the whole unsigned apps are a security risk thing.

@LombardoJoe: [www.alibaba.com]

We're talking about the guy who made American Grafitti, sitting down with a 20 something fuzz head who admits to smoking more pot than anyone he knows. Why wouldn't you take a moment to tell him you think the world is going to end in a year and you may or may not have access to a spaceship? Ever since the story first…

Living up in the mountains one summer where grizzly bears were known to roam the streets, the common advice of locals was to always keep a lighter handy. The sound of the flint and steel sounded enough like a rifle (this was what I was told) that bears would run from the noise. One night on a walk I came face to face…

Um, that's a typical low voltage lighting ballast. Dude needs to lay off the go pills.

@kaffenated: Did you never hack an original Xbox? XBMC still looms large as one of the greatest additions to any living room.

@goldflow: Cory Doctorow's newest book, For the Win, talks a lot about the amazing amounts of headaches possible when trying to develop and maintain a virtual economy. You end up getting the same shady investors and double-backed investment brokers you get in the real world, but in a system much smaller and easier to…

There have been less than a dozen terrorist attacks on planes in my lifetime, and I'm pretty sure at this point we're nearing billions of flights that have gone off without a hitch. So you gotta admit the chances of you being on a plane getting blown up are like, really freaking small. But we're gonna spend billions…

Eh, dubious conclusions. The Mac-Windows saga parallels so closely with this story it's annoying. To say that it's solved with walmart and verizon sounds like good business sense, but I think another major consideration is sustaining developers. The android market place has become extremely hard to manage in terms of…

@Odin: And Apple will happily sack away cash offering slightly nicer closed enviroment proprietary devices. That's all Steve Jobs knows how to do, besides invent new rockin devices.

@Matt0505: I was just thinking how this creates almost a gap in Apple's line-up. I'm still not sure they intended to dominate the portable gaming market, but with downloadable games coming into their maturity, it makes sense to have a set top box. Unfortunately this $99 wonder isnt the device to compete with a PS3 or…

I've been wanting to make one of these puppies since I was 16, exciting to see someone really do it. Pretty much what I expected tho, an insane amount of love and labor (never mind a giant capacitor charge) to get something that ranks just above an air rifle in terms of power. Shoulda built a potato cannon instead...…

so you're saying I should start burying helium tanks now and get ahead of the rush?