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This moron bragged on Facebook about drunk driving and hitting a couple of cars.

[Via Shawn King]

MG Siegler:

We all know the “four horsemen” of tech: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google. These are the companies that pretty much everyone agrees will shape the foreseeable future of the tech sector. In some circles, that list makes waves for who is not included: Microsoft. But any rational thinker (meaning those outside of Redmond or anyone who hasn’t made a career as a .Net developer) knows that Microsoft simply no longer belongs on that list.

But that doesn’t mean the list is perfect. In fact, I do think there’s an omission that’s becoming a glaring one: Samsung.

MG makes some interesting arguments about why Samsung should be the fifth horsemen. There is no doubt the company is huge and has a lot of resources, but for me the question is can Samsung predict what consumers will want before they know they want it.

That’s one of Apple’s greatest strengths. They’re working on products we don’t even know we’ll want yet, but when they’re released, we have to have them.

This is pretty much how all Canadians do it.

With all the silly talk in the US of a “Trillion Dollar Coin”, you might not know that the Canadian Mint actually produced the world’s first million dollar coin in 2007.

It is 99.999% pure gold bullion, weighs 220lbs and, even though the face value is one million dollars, it’s actually worth over $5.3 million dollars now.

The coin have been certified by the Guinness World Records to be “the world’s largest gold coin” and the Canadian Mint has sold five of them.

Gizmodo:

Here’s a rare sight: four out of the ten Nimitz-class aircraft carriers—the largest warships ever built—plus an Enterprise-class carrier docked together. They are resting at Naval Station Norfolk, Virginia, which coincidentally is the largest naval base in the world. Look at all that engineering and firepower. And it’s only half of the Nimitz fleet!

Wow…if you’ve never seen one of these carriers up close, this picture might not mean much but trust me – this is truly an awesome display of military might!

Animal is funny as hell.

A person’s cultural fit is becoming more important all the time.

Want great press for your startup, app or company? EZPR specializes in getting great stories written about what you’re working on.

Wired:

With all the technology hailed from the show floor at CES, it is inevitable that some of it will never materialize. CES always generates some vaporware, and 2012 was an especially good year. Here, then, is a look at the stuff we were promised at CES 2012 and continue waiting for.

Keep this in mind as Wired, CNET, The Verge, et al announce their “Best of CES Awards” next week – the majority will be for products that will likely never see the light of day.

I am a complete sucker for these time lapse videos and this one is incredibly well done. It helps the subject matter is one of the world’s great cities – Paris.

Does anyone need a 15,000-foot landing strip? How about a place to assemble rocket ships? Or a parachute-packing plant? An array of aerospace tracking antennas? A launchpad?

Make us an offer, says NASA, which is quietly holding a going-out-of-business sale for the facilities used by its space-shuttle program.

Gizmodo:

The US has a love affair with imperial units: height in inches, milk in quarts, weight in pounds. You name it, and it’s measured in imperial. The only problem? Imperial is dumb. So let’s cast of those shackles and join the rest of the world by embracing units that make sense. Let’s go metric, once and for all.

Why make the move? A (metric) ton of reasons.

What do you think? Should the USA “go metric”? I’ve been “bi-measuring” since I was a kid and am (mostly) comfortable with both but there’s no doubt metric, with its factors of ten, is much easier to deal with.

I agree totally with Harry Marks on this.

Yes, this is how it’s done.

Kubrick:

Does I. B. M. know that one of the main themes of the story is a psychotic computer?

I love the one person who expensed his trip for a job interview.

Interesting to say the least, but I think the comment about the list on Coudal.com sum this up for me.

In order to use the SDK, you must first agree to this License Agreement. You may not use the SDK if you do not accept this License Agreement.

This sentence alone already violates freedom 0, the freedom to use the program for any purpose without restrictions.

Oh Google.

Where the hell does something like this come from?

Much respect to Tyler Kirk for everything that he’s accomplished.

Toyota and Audi plan to demonstrate autonomous vehicles at CES.

Rob Griffiths dug around and found out how to remove Google+ plus from your account.

Marco Arment:

But Google’s increasingly desperate push to cram Google+ down everyone’s throats hasn’t made Google+ any more relevant. It has only resulted in a lot of confused Google-account owners who inadvertently “upgraded” to Google+…

Bingo!

Google has settled with the FTC, avoiding antitrust penalties by agreeing to license standard-essential patents to rivals without threat of injunctions, and to remove restrictions on online advertising, though the concessions aren’t enough to placate activists. As part of the agreement, Google will be forced to license the standard-essential Motorola Mobility patents on FRAND (fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory) terms to any rival that requests them, after fears that the search giant might use its acquired IP to bludgeon competitors with extortionate licensing fees else run the risk of expensive and limiting injunction proceedings.

This is brilliant. I love the Spider-Man art.

The bookseller, which also saw fewer shoppers come in to its bookstores, has bet heavily on its Nook business, which includes e-readers and tablets as well as digital books, as a source of growth.

But the Nook segment saw revenue fall 12.6 percent from a year earlier during the nine weeks ended December 29 as it cut prices to compete with Amazon.com Inc’s Kindle and Apple Inc’s iPad.

Amazon will eat you alive if you try to compete with them like this.

Google has to be the creepiest company around.

At about 10 a.m. on Dec. 21, a Tim Hortons customer at the Beaverhill Boulevard location decided to pay for the order of the next vehicle in the drive-through line.

That began a chain of random acts of kindness that lasted for three hours — and 228 orders.

Canadians love their Tim Hortons coffee… and being nice to others.

Ars Technica:

When Steven Vicinanza got a letter in the mail earlier this year informing him that he needed to pay $1,000 per employee for a license to some “distributed computer architecture” patents, he didn’t quite believe it at first. The letter seemed to be saying anyone using a modern office scanner to scan documents to e-mail would have to pay—which is to say, just about any business, period.

This is just ridiculous. Someone has to do stop these trolls from doing this.

Car rental service Avis has acquired car sharing service Zipcar in a $500 million deal.