That’s a shit load of taxes.

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.

John Gruber on how he went about creating a Retina favicon for Daring Fireball.

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.

Horace Dediu looks at the time it took for smartphones to reach 50 percent of the market and estimates when he believes it will reach 80 percent.

Interesting to say the least, but I think the comment about the list on Coudal.com sums 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?

Best Buy said some of Wal-Mart’s promotions, including a deal on the iPhone 5, had a measurable effect on its profits due to a price-match guarantee that requires the retailer to match the price of competitor’s ads. Best Buy said it lost about $65,000 in profit the day Wal-Mart’s promotion first ran on Facebook, because it was compelled to match Wal-Mart’s advertised $150 price, even though it concluded that Wal-Mart didn’t actually have a sufficient number of iPhones available.

Here is a cached version of the article.

Jacqui Cheng for Ars Technica:

Apple has declined to publicly comment on the issue and won’t explicitly confirm the reason for the bug. But numerous developers experienced in the complicated world of calendaring have stepped up with their observations and the overall consensus has converged on the ISO week date.

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

Fascinating story from Don Melton about how he hid Safari in plain sight while developing the browser.

Wall Street Journal:

Toyota Motor Corp. and Audi AG are throwing their hats into the ring of potential suppliers of self-driving vehicles.

Both auto makers confirmed on Thursday that they will be demonstrating autonomous-driving features at the Consumer Electronics Show in the coming week, signaling a new effort to raise the technology’s profile among consumers.

But what happens when the vehicles develop a craving for human blood?

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

Clearly, Microsoft doesn’t want to be in business any longer.

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!

H.E.A.R. (Hearing Education and Awareness for Rockers) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to raising awareness of the dangers of noise exposure that can lead to permanent hearing loss and tinnitus. Damage to hearing is typically cumulative and irreversible, not immediately detectable, and it can occur from almost any contemporary music source or event.

I have a lot of respect for the work Kathy Peck does to raise awareness for musicians and music lovers everywhere.

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 stop these trolls from doing this.

Canadian astronaut Col. Chris Hadfield tweeting about using his iPad and GarageBand in space.

Do Not Disturb scheduling feature will resume normal functionality after January 7, 2013. Before this date, you should manually turn the Do Not Disturb feature on or off.