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.

It’s great to have another operating system for phones, but I think Gruber summed it up nicely.

In graphic design, nothing is what it actually is. Everything other than content is representative of something else. Additionally, much of the content is also merely representative of something other than what it actually is.

Both of these services are dangerous for app developers because they offer simple, one-tap installs of pirated apps and do not require that devices have been jailbroken in order to do so. This is an enormous problem, as it opens up the arena for their use from the relatively small fraction of users with jailbroken devices — as was the case with Installous — to any unscrupulous users of iPhones and iPads.

Don’t steal from developers people. Bad karma shit will come back on you.

Jamillah Knowles for The Next Web:

Smart mom, Janelle Burley Hofman has published a document that may secure you a full-on teenage eye roll, but it could also help young ones learn to be responsible. Amusingly it’s not just a few core principles, but an 18 point contract for her 13-year-old son Gregory to adhere to as the lucky recipient of an iPhone.

As a former teenager I bristle at some of this stuff, but as the parent of two teenagers and a tween I can’t help but admire Janelle’s thoroughness here. Really well-thought out, reasonable guidelines for a kid getting their first phone.

What do you say – is she being reasonable by making him stick to these rules?

I skipped by this at first and then found myself going back and looking again and again. I knew it was something I had to share.

[Via Swiss Miss]

This isn’t something I’d use for The Loop, but there are plenty of Web sites that this type of slider would work very well. I like these when done right.

Armed robbers broke into a central Paris Apple store on New Year’s Eve, stealing goods with an estimated value of one million euros.

That’s a lot of product.

Robin Wauters, The Next Web:

Vehicle rental services company Avis Budget Group (Avis) today announced that it has agreed to acquire car sharing network Zipcar for $12.25 per share, or approximately $500 million, in cash.

A big move for Zipcar, and a smart move to grow Avis’ business too.

For the uninitiated, Zipcar’s business is “car sharing.” Members can arrange to use cars by the hour or by the day, an alternative to traditional rental services. Gas and insurance are included in a fee you pay as a member.

It’s really useful in urban areas and elsewhere where residents may depend primarily on public transportation, but occasionally need vehicle access to transport people or cargo or to visit places they’d prefer to go to by car.

Avis says it’ll help expand Zipcar’s fleet to have more cars available at peak times like weekends or holidays, so expect to see more Fords and Chevys next to Minis, Volvos and BMWs in Zipcar parking lots soon.

Charles Arthur, The Guardian:

Sayonara, netbooks. The end of 2012 marks the end of the manufacture of the diddy machines that were – for a time – the Great White Hope of the PC market.

Arthur notes that both Asus and Acer exited 2012 with no plans to produce netbooks in 2013, apparently spelling out the demise of the mini-laptop platform.

The idea of the netbook echoes in products like Google’s Chromebook, manufactured by Samsung and Acer – a slim, tiny laptop with limited capabilities and Googlian (Googlish?) emphasis on “cloud.” I’d argue that Microsoft is trying to shoehorn laptop functionality into a tablet by building in a kickstand and emphasizing covers with built-in keyboards.

So I think it might be too soon to spell out the demise of netbooks entirely. Harry McCracken at Time agrees with me. He notes that the fix was in for netbooks from the get-go, from lackluster vendor support to active sabotage from Microsoft. McCracken predicts the netbook will reemerge in all but name as market forces push prices on Ultrabooks down further and further toward the netbook range.

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Joe Caiati outlines his reasons for pulling the plug on Facebook, including the ability to use Twitter to keep up-to-date. If I had to choose between Twitter and Facebook, I’d probably make the same choice, but there are plenty of people who still get a lot out of Facebook. I think it’s the people that use it as a small personal network of friends instead of trying to build a massive network of people they don’t know.

“Dirty Harry” made it.

Rolling Stone’s list is good, but clearly missing some iconic models. I think everyone’s list would be a little bit different.

This is very cool in at least showing the possibilities.