I was buying a house in ~2006, and they somehow got me qualified to afford the new house even if I hadn't yet sold the condo I already owned, so that the offer on the new house wouldn't be contingent on the sale of the condo. There was no way in hell I could afford both. I didn't have much of a down payment, beyond the equity in the condo. But I benefited from the insanity in that it allowed me to put in an offer without the contingency. I wondered how they were able to make it work, when I knew it definitely wouldn't. I'm sure it wouldn't happen today.

In the end, I sold the condo before I bought the house, and I've made every payment on the house on time, no problem, no bailout needed.

Yes, they do. We get a message at least weekly for the former residents of our house, trying to collect various debts. Note, I've lived there over 9 years and we still get those calls. It's basically harassment, but there isn't much I can do because it's a bunch of different debt collectors, rather than just one company.

Did you really buy your last laptop in a Staples or Best Buy? Try the internet sometime, it's pretty cool what you can find. For example, System76 and Dell both sell Linux laptops. There are probably other brands, too.

Few politicians actually put out a platform these days. The ones from the two major parties (has anyone noticed one of them calls it a "brand" now?) in the US don't; for example, see Clinton's recent answer about approving the pipeline, or Trump's recent answer about whether Obama was born in the USA.

The few that do are usually one-issue candidates. Even if someone does publish a full platform, it's unlikely they're going to put out an opinion on every single law out there, even if they know it's somewhat controversial.

Republican "brand"...am I the only one that sees a problem with that term? Bush used it on Colbert a few days ago and it completely shut me off from what he was saying. Companies have brands. Politicians should have platforms...

It sounds like a pretty interesting feature, actually, once you get past the "Haha, iOS 9 is a failure!" tone of the summary.

I'll say something that gets said every time: They probably weren't clueless. They were probably hoping they were close enough to the ground floor of the scheme to cash in.

Personally, I'm glad there's competition - it keeps both of them getting better. I missed the "back" button on Android on my iPhone, but I see iOS 9 is will have that functionality, so good. (I guess there's actually 4 competitors - Windows phone and Blackberry - but iOS and Android are the leaders.)

Our car has that and I don't really like it much - sometimes it fails to dim when I want it to, and my wife said that it dims too easily for her liking. A mirror with a manual lever mirror worked better for us. (Our truck has it, too, but the cap over the bed with tinted windows means that headlights are never bright enough to trigger it.) It's not something I actively hate, but if our next car didn't have it, I wouldn't mind.

What I would like is a way for the headlights of oncoming cars to be blocked out. I sometimes do this with my hand and I can instantly see far better. Unfortunately a lot of people don't seem to understand our eyes and how light works - for example, a cop car with bright, flashing lights at night can actually blind your eyes to whatever they were trying to warn you about.

There are some in DC that let you walk the diagonals during that cycle, too. It's a nice time saver. Also, it's weird to be walking out in the middle of the intersection with at least four cars facing you (usually more like 6 or 8).

I just did, mostly by accident. I wasn't trying to build a super quiet machine, but it happened. I don't remember the parts I used off the top of my head, but the processor is an i7, and I put in a 240 GB SSD. The thing is silent unless I'm doing some heavy processing - then I might hear a fan, if I listen closely. With newer processors, the CPU fan slows down when it's not being used heavily, which helps a lot. Power supply fans will usually be quiet too. The other big noisemaker is the hard disc, so switching to an SSD helps with that.

As a manager, here are the two pieces of advice I'd pass on:

1. We don't use passive voice in our memos. College is wrong. I've been out of college for a long time, but I always want to write to the business writing prof I had and let him know. We stress active voice.

2. I picked this up from a Murawski course (which deals with active voice writing). It was, "Doing work is bringing your supervisor a solution, not problems." That is, me going to my boss and saying, "Hey, I've got a problem here," isn't doing work. The work is going to my boss and bringing him or her a solution to the problem. Now, sometimes you get stuck and need help, and that's fine, and I'm happy to help - but your goal as an employee should be to bring me proposed solutions to problems (or, better yet, just take care of it, if you can).

Note, I have yet to meet anyone who calls them "Freedom Fries". Most Europeans probably understand the difference between a publicity stunt and reality.

From what I read, it sounded like even if the car had the feature, it would have been deactivated because he was accelerating - in other words, the car assumes the driver is behaving in a sane manner and deactivates the feature.

...because people don't want to pay for features they won't use? We don't have a sunroof in our truck, because we know we'd use it only rarely. Someone else might use that sunroof all the time. On the other hand, for our car, we paid extra for the memory driver's seat, because my wife is much shorter than I am, so we're always readjusting the driver's seat between us, and it's a time saver, plus there's probably a small safety bonus from getting the seat in the same position every time. But for a car that's normally only going to be driven by one person, a memory seat is kind of a useless feature.