My palate may be screwed up, but my homonym detector is in prime form!

72 hours? Hah. Recently for me it was about two weeks. I mean, yeah, they autoreplied to the ticket immediately, and I got a computer-generated useless response half an hour later. But once I responded to that it was two weeks, and when that didn't work, it was two more weeks for another go-round.

Now they did apologize a little, and they said they were working on dealing with one really big backlog, so maybe it's not always that bad, but I was pretty unimpressed.

Sure. But I think a response to that is to accept what you have to and then keep going. If you take a lowball wage just to make the rent, don't sit there for years waiting for things to magically get better. Use that new position as your fallback, and keep looking, because now you're not in the position where you're forced to say yes.

People say this all the time. What nobody ever says is how to not be the first party to name a number. That would be a useful tip for someone to include here, if anyone has it.

I agree with you. That's why, as an author, I chose for my ebooks not to have any DRM. I'd rather someone who enjoyed my book lend it to a friend or family member and have them also enjoy it than not buy because of the DRM.

Frankly, I also don't really care how many individual readers download one of my books for their own enjoyment, especially if they take a moment to post a review or recommend it to someone else. That's darn near close enough to payment as far as I'm concerned. I do draw the line at anyone trying to resell my work as theirs, and there's definitely some discomfort at places like those in the article that might be profiting by giving away what isn't theirs to give.

This feature is of course a necessity for the coming zombie apocalypse. Imagine if you were trying to make a getaway, and a single zombie could stop your car by lurching in front of it. Something like that could single-handedly doom the straggling remainders of humanity.

Hah. I remember that one!

Think about it some more. There is a place near the south pole where the effective circumference of the earth at that latitude is exactly one mile. So if you started one mile north of that spot you could go south, make the circle, and head north, and be back in the same place.

Then, as the GP says, there's an infinite number, because there's also a spot where the effective circumference is half a mile, a third mile, a quarter mile, etc., where you're just doing more laps around the same ring when you head west, before heading north.

A sign at a nearby farm read "cheese making beef eggs". I think it used to have dots/dividers between some of the words, but they'd faded. My wife saw it and said, "What are beef eggs? And how do you make cheese with them?"

I did the same thing as a child with coffee cake. The thing of it is, it took years before someone bothered to correct me and let me know there's no actual coffee in it. What a waste of a bunch of dessert.

I realize this analysis is about "popular" music, so this may not entirely fit. But last year I listened to one of those Great Courses sets on "How to Listen to and Understand Great Music" and really changed what I've been listening to, which now includes quite a bit of concert music (baroque, classical, etc.) that I never really appreciated before. Am I an outlier that I'm picking up something new just as I turn 40, or does this not count because it's not pop music, and old fogies are supposed to drift into listening to this ancient stuff anyway?

I'd say I've also picked up a lot of new material recently because of Pandora, but I'll admit most of that is older music, where it's a genre/style I liked, but I somehow missed some of the artists from that era who are similar to ones I already liked.

While I'm dumbfounded by repeated arguments that there can't be any business model other than "selling a hammer" I also don't agree that 70 years is a reasonable span for royalties. A decade or two? Sure. That's a pretty good span for getting your money back from a creation. But by the time a work of art has spanned a generation, let alone two or three, it really ought to be open to the public to make use of it. Without getting too specific about where to draw the line, it seems to me like a decent rule of thumb that if something existed before you were born, by the time you're a fully grown adult it ought to be available for use in your own art without continuing to pay royalties.

Well, it certainly won't happen in the reverse order.

I believe the process is supposed to begin with a telephone call.

That runs slightly counter to an experience I had, which was similar but not quite the same. Someone opened an eBay account using my name and address and a fake credit card, but it wasn't my card. They bought just a couple of things, totaling less than $200. I've had collection agencies contact me a couple of times about it on behalf of eBay, who was clearly looking to recoup that relatively small loss. Not sure if they've got different policies in England as opposed to the US, or what else might have caused them to pursue my case but not yours.