About fifteen years ago our mail kept being misdelivered, and we kept getting other peoples' mail. We took it up with all sorts of folks, and finally the regional postmaster said that if the mail is put by a carrier in a box, it has been delivered. If it's not in our box, it's our problem (!).

Personally, I'd rather have some competition than put up with that level of asshattery.

Good luck with that. Many stores can't survive the bad word of mouth they'd get for throwing people out for using their phones in whatever way they please. Meanwhile, I'll keep happily scanning barcodes on products to see if it's a good deal where I am or not.

...the axis of evil.

"The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from." -- Andrew Tanenbaum

We keep our landline because we have an alarm system that needs a phone line to dial in and VoIP isn't reliable enough, even if it can carry the traffic. We could probably get a cellular unit for it to use instead, but that's another reason we keep the landline: cellular coverage out in our neck of the woods isn't the best.

I work for a hospital system, so by default we're 24/7. We could implement some power savings except for the fact that clinicians don't understand computers, so if the monitor is dark then as far as they're concerned the machine is broken. Add to that the fact that they often won't call in a problem or try to turn it on but rather walk to another machine, plus that non-IT folk are in charge of the system so we're here to make them happy and not vice versa, and I suspect all our machines will be 24/7 from here on out.

Mod parent up; just because WotC are pulling these PDFs, people need to know that there are the OGL clones. The Old-School Renaissance really has an opportunity here.

In addition to OSRIC for AD&D 1e, if you want some old-school goodness from the old Moldvay boxed sets you can get Labyrinth Lord , and if the original boxed set (OD&D) is your thing then you can get a couple of different flavors of Swords & Wizardry depending on if you like just the original three books ("white box") or items from the Greyhawk supplement thrown in. In addition, there are other games that are old school like Basic Fantasy which is very similar to Moldvay B/X with some bits of AD&D, and stirred with D20 for ascending armor classes.

Note that all these are available in PDF absolutely free, and also available for sale in softbound or hardbound (well, OSRIC is getting there, it's not quite there yet).

Even better: missing Dragon and Dungeon magazines? No problem: there are magazines like Fight On! and Knockspell to take their place.

It takes me three minutes to get to the interstate, it's about fifteen minutes on the interstate and about two minutes into the parking garage. That's twenty minutes, but even if it were five minutes closer, there's no way I'd be out there on a bicycle. I'd get run over. (Before someone suggests an alternate route, an intervening river I have to cross limits my alternate routes to being either five miles out of my way and moderately less dangerous, or twelve miles out of my way or forty miles out of my way and just as dangerous. Not really acceptable changes.)