Then you're part of the problem. Tell your physician that you want medications that you can afford without copays and you don't want to fall into a donut hole at the end of the year when you've maxed out your benefits for the year and have to pay full cost for a month or more.

If your doc refuses to change to generic alternatives, there are two options. One is that there are no generics that can treat what you have, the other is that your doc is in the pocket of their local pharmaceutical reps.

BTW, check out http://goodrx.com/ and put in your zip code to see what your medications cost at local pharmacies.

That is an option. Wouldn't it be lovely if Google offered to bring back the news aggregator only if subsidized by the papers?

Probably the same reasons anyone would buy a coffee maker where home-brew coffee costs more than 25 cents a cup.

1 - Laziness
2 - Poor math skills
3 - Lack of impulse control

How does this mesh with the ideas that:
1. shared libraries allow a small memory footprint
and
2. allowing the OS to manage dependencies allows applications to be more secure since all applications that rely on a shared library benefit when a security update of the library get installed

Just to clarify, if we use X10 we're good?

What's a CD?

The technological decline was obvious once episodes 1-3 were released. That was the peak of Galactic Civilization. Things have been in decline since. No more shines ships. The Millennium Falcon is still the fastest ship around. No more research into the force, and the little knowledge gained re: midichlorianes was completely lost. And the Jedi devolve from a quasi-science into a cult.

Agree wholeheartedly.

On the other hand, a couple suggestions/thoughts. Why is your gaming PCI on all the time? (Obvious, since she's complaining about the noise of the computer, not of the games.) Turn it off when not gaming and get a second, much smaller PC for your media player. Look at the nettop size computers.

Other thing is to not spend a significant amount of money on any of this. If it's not important to her, she'll be upset some time in the future, regardless of whether you can afford it.

I was going to make a joke about how little a fridge could do to kill you, then I remember something that happened to me and my wife a couple weeks ago.

We were at a local grocery store and she picked up some cheese with an expiration date in November 2016. I told her my doubts (I don't recall any refrigerated cheese ever lasting that long).

My wife's response was that the label said it so it must be true. And this is coming from someone who doesn't believe the medical community much to begin with.

Two weeks later the cheese was going bad in the fridge. My wife didn't believe it and tried to cut away the bad parts. I put the whole thing in the garbage the first chance I got.

Why paint? Presumably we're talking about houses here (unless we own apartment complexes). Instead of white paint, buy light colored shingles or ceramics.

I would imagine the first couple on the block will be eye sores, but as more people get into it, they'll look more in place.

Just looked again. The top three of those were ads. I can't explain why the first two non-ads were both to mail.com.

For the same search term on Google (not logged in), 'free email account', with adblock turned off, I get:
mailchimp.com
yahoo.com
gmx.com
mail.com
mail.com (yes, twice!)
gmx.com (again?)
yahoo.com
google.com
hushmail
email.about.com

Seriously. WTF. No Microsoft in the top 10 and gmail is number 8 on the list.

Can you name some of these services?

Why not give some examples, and we can discuss where those examples rate in popularity vs. where they show up in search results in the various search engines.

Please give one example of how people are forced to use google products.

My dad's email address is via yahoo. He likely goes weeks without hitting the google homepage. He's not particularly technically literate, either. People with google/Hotmail/Yahoo email tend to use home pages associated with their email address.

I was kinda thinking the same thing.

If there is any bundling going on, it's exceedingly subtle. The only thing I can think of is the link to gmail and apps on their homepage if you aren't logged in. A hell of a lot less links than on Bing's or Yahoo's home pages.

Come to think of it, one of the reasons Google gained popularity is how sparse their pages are to begin with.