You are quite lucky, but unfortunately many employers/clients require a great deal of accountability. Working as I do for the NYC gov't, for instance, the very existence of consultants is a political football. Minute by minute accounting of money spent on our contracts is pretty much required, because at least half of the people we are working with are actively trying to get us fired at any point in time. Our group was recently told to be careful to clock in and out for lunch or going down to smoke because the office manager, a Dept. of Ed employee, had taken to scrutinizing the surveillance footage of the building entrance and comparing it to consultant timecards in an attempt (successful in at least two cases) to get people fired.

I think he feels it's like being on a floating base, with all the retards who couldn't hack it in sub school, along with all the chickenshit crap of basic. I gather the sub people are a great deal more laid back, especially when they are underway.

I never noticed that they particularly cared about tatoos on gaijin though, just japanese people.

Funny, my brother feels exactly the opposite. He can't imagine why anyone would be on a carrier.

Exactly. And also, I thought the name was quite clever in that it showed that the actual resource was almost beside the point. It doesn't matter what the valuable thing is, just that it is valuable. People say the plot is a cliched retelling of $historicalevent, and then congratulate themselves that they've seen though the cunning allegory, but they are missing the point. Humans have shown themselves willing to kill entire populations of our own kind for any number of resources. It is cliche precisely because it has happened again and again throughout our history.

Bravo.

Hard to charge that electric when the power cuts out twice a day.

Is this post really supporting the notion that web search should be a public utility controlled by the gov't rather than a corporation? I really hope not...

Except, you know, for the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. But other then blatantly violating a bedrock law of American capitalism that has been on the books for 70+ years they were perfectly within their rights...

We do in fact have absolute assloads of easily accessible coal. It is bad from a pollution standpoint, but in a world where it is raining dilute sulfuric acid and ash for a decade or so we won't care much. Coal will suffice for a mid- to late-19th century level of technology within a fairly short period of time. The much greater problm is we will all die of starvation before that.

One hundred percent this. My wife is a Canadian citizen and we used to go see her parents in Toronto by bus, but after our last trip back through the US border on our way home we have agreed that we will never cross by land ever again. We will just have to save up a bit more and take the plane, where for some reason the border guards are somewhat better behaved, maybe because they are dealing with people who can afford plane tickets. They are simply animals at the land crossings though. Sadistic animals. I have more then once watched them pretty much abusing old people they knew spoke very limited/no English simply because they were brown. The Canadian agents, by contrast, have been almost unfailingly polite to me, even the one trip I realized that I had left my passport 12 hours away in NYC. I showed the guard the ring I was planning to propose with instead :)

http://dwarffortresswiki.net/index.php/Carp
Damn carp.

I second a recommendation of Sumatra.

You do understand that you can tell it you bought something as a gift and to ingore it in recommendations,right? /you're welcome.

You are incorrect. GE is by and large a financial services company now.