Yes, but it is still cheaper than home delivery.

We are one of the digital subscribers. Usually in the morning I will pull the thing up on the tablet to see what is going on in the world..

They had an epic screwup many years ago. One month I paid the bill, and instead of deducting the amount on the check from the balance, they added it so the next bill showed a past-due amount that was exactly double what the previous bill had been. Calling their customer service was useless - you would wait in the queue for 45 minutes only to find out that their "computers were down" and there was nothing they could do. This went on for days. Eventually I thought I got it all taken care of, and then out of the blue 6 months later I started getting calls from a collection agency. I started sending some rather rude letters to the CEO after this - eventually they admitted the problem.

It was nearly 30 years ago, but to this day I refuse to have anything to do with Sprint.

And then tell your friends about it so they know to wait for the beep.

I had to clean up my sister-in-laws computer at one point. People had been downloading "free" games from god knows where, and it was horribly infected with all sorts of malware. When I got a hold of the thing, it wouldn't boot because of the crap that was installed.

My main beef is that I may have 30-40 tabs open, and find the browser consuming 50% CPU on the laptop - all because of misbehaving javascript that runs and performs useless updates in the background. And firefox doesn't make it easy to figure out which tab is the culprit, so you just have to start killing them at random until the CPU usage goes down. At least until you learn from experience which websites have the offending javascript.

On many web sites I use the javascript is gratuitous. Eye candy and whatnot, or huge scripts to manage useless comment systems that I never use.

And why do I care? It makes the machine sluggish and burns through the laptop battery more quickly, and the laptop runs hot.

But Firefox can do what it wants - I still use noscript and adblockplus to selectively block scripts.

No, there are companies out there patenting DNA as well, and that's another set of thorny issues.

What has Brown done for you lately?

Yeah, I have a TDI, so I know all about this. You can take it out of gear and come to a safe stop and if you know what to do under the hood you can cut the air supply which will kill the engine without damaging it. There is a relay which should cut the air automatically if you turn off the key, but there are instances where that fails (something gets stuck).

But if you don't' do any of this, then the engine will eventually burn through all of the engine oil and then seize. Given the distance the car went, this doesn't sound like what happened.

to those sorts of parties. Probably just as well - if I knew ahead of time that there was a puking robot, I might stay home. Or show up wearing a wet suit.

You could probably hook up the robot to work as a sort of fountain in a swimming pool however.

I had read somewhere that they had found that some of the vomit was in the form of an aerosol that spread in the air. They had used a fluorescent dye in their fake vomit to discover this..

I guess it gives them a better idea how large a radius needs cleaning after someone with norovirus pukes.

How about the Apple store as an iBarf.

"Bear observed defecating in forest."

Dammit - that was my password. Now I have to change it again.

When I look at these things, there are various factors I consider. How many lumens you want, the efficiency (lumens/watt), the color, and the CRI. For a no-name bulb that cheap I would be suspicious - it is probably an earlier generation of emitter.

We have some that are 3-4 years old, and they just keep going and going. It seems to depend a lot on the brand - some of them are just cheaply made and burn out relatively quickly. Maybe one a year burns out, but I still have a bunch more that are sitting in a closet waiting to be installed.

We do have 2 LED bulbs in the house. One is over the stairs where a CFL just doesn't work well (typically you flip on the lights and go down the stairs - the light never gets a chance to reach full brightness, so it felt like you were going down stairs in the dark. The LED bulb comes on at full brightness with perhaps only a 1 second delay).

There is one other place where long-life bulbs really shine - if you have really tall ceilings, changing a bulb is a huge pain in the rear.

The only way they would allow downloads of their free podcasts was through iTunes. But I don't have any Apple products, and I didn't want to install iTunes.