FTFY

This is why I have 2 checking accounts: one for paying bills and one for daily spending. I direct deposit my paycheck in the billpay account, pay all of my months bills at the beginning of the month, and then as I need to spend money I transfer the amount from billpay to spending and use my debit card. This way there is only like $20 in the spending account (for emergencies like gas or something) and if someone gets my card then they can't spend up my entire paycheck at once.

Man, could we get some <p> tags in there somewhere?

I get good products and great service from Google (search, Gmail, Chrome, and my Nexus 4). No one is "holding me hostage" to force my loyalty. That loyalty is freely given, even with the knowledge that all of my interactions with Google are tracked and stored somewhere. Every other provider of these services would track, analyze, and use this data anyway, and even if Google has shown itself to be a corporate entity with corporate goals sometimes, that doesn't mean that they have broken their "don't be evil" mission. You can be "not so good" sometimes without being "evil".

To paraphrase what Mark Sisson said about marathons: "Everyone should read Moby Dick twice in their lives. Once to prove that they can finish and again to beat their time from the first one." Actually screw that. Just slog through it once and leave it alone after that. Moby Dick is only great literature because it is one of the first true adventure novels and because it is written, as the GP point out "in some old modern English that makes you feel all educated and smart when you read it". I wholeheartedly agree with this statement.

A friend of mine was really interested in hydrogen as a fuel source for cars, to the point that he converted one of his half-dozen 80's Honda hatchbacks to a hydrogen-powered vehicle. He was a huge fan of hydrogen, until the day that he was working on his car and didn't realize that a fuel line had developed a pinhole leak and caught fire. Since the flame was invisible and he had no reason to be alarmed he reached into the engine compartment to work on something and passed his hand straight through the flame. It was only like a 1/2 second before he realized that his hand was burned and he yanked it out (seriously, it was like he smelled his hand burning before the pain hit).

The other $650/month of that premium is probably paid for by his employer as part of his benefits package.

L+R used to be the third button click when mice only had 2 buttons.

Shocking, I know, but all scroll wheel mice are three button mice. If you click down on that scroll wheel instead of scrolling it, you get the third button click.

I looked at my wife's iPhone 4 after she upgraded to iOS7 and I was actually shocked at how bright and saturated all of the colors were on the home screen. It was actually kind of painful to look at.

Windows 8 actually isn't that bad. If you knew me in person, you would be totally suprised. I've been a big Linux user and anti-MS person for years. Had to use Windows 7 for the last few years at work, and for the last few months have used Windows 8 as my primary workstation. To me it seems like (other than the Metro start page) Windows 7 with a few cleaned up features like the new Task Manager. The amount of time I spend using any of the Metro UI: less than 1%. I don't even notice it any more, since I just hit the Windows key and type the name of the app I am looking for. I mostly spend my time in Remote Desktop into various 2008 and 2012 servers.

I use the same apps I always have (RDP, Outlook, Office, etc..) and I really don't see what the big deal is that the Start menu is now a Start page. To me it seems like they stole the Start page idea from Gnome 3.

This * 1000.

From your 88 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 8,594 items, clicked 518 items, starred 1 items, and emailed 0 items.
Since March 28, 2012 you have read a total of 92,192 items.

How about this: sometimes we actually **want** to feel like kids again and watch guys in rubber costumes chase a guy wearing a bow tie until he turns around, spouts off some silly time-wimey BS in a near-unintelligible British accent, waves a Harry Potter wand with a green crystal on the end, and saves the day. And we want to be able to watch that with our kids, too. Sometimes we want to escape the pressures of our boring lives and imagine hopping into a big blue box, pulling a few levers and twisting a few dials and going on adventures with a crazy person from the future.

When I feel like it, I pull out a good, thought-provoking novel, and when I don't, I pull out some "brain-candy" and just get lost. It's that simple.

I enjoy a good hard-SF novel as much as the rest of us here, but seriously, if you ever A) expected Doctor Who to be anything close to hard SF or B) ever expected *any* show of TV to be anything close to hard SF then you are on crack. Hell, the only channel to ever focus on even mildly good SciFi is now called SyFy and it has a 2 hour block of wrestling on every night.

As a geek, I was intrigued at the programming behind his response tree, but he is clearly a robot, albeit a very well-programmed one.