See that's the thing, you chose to live in London. You could have taken a job somewhere with cheaper housing, but for you, being in London was more important than having more space. It's a tradeoff. For me, having more space is more important, because many of the things I do (both for fun and to make money) require a lot of space on an ongoing basis. This is why I don't live in a city that's so big that a postage-stamp-sized piece of land costs ten thousand bucks. :-)

Either way, you kind of missed my point, which is that it isn't necessarily true that a family of 5 can't derive significant usability benefits from having 5,000 square feet. Whether the extra space is wasted or not depends highly on what sorts of activities the family wants to do when they aren't at work/school, and whether they can readily achieve those goals in less space.

The industrial printer because I have a side business doing book publishing. I've found no print shops in the area that can handle one-off large-format printing for doing proofs of hardcover dust jackets, hence the only way to usefully get books out the door was to buy a giant beast.

As for the exercise equipment, most days of the week, I work until the early evening, then have musical rehearsals that keep me up for several more hours. Having that equipment in my house is the only way I have a prayer of getting any exercise at all.

This is California. All the garages in the region have long since been converted into bedrooms, and very few houses have basements. :-)

I'm not complaining. I'm simply saying that you shouldn't assume that everyone's space needs are the same. Could I survive without the drum kit? Sure. The piano? Probably not for very long. For me, music is a crucial emotional outlet that I do, in fact, very much need. I'd probably sell one of my legs before I'd sell my piano. I've owned it for two decades, and it is very much a part of me.

But the more important question is whether that space could somehow be converted to another use that would fulfill one of my other desires. The answer, of course, is no. There's no practical way to turn my living room into a wood shop, because that pretty much requires a dust-proof floor, which carpeting is not. And it is highly incompatible with any other use of the room because of the dust involved.

I try to do the dustiest work outside, but with me being at work all day, I have very limited daylight hours in which to do so. As a result, the lack of a dedicated wood shop triples or quadruples the number of days that any given project requires, because I basically get to a point where I can't go any further without making some major wood cut, and then I'm stuck waiting until the next day that I get home before dark, which may be two or three days away.

What makes me uncomfortable is when those projects cause me to either lose the use of my main bathroom or kitchen for weeks at a time. Yes, it is, strictly speaking, a want, in that I want to be able to do woodworking projects, and that my survival is not dependent upon my ability to do them. However, because I am unable to do these things usably in the space available, I do need more space if I hope to do these things in any non-insane manner. And that was my point—that one should not assume that other people don't have valid reasons for wanting more space merely because you don't. :-)

When I first heard the story on KCBS this morning, that was my first thought as well.

More like 25% to FedEx/UPS, and everybody else in the distribution chain loses money on every sale, but tries to make it up in volume....

There's a big difference between forgetting to pick up your billfold with $200 in it and handing it to the secretary, saying, "I don't need this billfold anymore." One is a failure to act, the other is a deliberate act. I'm not saying the secretary in the latter situation shouldn't ask whether you really meant to leave $200 in it, but the two situations aren't really comparable.

People sell things all the time for way less than they are worth, only to find the highest bidder reselling it at several times the previous selling price. This is really much closer to that situation than it is to forgetting your billfold.

Even with 3 kids, you do not need 5000 square feet of house.

That actually depends a lot on the people involved. As a single person with no kids, I'm finding ~1,800 square feet to be woefully insufficient for my needs. When I do woodworking projects, I have to either lose my master bathroom or my kitchen, and sometimes both, because I don't have a proper wood shop. My drum kit, weight bench, and grand piano take up almost the entire living room, so I don't have a proper living room. My filing cabinet, sewing table, printer table (for a printer the size of an office refrigerator), and Christmas tree (too big for any of my closets) ensure that I don't have a proper dining room, either—just the breakfast nook in the kitchen. My bedroom has essentially no available floor space, between the bed, dresser, two bedside tables, and a treadmill, with the exception of the main walking path into the room. My guest bedroom is completely filled with the bed, one tall dresser, and a small bedside table. I'd like to add another bookcase, but there's no space left in my house unless I put it on the front porch.

Basically, I've done the math, and to be comfortable, I need a minimum of 400 square feet for a wood shop, 200 square feet of closet space for the tree, at least 200 square feet of dedicated space for exercise equipment, and ideally a music room with another 400 square feet or so, for a total of 1,200 additional square feet, or 3,000 square feet total. If I got married, and if my wife had similarly space-demanding hobbies, and if we had three kids, even after you deduplicate the kitchen, bathrooms, and shared living space, we would still need well over 6,000 square feet. So 5,000 square feet for a family of 5 is not excessive. If anything, I'd find it kind of cramped.

Get a smaller, comfortable place to live and put you money somewhere more useful. If you're married, obviously your spouse needs to agree with this...

Or move to a location where you can afford a decent-sized house. Five thousand square feet is not a mansion. I believe that the current lower bound is 8,000 square feet.

Not at all. This is simply saying that the companies holding the analytics data for advertisement and using it to sell ads should be separate and distinct from the companies selling products, and that the companies selling the products should be providing info to them without providing any PII, tracked only by a persistent advertising identifier, and that a cookie nuke should reset that advertising identifier, destroying all prior history.

This. I don't mind static ads. Heck, I don't even mind analytics and tracking as long as it is anonymous and the raw data is not made available to anyone who could de-anonymize it.

What I mind are the seizure-inducing flashing ads that tell me I'm broadcasting an IP address, the ads that take over my screen if my mouse happens to cross the edge of the ad as I go to click a link on the page or scroll it, the ads that make annoying sounds on my work computer, the ads that play video and audio on my work computer, etc.

I know the advertisers think that they're going to get better results by being more annoying, but the reality is that it is an escalation in an arms race that can only result in that ad network getting blocked en masse.

The sector translation able is what I was talking about. That table is in the form of a log journal. If a drive is writing to that journal, thus recording the fact that the block moved from point A to point B, prior to actually finishing writing the data at point B, the drive is defective by design. Period. And if the drive did not write that journal block, then the data did not move to a new flash page, and the write didn't happen. It should not be possible for background updates to cause data loss, because the old copy will always still be there on the disk until such time as the new copy has been fully written and the translation table/log journal has been updated.

That said, if you have a below 2.5 GPA...good lord, go get a new diploma and with a higher GPA. Only your most recent GPA counts. Getting a good GPA isn't hard, it just requires you to actually give a shit. Employers tend to not care so much for people who don't give a shit.

Do any employers actually care what someone's GPA was in college? I don't think I've ever put that information on my resumé, and I've never had any prospective employer ask. Never. Yes, for a new college grad, it might be relevant, but for everybody else, going back to college would probably be a waste of your time.

IMO, you'd be much better off taking classes in a particular specialization that will be relevant to your future career as the original poster suggested, rather than wasting four years just to prove that you are capable of getting higher grades in a pile of non-major classes whose subjects mostly won't provide any real benefit in your future career.

The way I interpreted the question was not what kind of vehicle can do it for $30, but rather what kind of vehicle can do it on 3/4ths of a tank. The answer is "Almost all of them". To find out what kind of vehicle can do it for $30, find the highest MPG non-Toyota out there, and you probably have your answer, give or take. :-)

Fine, then a tax on all fuel when sold at truck stops (and require truck drivers to buy their fuel at truck stops, not that they realistically could do otherwise).

That's because Toyota uses undersized tanks in all their cars to artificially inflate their fuel economy numbers. Contrast that with, for example, a Ford Windstar, which has a theoretical highway range of 596 miles—only about a hundred miles short of a round trip from San Francisco to Los Angeles and back.