You don't have to watch cable TV with commercials.. Get a DVR.. or jeez, a VCR. I was skipping commercials well over 20 years ago with my own VCRs, close to 30 with my parents' VCR... and now with DVRs..

(Note, I *do* use On Demand once in a while, and that DOES have unskippable commercials for SOME channels.. Though after a couple of days, the commercials are often skippable [for non-broadcast stations], but even broadcast stations sometimes, e.g. Enlisted, had shows with NO commercials on On Demand.)

Why would they freeze ALL of your accounts all of a sudden? Use a different credit card (cabs take CCs nowadays, right?). Or go to an ATM and get some cash that way if absolutely necessary.

Your money in the bank is already "directly traced via some technological means". It's numbers in a computer.

Heck, even if you have a pile under your mattress, the value of it is due to everyone else thinking it has value too... You can't eat it.. and no, I don't think gold has more inherent value in itself either, except for conductive properties when society rebuilds itself after whatever imagined doomsday scenario you come up with.

What protection existed that allowed Amazon to be created in the 1990s as a tiny company (ran out of his garage) that became a behemoth due to its own success?

Why can't _another_ company do something better and put Amazon out of business?

Mules are the quintessential example of two species being close enough to produce offspring but distinct enough that the offspring is never fertile. However, fertile mules have been found.

Aren't you contradicting yourself? The wikipedia page says pregnancy can occur naturally. Also, due to the # of chromosomes issue, couldn't the 'rare' fertile mules produce offspring? (i.e. a male mule & female mule)

Who are you calling we, kemosabe?

I had a 105 meg external drive by 1992 (I think it might have been easily 1-2 years before that). Actually, I had an 80 meg external before that (put into a case).. the 105 was a prebuilt "external" drive.

Yeah, wow, I didn't realize that form was so relatively recent. I had thought that's what soccer balls were "always" like. (From the Wikipedia page, they actually came out before 1970..)

This is only because the practice isn't well established.

I was being more general, of the practice of people 'picking the default'. I can't provide citations admittedly, but people sure seem to think most accept the default button in computer dialogs, for example. If that is true (and I personally think it is), I don't see why that wouldn't be the same for other things, except for the comparative fringe who is on the no monitoring/privacy end of the spectrum.

Nowadays, the Intel architecture won...

I think ARM Holdings (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_Holdings) and its licensees would like a word with you.

His fund has an impressive trading record. He had the big advantage of starting early, in 1982, when almost nobody was doing automated trading or using advanced statistical methods. Their best years were 1982-1999. Now everybody grinds on vast amounts of data, and it's much tougher to find an edge. Performance for the last few years has been very poor, below the S&P 500. That's before fees.

So then was it a fluke or not?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

How do you know I am?

Plus, if, as the buyer, I don't care about that, why not let me buy whatever I want?

We are... the companies from which we're buying the products.

Sure, he did all kinds of dirt-gathering in order to try and impeach Clinton

Clinton *WAS* impeached. He wasn't *convicted*.

Because sometimes costs (catastrophic illness) go beyond one's means?

I agree with you in general, though... and even after buying a new car, have the minimum amount of car insurance.