I know it's just a simple neighboring key typo, but I'm still laughing about a problem with "energy nerds" two minutes later.

What I'd really like is a house built with pre-installed vacuum tubes, so that you can get immediate distributions from a central depot. That would be awesome.

In the Catholic pre-marriage class they talked about birth control as "withholding your fertility from each other" which, by their standards, was as bad as withholding anything else in what's supposed to be a union. I'm not Catholic and really couldn't make sense of that one, but it seemed to be a universal argument against birth control of any kind.

I'm in the opposite situation. We've got two, she wants one more and I'd rather stop. She's had several of her friends say "Why don't you just stop taking birth control and not tell him?" to which she has replied, "I'm not going to betray my husband's trust like that." Guess that's how I know she's a keeper, as it would be a really uncomfortable situation if I couldn't trust her with this.

Since I only have to walk across a grass lot to get mine, does that mean I've got better odds than you do? (Also, poking holes in your logic, most people already go to a gas station or grocery store for other reasons, and don't need to make a separate trip just for the ticket.)

A friend of mine found a scratch-off ticket on the ground that netted him $10. It had already been scratched. No idea if the original owner just dropped it, or somehow misunderstood that it was a winner.

While I'm generally agreeing with you, I think we're actually in the middle of a huge glut of lawyers, and employment prospects out of law school are especially lousy, and have been for a while, so that may be a bad example.

I think you forgot the line about the cosmonauts.

Compatibility, on the other hand, is one reason I've used them. In my youth I created a bunch of files in WordPerfect on the Mac. Originally they were compatible with Microsoft Word so I didn't care. At some point decades later I realized that by drifting from Mac to PC and to MS Office as a default, I could no longer open those files. Even installing a newer version of WordPerfect for Windows wasn't working for me. Out of desperation I tried LibreOffice a couple of months ago and got the files open. I was very pleasantly surprised, and extremely happy to have my old projects back.

Brought to you by the people who invented "click start to shut down." I like it.

Now I'm going to have to invent sun-baked potato chips, just to prove a point. And make a fortune on the marketing gimmick. I shall call them Sun Chips. No, wait ...

I like the scroll wheel for scrolling, but I don't find it at all easy to click the wheel. That function may as well not exist for me.

The most frustrating part about those posts is usually the entire analysis is correct, up until that last throwaway line "it will never happen again." Why do the authors feel the need to include it? In some cases the real answer is it won't occur for another thousand or ten thousand years, but that's not good enough? Of course some of the others (December has five Tuesdays this year) happen about half of all years and are complete junk articles, but I actually find the rarer ones kind of neat, with the exception of the completely erroneous disclaimer.

Thanks for the confirmation. I thought so, but didn't want to say that and give anyone bad information.

Schedule D won't apply to tax-sheltered retirement accounts (at least during the investment stage; I haven't gotten to the withdrawal stage to figure that part out yet), so it's only if you've got investments outside of that.