The wind at your back and a star to sail by.

Seriously though, I would log onto Cruising World Magazine's website and start reading through their back catalog for articles on how to prepare for blue water sailing.

I would have at minimum: gps plotter with charts, radar, vhf radios (one for boat, handheld for dingy), ssb radio, cell phone, laptop, ipod, watermaker, and good instruments for wind/boat speed, etc. Make sure you have redundant equipment that can work without electricity or handelds that work on local batteries.

By the way, don't bring a gun, unless you don't want to be allowed into any port. Guns are forbidden in 99% of countries if you are entering by boat and they will immediately make you leave if they don't throw you in jail first. Bring a Crocodile Dundee knife, instead.

Government is the lesser evil than business? I don't think so. Business has competition and must voluntarily enter into a transaction with you. Government is a monopoly and can require you to act on pain of imprisonment and death.

"StrongVPN", not Stong, jeez

I use StongVPN to login from Europe for my household (3 power users) to get Netflix, Hulu, etc. I don't know how this would scale to hundreds of people, but StrongVPN's customer support is very good. Every time I chat with the support staff, there is someone there (24 hours, I am on Paris time), and they have taken care of my problem. They seem to have lots of servers so you could probably get the bandwidth you need. Good luck!

I haven't seen a DVD in years thanks to Netflix andHulu streaming, and software downloads.

It's obvious most of the people on this forum have no children. I had a similar circumstance where my child rang up $500 in in-app purchases. When I bought the 99 cemt app, I read all the fine print and it said nothing about in-app purchases. Keep in mind, this is a child's game where you run around finding jewels or something. You can level up using found jewels. However, at some levels, in the same screen, you can purchase the level up using real money instead of jewels. The only difference is a dollar sign instead of the jewel icon next to your item. This is misleading, especially to a child that has no concept of money.

Even worse, I tried to get a refund from the game developer and they referred me to the Apple Store. The Apple store links were circular, so there was no way to report the problem. (The Report a Problem page had a link that sent me to the Support page. To report a problem on the Support page there was a link to the Report a Problem page.) Luckily, my Apple Store account was linked to Paypal so I got a refund there.

Afterwards, I did some research and found out you can turn off in-app purchases, which I have now done. However, on this iPad, I have to go back and turn it on when I want to make a purchase, since the iPad does not have the ability to create separate user accounts.

I'm a lawyer and thought this would be a good class action suit. I'm glad to see someone has done it.

Freefilefillableforms.com is an online tax preparation and efile service that is free. No income limitations and almost all 1040 related forms. I have used it for several years and it is great. You can save the return to your disk as a pdf. It computes the fields and does some basic error checking. It links to related forms and instructions. Easy to use GUI, almost too flashy sometimes. It does not store the data in any usable format, but that is fine for me because I do everything in Quicken.

I live in France and use StrongVPN for Hulu and Netflix. They are reasonable, have actually helpful 24 hour customer service on chat, and sell a preconfigured VPN Cisco gigabit router to share the VPN with the whole house (which they support). They also have good troubleshooting tools, and lots of servers to choose from. It took some patience to get it setup properly but now it's running smoothly. I recommend them. If you buy the router, I also recommend you upgrade to their OpenVPN servers.

I decided to go paperless, too. This means selecting electronic delivery of all the documents you can. For others who insist on sending you paper mail, get Virtual Post Mail (http://www.virtualpostmail.com/). They will scan all your mail to downloadable .pdf files. They will forward original documents if you wish or recycle them. They even have a check depositing service. It's about $100 per year.

I have been using them for a few months now and it is working great. No more incoming paper. As others have said, don't bother with all your past documents, put them in a banker's box and destroy them over time. It will be too time consuming and expensive to scan all your past documents.

Buy a roll of velcro tie material (http://www.bing.com/shopping/search?q=velcro+ties+roll&qpvt=velcro+ties+roll&FORM=Z7FD).

Cut them into 1" to 3" lengths depending on the thickness of your cables. Tie them off every 12" or so.

For cables of different lengths, roll the excess in a 6" roll somewhere out of the way, velcro tie that, then continue on so that the terminations are equal.

Link?

Writing an article about these adolescents just gives them what they want: attention.

Once they put a device in your car that can record your movements, it is a slippery slope to using this device, for instance, to track your movements, to automatically give you a ticket by email when you speed, or to disable control of the vehicle remotely when the authorities want to control your movements.

If there's a need for delivering mail to Alaska, the market will fill it.

I'm not saying get rid of the Post Office. Right now it is *illegal* to even compete with the Post Office. Let the private market compete and you will see more efficiency. It has worked everywhere else, it will work here.

The insurance market is not analogous as it is highly regulated by government. By the way, insurance is a risk contract. If you are already sick, your risk is 100% so you are not insurable.

The USPS is a government monopoly. End the monopoly and let free enterprise competition enter the equation. This proven method will increase the efficiency of letter delivery more than any central committee.