Yes, kitchen counter space is limited. And toolbox space, and desks, and dressers, etc etc. Keurig has a functional niche (places where mess is intolerable or there's no one to clean it up, like medical lobby or a low-use office), but their marketing has convinced a broader market that it's too cool not to have one. It won't last. Already there's blowback about the amount of waste produced by this particular device, and popularity is waning... just like most other uber-popular single-use doohickeys.

In order to survive past initial novelty-driven sales, a single-purpose/non-flexible device had better be utterly awesome at what it does, and seriously durable in both function and regularity of need. That's why the regular pan stays while the egg-magic pan goes to Goodwill (not durable, don't want eggs every day), and virtually every Rolodex has been replaced by a free app on a general-purpose portable computing device (not flexible, need changed). The Keurig makes consistent mid-grade coffee (not awesome), and is moderately durable at best (and DRM is a form of intentional breakage), which means market survival will eventually come down to flexibility. Can JoeBob consumer make ramen with a Keurig? No? Then eventually he'll keep the kettle and throw out the Keurig.

'Jus sayin... as I sip decent coffee out of a mug, made with a 15yo Cuisinart kettle, an $0.80 sbux Via packet, and less waste/cleanup than Keurig. The packet will change, the kettle will stay.

The annual booster shots for dogs is greed. So is the leptospirosis vaccine, and heartworm treatments for anything bigger than a squirrel. The leptospirosis vaccine only protects against 6 of the more than 150 types, and it's transferred by wild infected animals pissing on your dog's food. For heartworm, just keep the mosquito population down, the same as you should be doing to prevent the transmission of West Nile disease in humans. It's not like dogs can catch it from each other.

California is a microcosm of the United States as a whole: liberal around the coasts, except for the south coast; and conservative inland, except near the large body of water on the border.

They also tend to run liberal in federal elections and conservative in state elections.

This split personality is behind a lot of California's budget problems, as one part of the populace with a majority vote has mandated spending on certain programs, and another part of the populace with a majority vote has prohibited raising certain taxes, leaving the legislature tightly bound between the rock of having to spend money and the hard place of not being able to raise it, requiring them to borrow it.

Which, come to think of it, is another microcosm of the United States as a whole, and the reason for the constant debt crises we keep having. Congress mandates spending, doesn't authorize the necessary taxes, and then blames the president for coming to the unavoidable necessity of borrowing to pay for what they've required him to spend and not allowed him to raise.

But the numbers you have come up with are not comparable to each other, as they are for different areas and data sets.

25% of calls are pranks, while 70% are dialled inadvertently - an inadvertent dial is not a prank, and a prank is not an inadvertent dial, so these figures are not comparable.

The expected total expenditures for a student at my university when I graduated back in 2003 were in the range of $19,000 per year in today's dollars. Estimated total costs for students at the same university in the upcoming school year are about $35,000.

There really is no comparison here. School is vastly more expensive today than it was even 15 years ago. And that is tremendously unfair to current students.

You trust the infrastructure between you and the second party, but only in the US (and some tourist areas) is it considered acceptable to hand over your card to a 3rd party who disappear with it for a while. The rest of the world, the third party never, or rarely even touches your card. So you don't have to trust a 3rd party with your card to use it. At most, you trust the infrastructure between you and the credit card company.

"A better question may be, why do "federally-guaranteed loans" need to exist in the first place..." Exactly. If the question is "Why is higher education so expensive," that is the answer.

That's a great point but it does seem like a company should have the right to enable GPS tracking for company assets. Perhaps a good compromise would be that you could indicate when you were off-work to avoid tracking, but if required the device could be signaled to turn back on tracking.

I personally would probably get one of those signal shielding bags and drop it in there when I wasn't to be on-call. Then you could carry it with you even. Then it also appears just as if it lost power for a while, so it would be hard to get in trouble over it...

Depends. Is it wrapped with #if __i386__ || __x86_64__ and followed by a #else clause that contains code without the insane optimization? If so, it is elegant. If not, it is ugly.

And if he was to prescribe a standard antibiotic, you can buy them yourself at a pet supply. The same antibiotics used for fish are the same that you are given. Exactly the same, just different labels and no prescription required.

Is it? How come I never see job ads for COBOL programmers? I know no one who uses it. I have often heard that it is used in "banks" or for "business" programming. But I know several people that work as programmers at banks, and none of them use COBOL or are aware of it being used at all. They are all Java shops. Same for programmers writing business logic. So I think that all these myths about demand for COBOL programmers is a load of hogwash.

Ada was oversold in the 1980s, and quickly developed a reputation for poor performance, and heavy resource requirements. Few systems were written in it, and even mission critical military systems (which Ada was designed for) could commonly get an exemption to use something more sensible.

Many of the concerns about the safety of fracking relate to the drill shaft and riser pipe that comes up from the pay dirt, through the groundwater supplies, to the surface. When the riser pipe is installed, a drill shaft is made and the pipe is inserted into it, there is a space between the pipe and the wall of the drill shaft that is supposed to be filled in with cement. If the cement flow is blocked for whatever reason, the annular space may not be filled in, you will end up with an open channel that could run for thousands of feet between the pay dirt and the groundwater supply. Since you cant really see if the cemented went okay, its many thousands of feet underground, its hard to tell if this is happening. When the high pressure drilling fluids are injected, they would easily flow right up that channel into the groundwater supply. They say in the propoganda that there is many thousands of feet of impermeable rock between the pay dirt layer and the groundwater, but this doesnt mean much as you just drilled a hole through it all.

Lost me here. Programming can definitely be a passion, and it can also be a talent. One might have a natural aptitude at programming. That doesn't mean one cannot learn the skill of programming, or that someone who finds it difficult in the beginning will not become an expert.