I'm starting a car company, our cars will be well built, stylish, full of popular bells & whistles that the public will like & uber expensive...Oh one tiny catch...you have to buy your gas at the dealership, air your low tires at the dealership, in fact everything is so proprietary that you will need to use the dealership for everything; and if you don't not only is your warranty void, we reserve the right to prosecute you...but of course our fanbois will come out in droves to defend us & line up for days when the next years model comes out.

I am not in favor of capitol punishment and here are my reasons which have taken a good part of my adult life to figure out: 1. The state can & will make mistakes. Someone once said let 100 guilty men go free, instead of killing 1 innocent man. 2. If the person is innocent of the crime, they have the rest of their natural lives to exonerate themselves. If they can show malice in the trial or sentencing then they may have recourse against the state or the individual who sent them to prison. 3. If they are guilty, they have to wake up every day and knowing the person looking back at them in the mirror is guilty. That may be worse than the release of death.... 4. Life without parole is a perfectly acceptable sentence, they will no longer be a menace in society. 5. I do not have a citation, but in my home state according to a newspaper article, since 1972 we have put to death 4 people. In that time 15 I believe have died on death row before they faced the chair or the needle, so effectively they had life without parole. 6. No need to comment, I have spent over 3 decades thinking on and reading about capitol punishment. I now simply state my point and walk away, feel free to take it, leave it or dismiss it.

Yes the balls can be rigged but after speaking with some lottery folks years ago, they go to great lengths to insure there's no tampering with the balls. The state lottery decided to do their first ever live draw remotely and I was assigned there doing first aid/security (I was in the National Guard) The lottery security guy was explaining how they had several sets of balls. All sets were weighed before and after the draw and had to be within a very narrow window of weight both before & after. the draw set is also chosen randomly and before and after the draw each ball is weighed to make sure there is no tampering as well as the set holder without the balls. So about 15 minutes prior the sets were weighed, one was chosen each ball was weighed and the set holder was weighed. The draw was done live and immediately after the everything was reweighed and passed. This was 20 years ago so the methods may have improved or changed. I don't play much but I think the big money is still ping pong balls, now the small every 5-10 minute is RNG I guess.

I was born during the Johnson Administration and was not eligible to vote until Reagan was in office. I have made the decision that for the rest of my life I will not vote for a President who has the same last name as any President who has held office since my birth. If I remember American history correctly, our founding fathers voted against dynasties with muskets and several of the foreign states we have been at odds with in the past 60 years are dynasties although they are voted in democratically (when there is only one party it's pretty easy) and we do have the sham of two parties that are simply 2 different dynasties taking turns screwing the American public. So any Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, or Obama that runs will NOT get my vote, although there might be an exception for a Johnson, as Gary Johnson is not related to Lyndon Johnson and is not part of the two party dynasty.

It's all (insert ideology you disagree with here) fault!!! I'll start It's all global warming/global cooling/democrats/republicans/liberals/conservatives/evolutionists/creationists/fracking fault!!! They all did it the dirty rotten SOBs....Did I miss anyone?

Same thing was done to Troi in TNG when she tested for full Commander. The no-win forced her to choose a crewmate to die to save the ship in a holodeck simulation. She failed until she realized someone had to die. Of course the person she ordered protested but eventually went off to their "death" for the greater good. Back to the subject: Kudos to him for thinking outside the box, very creative, hopefully it will be channeled in a positive direction.

911 operator gets no answer as the library IS CLOSED DID YOU MISS THAT PART? I was a first responder who backed up the local SWAT team a few times, both real & false alarms. These guys take everything, including their training mock scenarios very seriously. I got shot (training rounds still hurt like a mother-) for showing up late at a mock hostage scenario at a local sports stadium once. The bad guys took control of the announcers booth, and were holding the PA guy hostage. It was funny hearing the bad guys demand a million dollars and a helicopter on the 50 yard line over the PA and insulting the SWAT team the whole time. I can only imagine what someone outside was thinking if they heard that.

So how does one get on this "list"? I have absolutely no problem with any hajis showing up on my doorstep, I'll gladly let them meet 72 virgins...or whatever is waiting for them...

I used to work in the telecommunications field before I moved to IT (not a big change, but I digress) I started as a field worker, house to house doing the physical repair work. I was often warned "this caller is a real ass" by our dispatcher which I found it meant they managed to escalate the call to a real supervisor. Almost without exception when I showed up knocking on the door, they were always sweet & polite. The reason: I was a real body was standing there to help them, not read a script. After years of doing that, I briefly left the field looking elsewhere and when that idea fizzled I went back to telecommunications but decided to take my knowledge into the call center, thinking better hours, no bad weather and nearly the same pay. After training, I lasted about 3 weeks on the phone, forced to read from a script when I knew exactly what needed to be done to fix the issue, forced to use only IE, at times intentionally not telling a user the whole truth (we were not allowed to tell users that service would be interrupted for 6-8 hours overnight for upgrade work), working overnight didn't help either....drunks, bullies, and general asses calling. I had enough and had a connection to get into IT and took it.

Funny, my new Chip & PIN card came in the mail from one of my CC last week...still no word on the PIN yet, perhaps I need to contact them directly & no it is not my current bank...

In October 2012 I was on vacation visiting an old Army buddy. He is a firefighter/paramedic and happened to be on duty the night Chicago Fire premiered. As a former firefighter/EMT myself, he invited me to the station to watch with his shift. Within 2 minutes we were all howling and how ridiculously bad the show was written. One of the guys was online chatting with some of the other firefighter/paramedics who were watching at home. I think they hit almost every stereotype they could fit in that first episode. I still watch Chicago Fire when my schedule allows, and still shake my head at how badly the show is written. I actually watch for the plot lines that aren't wrapped around fire/EMS situations. True it's fluff but that's what I will expect from CSI:Cyber, terrible hacker/computer writing, maybe a believable personal plot that will all be fluff. My police friends have the same complaints about Chicago Police too, but that's another story...

Welcome to Europe! If you scream assault you will be laughed at. I am currently immigrating to the Netherlands, there are bike lanes all over the country, they are bike lanes not for anything else. My first time there, being a tourist I stopped on a bike lane to take a photo...the man who ran me over never apologized he just hit me and continued on...my Bride and in-laws politely informed me I was wrong and photos should be taken off the bike path. They also were snickering as I was picking myself up after being hit.

Call me a skeptic. Mother Nature will do what she damn well pleases with this planet and doesn't give a rip about us humans. 99.5% of all life on this planet has gone extinct and the other .5% will including us. A good old fashioned volcanic eruption like Mt. Tambora in 1815 will cause "climate change". That was called the year without a summer in 1816. I am not so vain as to think we can do anything to this planet that she will even notice, short of a full and total nuclear exchange. Even then I'm certain that a portion of the ocean life won't even notice that anything has happened and will continue to live, evolve & go extinct as Mother Nature sees fit. As time marches on we will see cooling cycles and warming cycles and a year to year comparison is irrelevant, or as relevant as comparing sports teams team stats year after year. Rules changes and personnel changes will alter the numbers significantly. For those of you still firmly on the "global warming" bandwagon then read this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... or this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M... either one will confirm your belief or refute your belief.

My fiance is currently living in the Netherlands and they switched off of CEDST last weekend, and here in the US we just switched from EDST. I have few problems mentally calculating time differences as I had to do it constantly when I was assigned to Korea in the military in the medical field...watching the docs come in in the middle of the night for a mandatory conference call with the CDC (we used experimental STD drugs) or with Medical Command HQ (in San Antonio TX) was fun. They had no clue what time their meetings were, so we had to learn quickly as our command and South Korea did not observe DST. My fiance still has trouble with the time shift, so she will tell me "call me at X" knowing I can figure this out. I will be glad when her visa goes through so I don't have to timeshift for a chance to Skype with her and the 4 times a year I have to recalculate for a week or two our time difference.

Yeah how did that work out for the public Dr. Nancy Snyderman, the Doc in NYC who went bowling and the latest the nurse who decided to go for a bike ride? The common link is they were all health care workers;with their entitlement attitudes I will not call them professionals. I spent years in the healthcare field and decided to leave. When "consultations" with other doctors are planning golf outings or looking at Dr. X's new toy and the patient is not mentioned or the nursing staff are more concerned about where to go party this weekend rather than has Mr. Jones gotten the medication he needs on time to fight the infection he has, along with the selfish anti-team members more concerned with making sure they have carved out their "turf" to last until retirement and will happily garrote anyone who steps in their path. And I have IT team members ask me "Why didn't you stay in health care?" Am I bitter? a little bit. I believe now that had I stayed in military healthcare I would have been happier I might still be in the healthcare field.