It's not Hot Topic and GameStop that are merging; it's GameStop and ThinkGeek. There is the opportunity for "synergy" (yeah, I hate the word, too) in that they're both retailers to a similar demographic, but one is online and the other is brick-and-mortar. They can do all kinds of cross-selling and get a combined company that sells more than either of the two separately. As well as eliminating a few minor redundancies in the staffing (such as maintaining two completely independent web sites), though that kind of thing never produces really huge gains.

That's an *opportunity*, of course, not a guarantee. They can still fuck it up royally. In fact, that's where I'd lay my money.

For some reason, al Qaeda seemed to have a thing for planes. They did try after 9/11, like the Underwear Guy and the Shoe Guy, though both were quite incompetent.

I suspect it's related to people's general fear of planes, even though they know on a per-mile basis the planes are really safe. The combination of the rather remarkable fact that they fly at all, that people are trapped in them, and the spectacle of many people dying at once seems to attract a lot more attention than it really merits in terms of the sheer calculus of death. Terrorism became really prominent through hijacking and bombing planes. It still seems to hold a fascination.

It is notable that we haven't seen any attempted bombing or hijacking for quite some time. Perhaps al Qaeda has realized that it's pointless, though they're not really doing all that much against softer targets, either. I think we all know how easy it would be, and how much disproportionate terror it would cause in Americans, and I don't really know why they haven't tried harder. Not that I'm unhappy about it, but it does leave me uneasy. Not uneasy enough to impose TSA-level draconian measures on everything, of course.

In many places electricity is taxed or high distribution tariffs apply. When you combine that with low feed-in tariffs, those with solar panels have a strong incentive to use their own power rather than export and import power.

Thus, it is cost effective to store energy for the consumer, not for the power companies -- and sometimes it is cost effective for the consumer to store energy expensive high-demand power from the middle of the day and use it during the night when power is otherwise cheap. Some power companies are investing in batteries to do the exact opposite, of course.

In the grand scheme of things there are larger fish to fry when it comes to tax and tariffs though, where the interests of society do not align with the incentives provided to individual people. E.g. it is rather stupid to tax labour, which is a clean and beneficial way to improve our society, instead of resource consumption which causes pollution and poverty.

Yeah, and also meant my public key.
Derp.

Anyone who encrypts mail to me does it from their own machines. This is for Facebook mail to you. If a user grabs your keys they can also send you mail directly without going through Facebook.

Facebook lets you control your public keys as if it were any other information: public, friends only, etc.

Them having my private key is not a problem. This encrypts email one would normally get. I don't work for Facebook.

What is the problem you are eluding to?

If they have only your public keys, what is the harm in them running a keyserver?

I don't use the gmail web client. I have the a GPG plugin (GPGMail) on my laptop's email and a GPG client (oPenGP) on my iPhone.

There are GPG plugins for the web client but I have not used them.

a) for some things, yes.

b) It's worth encrypting everything. This protects your data not only from the spooks, but from gmail/live/your ISP/whatever free client you may use.

Just added my keys. Not that I care about the notifications that "Billy scored X on Y Game", but anything that obfuscates and encrypts data on the wire is a good thing. It's not just the NSA, how many of you use gmail? This will keep them from scanning your mail.

>In fact I may enable a bunch more useless notifications and set up a rule to delete them at my end as they arrive.

I appreciate software is different than engineering, but the collaboration, mentoring, and comorodory of an open office environment really helps build the business for us. While I do have an office

You like the open office environment, although you have your own office... how nice. Open offices are really nice as long as it is someone else dealing with being packed in like cattle.

Same as eBay, seller reputation.

End prohibition. Stop the violence.

Thanks!

You're talking about a profession that in many cases has either no training or dubious training.

This is a field that requires a masters degree and certification.

You're probably thinking of faith-based social organizations that attempt to provide counseling services. Those agencies do not provide effective treatment for the ailments you mentioned. At best they might be able to provide some marriage counseling assistance.

The system can't seem to find a victim though. The system is broken.