*sigh*

So now "between and man and a woman" is now "men paired with women." Even you can see those aren't the same thing.

But read up on it. You'll find that there have been Western institutions of pairing a man with multiple women. There have been institutions of pairbonding of men (specifically monks). There have been institutions of spouse ownership. You only have to go back a short way to find that the "traditional marriage" is a fairly recent invention. Again, read Coontz (yes, I know you won't, but she has a hell of a lot more documentation than I'm going to post here).

And hey, if we're going for "tradition," why not go whole-hog? Let's bring in all of the possible traditions. Widows must marry their brothers-in-law. Adulterers must be killed. Anyone who disgraces the family honor must be stoned. These are marriage traditions that go back thousands of years too.

I think what we can say is that marriage has been between a man and a woman for thousands of years.

You think wrong. Marriage has been a quite varied institution even within the narrow stricture of "Western" culture over the past few thousand years. A good starting point if you want to learn is Stephanie Coontz's book. But there is a great deal of actual research on the subject, which would be well worth your time to look into.

It has nothing to do with political correctness to point any of this out. It's simple fact.

States started with the marriage licenses to prevent brothers and sisters from marrying each other.

Incorrect. Marriage licensing, historically, is directly related to inheritance.

Pick up the phone. Ask them who they're calling from, have them spell your name specifically, state you "do not recall" such alleged debt. If you can, record the call. ("It's for my own records" if they ask.) Don't ever give them ANY information. If they insist on collection, ask them to send you a physical claim. If such arrives, find a defect and tell them about it when they call back. (unless, of course, they have an actually-toll-free number, which they have to pay for.)

Oh, and always, ALWAYS make them repeat themselves. Repeat yourself ad-naueum, as well.

Just don't make any false statements, or agree to the validity of any debt you are not willing to pay.

(Honestly, though, I'd expect a scam to drop at "I'm recording this call, and your name is?")

You seem to have confused "down" with "off."

Quickoffice was a document-editing program way back in the PalmOS days, and it was the only major player to make a WebOS version.

Quickoffice does not require Google Docs to work. Although it does have some features which are counter-intuitive and don't work depending on the view you're in.

> 3) Its battery life is pathetic, so it makes up for it with a mediocre ICE to charge with. Wake me when it has a range near 1000 miles, which is what a setup like this should be sporting.

This is a serial electric hybrid. You are evaluating a metric that only really matters for an all-electric car.

A Volt (or any other car with a gasoline engine) can make a journey of 1,000 miles significantly faster than any car tesla makes. They can also be rescued if energy runs out with a common plastic container, instead of a tow truck.

An electric car is an excellent choice if your daily commute and fiscal budget allow it. (I know people whose daily commute is well over 100 miles each way.). But they are simply not the same category as hybrid cars, be those hybrids serial or parallel.

(And, yes, I know that the Volt's engine and likely the ESR have a physical connection to the drivetrain that is used at certain highway speeds. That makes it a semi-paralel hybrid, not an electric car.)

I'll see your Dyncorp, and raise you Dryco. Worry not. Wonder not.

Somewhere at home, I still have a page ripped from one of the early Byte magazines with an ad for a "Density Doubler" cassette interface for the TRS-80.

It also prominently featured the word "whopping" along with "virtually unlimited storage." I think it would put up to 300kb on a 30 minute tape, and also increased the baud rate to 1000 (the default was 500, unless I'm forgetting).

Those 87kb floppy disks looked small compared to that massive tape capacity!

Same problem here, different platforms. First computer was a TRS-80 with 4kb. Now even my phone has 32Gb, although if you want to get technical about it and talk only RAM, I'd have to go to my notebook which has 16Gb.

I still have a stack of (doubtless unreadable) 180kb and 360kb ssdd and dsdd hard-sectored 40-track floppies in the garage somewhere.

For the more enlightened of us self-important, hippie, too-cool-for-you douchebags, coffee breath is an *aphrodisiac*. Although I would concur that the crap at McBuck's doesn't rate.

I take it you've never encountered a vegan on a low blood sugar rampage, especially if they think you're a smug meat eater.

Those folks are positively *feral*. They'll rip your face off, although they will have the good grace not to eat it afterwards.

The wife took CERT training.

As a result, we've got several layers of preparation: a bug-out bag good for a few days, a bug-out crate that we could get in the car and that would last us a week or two, and smaller stashes in each of our cars. My car is AWD, and I have a winch, spare tire, and empty fuel containers in the back. We have cell phones, crank-operated cell-phone chargers, crank radios, and out of town contacts who will relay messages for us.

There's a generator in the garage with a siphon for gas, although it's never been used. We have a 2.2kW solar array on the roof, which can (with a few shunts) operate off-grid.

There're water purification devices (both electric and hand-pumped) in several kits, in addition to an 80 gallon rain barrel in the back yard.

Then there's the arsenal to defend all this stuff, including both firearms, claymore mines, and more analog stuff for later, like crossbows and trebuchets.

We've hidden caches of food, clothing, medicine, fuel, and ammunition throughout the nearby hills. I have a GPS and spare batteries in each bug-out kit with the coordinates written in waterproof ink on tin sheets.

(While the wife went to CERT training, I went to "How to Sell Your Startup to VCs" training, where I learned to be a pathological liar.)

Making a zip gun from plastic tubing is, however. And that's what a 3-d printed gun barrel is.

Over the weekend, I got a lot of spurious charges on the credit card I use for my Linode account. Charges from several different countries, for various amounts that looked like automated "is this card valid?" type probes. The bank shut it down, but not before I got paged a bunch of times.

Then again, the odds are just as good that a waiter at some restaurant uploaded my number to some IRC channel to get back at me for my guest's order being too complicated or something.