My bathroom fan already does this! If I'm standing in the bathroom talking, my wife can hear me from another room. If she talks, however, I can't hear her at all.

I guess they just built a higher resolution version of my bathroom?

for reference, Minneapolis (a much smaller city, but one that gets more severe storms) spends about $9 million a year maintaining:

"39 tandem-axle dump trucks with sander units and plows
15 tandem-axle dump trucks with plows
15 single-axle dump trucks with sander units and plows
3 motor graders
12 front-end loaders with spade-nosed buckets or plows
To round out the fleet, 15 motor graders and four front-end loaders equipped with front and side plows are rented for the winter season and staffed by City operators
Finally, to accomplish the alley plowing in the shortest time frame, 20 front-end loaders with operators are contracted on an as-needed basis"

From http://www.minneapolismn.gov/s...

Semi trucks are what blocked the roadways. A cluster of semis that can't make a grade brings all the cars behind them to a... wait for it... dead stop.

You must have missed what clogged all the roads in Atlanta: semi trucks that couldn't make slight grades. Personal vehicles were certainly having trouble too, but this doesn't all fall on "inexperienced in the snow" Atlantans. I lived in the upper midwest for several years, and I DID see pre-emptive salting.

I think you get that as an added benefit to the Soylent diet -- it's a 2 for 1.

(That's a pun, because you're eating a liquid based diet without much refuse, so you exchange 2... for 1...)

That's because Google is in on it too.

(removes tongue from cheek).

It was probably just that lady trying to get her money back for the cookie recipe.

Silly researchers. Don't they know that Time Travelers take a course on Adaptive Obfuscation in their junior year of Time Traveler School in which they are taught all the methods history has every come up with to detect time travel? All they've done is added an inset to the course textbook in the chapter on the late 20th/early 21st century.

But wait, maybe they SUSPECT this is the course of history, and the researchers have invested heavily in industries that will be involved in time travel textbook publishing!

Whereas as stockholders come behind creditors in bankruptcy proceedings. So if a loan left the with "nothing," stock would have left them with less in such an event.

Like I said, "woosh" :)

I had much more fun fixing the sentence while preserving the "biggest" error. I only posted to have fun with that. I have no complaint with your point or your mild mistake. Just having a little fun with what correcting it could look like.

Umm, woosh?

I hate to be a grammar Nazi, but...

There, FTFY.

Agreed. To fix Feinstein's quote: "He’s done this enormous service to our country, and I think the answer is no clemency."

I understand why he can't be offered clemency by the overseers of the system he has revealed. But the state is insular, the security apparatus more so. To suggest that whistleblowing within the ranks would have produced the sort of system review that's been going on is intentionally naive on her part.

Snowden did what any honest president with a backbone could have (legally) done upon learning about the overreach of the US security apparatus. Reveal the key abuses, start a public dialog about how the abuses came to be, and initiate reforms to correct the abuses. It's hard to remember, but this is the course of action you would have expected from Obama's pre-election rhetoric. He was for transparency and reigning in the constitutional abuse brought on by the war on terror.

The difference between a president and an underling doing it is that the underling is not authorized, and therefore by definition is revealing state secrets, and his mechanism is solely public pressure. Snowden has accomplished the first two objectives (reveal and start a public dialog). It's up to us to push the third.