€144,000 annually is comfortable living by any metric.

Getting deeper into bed with them is not a sensible decision either. It may be necessary in the short term but what's the exit strategy? The most sensible decision would be to avoid putting yourself in the position where you have to make that choice. Failing that, I would personally take my chances with the authorities. Caving to blackmail is never a winning move in the long term.

If you don't want to get fleas don't lay down with dogs. The "mob" (a misleading title, given that TFA doesn't mention Cosa Nostra or any other organized crime syndicate....) didn't pick these two at random and hold guns to their head. They got involved with them willingly; one of the two was seeking start up capital for a business venture and quite likely ignored the little voice inside of his head because of greed. An old adage comes to mind, "If it sounds too good to be true....."

Incidentally, the "mob" as traditionally discussed in the United States doesn't tend to go after random citizens. They typically get hooks into their victims because of the victim's own bad judgment. Loansharking, gambling, prostitution, drugs, and so forth. At the street level the vast majority of violent crime is common criminal on common criminal. There aren't too many places in the First World where taxpaying citizens have to really worry about becoming a statistic. Common sense goes a long way....

Read TFA. Specifically these paragraphs:

To his surprise, Adibelli agreed. “If you wanted out, why didn’t you let us know?” he said. Maertens was too scared to bring up the beating and the kidnapping and death threats. “Obviously, you know we’re not in a legal business,” Adibelli added. “So if you talk to anyone, we know where you and your family live.”

Adibelli brought Van De Moere down next and asked him if he wanted out, too. Van De Moere said yes.

There was only one condition of the release: Van De Moere had to give Okul an intensive training session on Linux, the operating system on which Metasploit, the hacking software, is based. A few weeks later, according to police and interviews, he did so over one weekend at a Holiday Inn in Ghent. In November, Van De Moere returned two antennas and had a couple of beers with Okul. That was the last either man would see of the Turks.

Something doesn't jive here. The type of people that are willing to actually hold a gun to your head are not the type of people that are willing to let you walk away simply by giving your notice. I don't doubt that there was some level of intimidation at play but there were apparently limits to how far the bad guys were willing to go. Which begs the question of why these two didn't go to the authorities after they "got out." Perhaps they didn't wish to part with the €25,000 in cash they had previously received?

These two were making €12,000 and €20,000 per month, before their involvement with the criminal element. One of them was seeking start up capital for a business venture and allowed himself to get roped in that way. If you give them the benefit of the doubt the best you can say about them is they were naive. In the worst reading they were greedy and willfully complicit. I suspect reality falls between those two extremes.

You know, you can just put Classic Shell on, and it looks and behaves almost identically to Win7. The only significant change I see in 8.1 once you get out of Metro is the task manager is a bit better.

I know that making one change is a significant hardship to most people. It's probably not as hard as explaining why they can't run Windows programs. Or at least trying to explain why particular programs don't work under Wine.

New York State limits you to carrying no more than seven condoms at a time. It's a bit of common sense legislation; there's no legitimate reason why a non-rapist would need more than seven condoms. :)

Please name 38 States that you think would ratify such an amendment. My own State (New York) would not ratify a repeal of the 2nd Amendment, despite our hostility to gun rights; the votes simply aren't there in the New York State Senate. If New York State would not ratify it just who do you think would? Other than New Jersey there is no State that is more hostile to gun rights than New York. I could set the bar lower for you than an outright repeal and you still can't get to 38.

Politics is the art of the possible; whatever the merits or lack thereof of gun control you do need to acknowledge this reality.

That would be prior restraint; in the United States we do not apply prior restraint to fundamental rights. You can be denied your right to keep and bear arms because of an established mental illness (the Federal standard requires that you be deemed mentally incompetent by a court) but you can not be compelled to prove a negative in order to exercise it.

"I have schizophrenia." <--- Denied
"Prove you don't have schizophrenia." <--- Unconstitutional

If you're not an American that may seem like a weird place to draw the line but we've got centuries of case law and tradition behind this concept. Speech works the same way too.

I suspect processed foods are not harmful. A raw food diet is a lot likely to be less optimal (basically, cooking - which is processing food - is what made us human: processing our food allowed us to break it down a bit meaning a simpler, more efficient digestive process, allowing us to have larger brains).

If you cook from fresh ingredients, guess what you're still eating processed food. Just because the food processing happened in your home, doesn't mean it's not processed food. It doesn't matter where the processing occurred - in your home, in a factory, or wherever, so long as the food doesn't contain excessive quantities of crap. I think the real answer is avoid crap foods. Foods with large quantities of refined sugar for example. I think the main things of home cooking (processed foods processed in your home) is that you know what went into the process so it's easier to avoid the crap simply by not adding it to the recipe.

I'm 43 and people who meet me think I'm in my 20s (well, apart from the receeding hairline but I've had that since a teenager). I drink, I eat processed foods all the time, I have plenty of milk, not too much sugar, and love gluten. I exercise a bit (mostly ride my bike). I drink tea (hot with milk, no sugar) by the gallon. I eat ice cream and chocolate probably too much. I'm 5'11" and weigh 152lbs.

Unless you've got a specific condition which gluten aggravates (celiacs etc.), gluten free diets are a fad diet that just take some of the joy out of food. It's no more healthier than a tasty gluten laden diet.

No, the users aren't the customers, the advertisers are the customers (and the few who buy reddit gold I suppose).

Yep, Look at Babe Ruth, He was a perfect example of humanity.... Fat, lazy, and mean.