Thanks for that info, I'd never heard that before. The need to heat the converter up every once in a while makes sense. I will put the top town and take a trip down A1A every once in a while :-)

My personal "why": I code from home, so my car leaves the house twice a week and even then only to go 5-10 miles. My car is a '98 Mustang Cobra with a supercharged V8. I paid 15k cash for it used in 2002. I only get 17 miles to the gallon, but so what? I fill up maybe once every two months. I do a lot of my own maintenance. An all-electric vehicle would be perfect for my needs, and I could easily afford one, but I plan on driving my '98 until it rusts out from under me. It is a blast to drive, and the cost of fuel is a non-issue for so few miles.

Young Jared James Abrahams, I hereby sentence you to 20 years of coding for the NSA. Our country needs young innovators with such talents to preserve our eternal safety from those who would do us harm. As your reward, you can have access to all the nude webcam photos you want, we have the worlds largest data center chock full of the bestest stuff.

So phones, tablets and consoles are now all the same thing?

Xbox 360 sold over 44 million units. Xbox Live has 22 million users. Those are some HUGE numbers, and there is a lot of brand loyalty amongst console buyers. Office is still king with businesses everywhere.

The first Ender book is the least cerebral. Too bad for you. Or was this sarcasm? My eldest daughter (15) has read all the Ender books. She loved "Speaker for the Dead" and thought the first book was the weakest. She claims that the Bean timeline is the best. I am hoping to see what she means this summer, but I have to retrieve all my Ender books first as she has farmed them out to all her friends.

Hard work can still make you "wealthy", depending upon how you personally define the term. I am living proof, and so are several of my friends, all of us in our 30s and 40s. Use your evenings and weekends wisely, take your network and your work skills (and/or you favorite hobby) and turn them into a small side business. Continue to grow that, or build additional business as bandwidth permits. If you are lucky you will flip one (I never did), but eventually the long tails of income will add up to the point where you can quit your day job (as it did for all of us). The only thing I sacrificed along the way was all the sports and sci-fi I used to watch on the tube when I was in my 20s. Good riddance to the media consumption, even if everything I did had crashed and burned I would still be glad I made the effort.

I was sitting in first class next to a British chap on a morning flight out of Dallas. A very nasty lightning storm rolled up and they delayed us at the gate for 30 minutes. When the announcement came over the PA this British fella went bonkers and delivered a most awesome scathing 10 minute rant about how Americans are fucking idiots and we don't fucking understand fucking service etc., etc. It really was quite impressive. Then the flight attendant started handling out free cocktails and everything was lovely.

If the engine configuration of the two-engine plane is push-pull then the thrust provided by the remaining engine stays in the center line. Add to that the comparison you forgot - a two-engine plane minus one engine has more range to find a runway to make an emergency landing on, whereas a single-engine plane minus one engine becomes a poor glider.

I worked in a bullpen for several years. We used to have awesome wars with toy dart guns with the rubber suction cups on the end of the darts. It was quite jarring to be concentrating on some code only to be suddenly popped in the face. It got so that any time somebody opened a desk drawer everyone jerked their eyes up to see if they were pulling out a gun.

I have kids and telecommute. My office is on the second floor - a one-room addition over the garage. The door to the stairs has a stiff spring on it to keep it closed. Anyone who wants to talk to me has to be willing to climb a flight of stairs and be physically able to open that door. Problem solved.

My thought exactly. No COBRA for your insurance either. I am sure that HR will word the choice as "resign" hoping that as many dummies as possible will make that mistake. I would just refuse to make the choice and spend my days job searching until they officially kicked me to the curb.

This is me as well with the poor memory. My co-workers thank me for writing such beautiful and easy-to-follow code. I explain to them that it is about my survival, I do it more for me than for them.

5 years is a good time span at any one company, anything over 2 years looks great on a resume. My personal experience was that nobody mentioned my degree after my first job, networking is far more important than a degree. Networking is also more important than kissing management butt to claw your way up the chain of command. When your co-workers like you personally and respect your work ethic in addition to you skills then you will eventually old buddies regularly calling you to see if you have any interest in a new position. Jumping ship becomes a matter of deciding when the time has come to try something different for more money.

If 20 kids were injured and none of them killed then the attacker wasn't really trying to kill them. He must have been slashing instead of stabbing. FBI statistics say 6 out of 10 gunshot victims die from sustained injuries 8 out of 10 knife attack victims die from sustained injuries.