Supposing you have a disability such as fear of open/closed spaces, or closeness to or isolation from your coworkers negatively affects you in some way. In UK and probably most places there is legislation to oblige the employer to make "reasonable adjustments" for that disability in the physical layout of the workplace.

I don't live in the USA but I understand it is a very closed market and the big 4 was about the only option. Surely though you can order unlocked phones direct from China same as the rest of the world?

Prison is theoretically at least not meant to be a "punishment" and if you say that to anyone who works in the "corrections" system they will get angry with you. Prison is not supposed to be about making people unhappy in return for them having done "bad things" it is supposed to be about reforming them and turning them back into good citizens.

More phones in an area = more people. More people = more crime.

Dowsing, astrology, homeopathy, whenever anything like this comes up I always find it scary to see the angry response that comes from "science" people. It's as if they feel threatened somehow like their gods had been insulted. If they truly thought the subject was worthless they would just ignore it and not even bother to get into the debate.

When I worked in an IT company in Johannesburg one of the kernel developers there used to get extra money finding water for farmers. Not sticks or wands, what he did was get a brick and stand it upright on the palm of his hand. He would walk around and interpret the water course according to the brick's movements. I have no idea how or why it worked but he was getting paid regularly.

He said Twitter fulfilled a need (while implying that RSS on its own did not). This is exactly what normal people expect from computers, that it will somehow make their lives easier or better. It's why they just don't get it when we preach our nerdy idealism.

A modern corporate giant is not one big company across the planet just because their offices all have the same logo outside. Local offices are separate legal entities in each country.

Suppose MegaMultinational, Inc. has its headquarters in New York and it is legally (in NY) ordered to do something by the court. If it commands its German subsidiary MegaMultinational GmbH to "just hand stuff over" this will likely be in contravention of local German law. Why would the local CEO risk jail by complying?

Picking up the smell of tobacco smoke is amazingly easy even if you are not a smoker. Walk through the cloud of smokers hanging around outside any office building and by the time you get to your cubicle you too will smell of smoke.

Recently I was astounded when I got to my hotel room and discovered I had been assigned a smoking room - turns out this is still legal in Germany. Getting moved to a non-smoking room took an hour. My clothes and my bags still smelled of smoke the next morning after two showers.

HP consumer laptops consistently worst in reliability tables. Why would you buy one.

http://www.engadget.com/2009/1...

I detest "um" or "erm" because the intended inference is "I am soo smarter than you and having to bite my tongue to avoid delivering a scathing denunciation of your failure to understand what to me is instantly obvious". Take that, ummers.

I never understood why Verisign was allowed to buy Thawte, who were their only realistic competition.

Not completely true - you have to consider the availability of those calories. A good example is almonds, there is about 9 calories in the average Costco roasted salted almond, but your body only manages to absorb a lesser number than 9 with the remainder being excreted. Another example is a litre bottle of olive oil; imagine the huge calorific value but if you drank the whole bottle at one go you would not absorb all those calories.

With a two-year contract you are encouraged to think that you are getting a very expensive phone for free, and consequently it's not unreasonable that you are going to be paying serious money per month on the contract. Nothing could be further from the truth - the development costs on these things are not that much and the bill of materials is pennies.

Of course the geographical size of your country does not help - here in the UK we have 20% of the US population packed into a landmass half the size of California. I personally have a really nice phone that cost less than 100 pounds no contract, with unlimited data for 7.50 a month. Don't remember the last time I went out of coverage.

tl;dr It's a USA-specific problem

I'm 57 and stopped eating meat suddenly one day when I was 18. I sometimes eat the various meat substitutes such as Quorn but this is for convenience not because I want a "meat replacement". Seriously, a benefit that meat-eaters don't realise is their easy ability to cook with high-quality protein in handy small pieces. No use asking me if I think it successfully mimics the taste of meat as I can't properly remember. My kids say the Quorn chicken nuggets are the closest and they actually prefer them to chicken chicken nuggets.

The rest of the time I eat food that is not in any way meant to resemble or taste like meat. It's not something I actively mention to anyone but you can't stop people finding out eventually say when you are at a group meal in a restaurant. Not so much these days but 30 years ago I used to get sideways looks from friends who thought I was not being serious with them and they would ask questions like "how can anyone not eat meat? doesn't it drive you crazy when you see a delicious steak?" Also used to get rants from aggressive meat eaters who thought I was trying to be superior to them somehow (I never did figure that one out.) None of this ever seems to happen any more I don't know why, maybe people have just got used to the idea.

Does not seem to have any long-term effects I'm pretty healthy so far as I know.

I am not in the USA so also got the "we can't log you in" message in a new window. If you now click the blue "OK" button instead of just closing the window then it provides you with a URL in the form

htttp://static.ak.facebook.com/connect/xd_arbiter/fjk6sKjilfjiowj.js?#

and a scary message in 12-point bold red

"SECURITY WARNING: Please treat the URL above as you would your password and do not share it with anyone."