When someone mentions procreative the GP thinks they mean having babies. Since, you know, that's what that means. =p

No kidding about international travel. After being so afraid of overages that I left my phone at home from a trip to Europe in 2008, earlier this year I took a work trip to South Korea / Taiwan / Hong Kong / mainland China. As I got off each plane and turned my phone on, the immediate text with "welcome to [country] standard data rates apply" was pretty awesome. I didn't take my laptop - I used my phone exclusively for two weeks.

(Verizon iPhone with a T-Mobile SIM, so yes I could get data in S. Korea despite the country being CDMA iirc.)

Who are you to say which is more lethal? It seems to me that H1N1's better transmission methods make it the more effective, if less efficient, killer than Ebola. So far H1N1 has thus proven itself to be more lethal, though of course Ebola might catch up.

Lethal - "sufficient to cause death" or "capable of causing death" is a word with enough ambiguity in the definition to apply to either case. It does not exclusively mean "efficient at causing death once afflicted on someone" as you imply.

So that's just 16 half-liter donations, which spaced out every 8 weeks takes less than 2.5 years. There's plenty of time for Dad to donate that much between when he learns his wife is pregnant and when that kid needs to enter high school. (Plenty more if Mom donates, too.)

The big problem, as in everywhere else, is that paying for blood attracts donors with bad blood (literally), some of which will escape testing and get into the supply. "Thanks to the blood for grades program, China now has enough blood for your transfusion. Unfortunately, the blood you got had untraceable levels of HIV and now you'll get sick and die, but you can do so knowing that some unrelated kid got into a better high school for your suffering."

That's not to say the U.S. doesn't have some of the same problems. The incentive to give can be strong.

I'm not a tax (or any other sort of) attorney, but I would think that, once the original poster's employer has paid his conference fees, they will expect (require) him to travel to and attend the conference, even if he's paying for the travel himself.

Generally, travel to and from required work-related tasks that are not at your normal job site is tax deductible. So, yes, to the OP, buy your own tickets to Vegas, stay a few extra days after the conference and enjoy a vacation, and (after consulting with an accountant or tax attorney) deduct the cost of the airfare plus the hotel costs (during the conference) from your taxes. And of course travel days and days spent at the conference are work days, not vacation days. Maybe you can negotiate with your employer to also provide per diem?

My Kickstarter edition of Euphoria: Build a Better Dystopia was $49. Since it arrived just after we had a baby, I resold it at a flea market, new in shrink, for $140.

So no good idea ever has been ignored by capitalists (banks, VCs, businesses)?

No bank would loan against money that would be returned to the backers, not the bank, were the project to fail.

I followed Fisker for years of development, primarily because they had a four-seat convertible on their roadmap, the Karma Sunset. Tesla hasn't managed one of those yet.

Funny enough, my suggestion was going to be:

1. A PC with no hard drive, that boots from a CD drive taped shut and buried in the case.
2. A printer.
3. Software that automatically prints emails from you or others on your white list.

There ya go.

Per Apple, this album is your own stuff. Let's flash back 20 years...

Assume you've told your maid service to always bring in the mail. One day, a U2 album arrive, unsolicited, in the mail, and the maid puts it on your CD rack.

Whether you paid for it or asked for it is irrelevant; once it shows up in your account/mailbox it was placed where it goes by your instructions.

But the router you attach to the router you are required to use can do it just fine.

At least the tax breaks for Tesla make more sense than the ones for the film industry. States continuously try to attract film and television through massive incentive programs, but they only work if the state has one of the best packages at the time of filming a particular film or season.

Texas had a good package for a while, and things were filmed here. Other states got better, and shooting moved to places like Louisiana. Right now Georgia has a great package and things like The Walking Dead and Archer are shot there, but don't for a moment think The Walking Dead wouldn't move to Louisiana or Arkansas or northern California if the incentives changed.

It's much more difficult for Tesla to move their factory, since they'll have extensive immovable infrastructure costs. The film industry is used to packing up every 6-26 weeks as films or seasons end.

Even KlearGear's lawyer can't hide his scumminess from his public statements.

>> "Ironically, if Mr. Palmer [consumer] had simply approach[ed] Kleargear first last fall and requested a stay to finance their new furnace — we would have worked with him," Mathieu [shitty company's lawyer] wrote. "We are human beings. Instead he has chosen a public forum."

Yeah, and be sure to ask your mugger if he can hold off a minute, so you can buy your lunch before he steals your credit card.

What you're saying is, every small business has to do business with Yelp. They're the 1000 lb gorilla in this case, and Yelp itself has earned plenty of bad reviews from businesses forced to deal with them.