From what I can tell, the Acela is kind of a ripoff. I just looked into the train from DC to NYC. Acela is 250 bucks, and takes a little under 3 hours. Or I can take the normal train for like a quarter of that, which only gets me there like 20 minutes slower. That seems like a pretty good tradeoff...

LA->SF, on the other hand, is way further away, so a high speed line would definitely be worth it at, or even perhaps a tiny bit above, the cost of an equivalent flight - trains are way more comfortable, and tend to leave out of more conveniently central locations, or at the very least, tend to leave at locations more conducive to using *existing* public transportation.

Awesome. I want to play poker with these guys... we can just draw right at the beginning, and they'll give me 700 grand, right?

Stupidly easy google search, "break bad" (because obviously "breaking bad" will just get you hits for the show): http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/...

I didn't know that either - I always assumed it was a made-up phrase for the show that just sounded cool, but apparently it's a midwestern phrase meaning, appropriately, "to turn to a life of crime". Of course, now if you say someone's breaking bad, anyone, or at least anyone outside that geographic region, will just assume it means they're cooking meth. I've heard it used that way colloquially a few times already.

That post lacked obligatory xkcd, so I have fixed that for you.

The difference is that industries like energy companies and internet providers are generally trying to ram through their business models which consist primarily of "screw you, customers, we're a monopoly and you can suck it!", while Uber is attempting to bypass regulations that are primarily designed to *protect* a monopoly (taxi companies - there might be multiple, but if they all work together, it comes to about the same thing). More competition is *always* good for consumers.

Could Uber use a bit more regulation? Maybe. But taxi companies' regulations are *not* primarily about insuring safety, unless you count the financial safety of the taxi companies.

Ok, at that point you're just describing highway robbery. What's to stop you from doing 100% exactly the same thing you just described on a truck right now? Human truck-drivers are going to stop just as much if they see a car parked in the middle of the road they're trying to drive on.

My phone is on 4.1.2 (I just checked). I haven't run into a single application I couldn't run on it. Fragmentation just means a bunch more work for app developers to support multiple environments, but they should be used to it - after all, it's still massively superior to the literally millions of different potential environments a PC application could be run under...

That said, I have a device that runs Android 1.6.x. That is basically equivalent to not even running Android, and was even when I got it several years ago. But even 2.x is sufficient for most things.

If they're really truly free speech people? Probably most of them. Long as you aren't doing it in a public space, not because of the bible, but more because of the defecation.

In any event, disregarding the difference between drawing a picture of something and taking a *dump* on it, there's an event huger difference between saying "taking a dump on something I hold dear is massively disrespectful and I will be angry if you hold a rally and encourage people to do it", and "taking a dump on something I hold dear is literally grounds for me to go up to you and shoot you to death". One is reasonable, the other is... not so much.

Good for her. Why should she? Maybe it made sense when women were expected to stay at home, but these days, just getting married doesn't in any way remove any part of a woman's identity any more than it does a man's, so why should one lose their last name and not the other? (When we got married, we were totally going to hyphenize, until we actually looked into how much effort it'd be, and decided to just both keep our original names, at least until/unless we ever have kids. Note: I'm male.)

Because engineers, sysadmins and tech support drones are generally still doing the job they were hired to do initially. Maybe they've been given additional responsibility they didn't deserve, but it's still the same *type* of job. Management is the weird one out, because it's so common for a company to say, "you are an excellent engineer/sysadmin/tech support person/etc., so we are going to 'promote' you to a job you are totally unqualified for, have no desire to do, and that isn't why we hired you." That doesn't generally happen with other jobs.

I'm very happy that I've so far managed to avoid that fate (by very clearly and consistently announcing to basically everyone just how much I like engineering-type work, and how much I would not like to be given a job where my primary responsibilities were not actually directly creating things.) It has come up several times. I really don't understand the sadly-common feeling that programming is for peons, that if what you want to do with your life is program, you are somehow limiting yourself, and that people who want to program should instead want to tell *other* people what to do and fight office politics fights. Both are essential, but they are not even remotely the same type of job.

I feel like most companies that would pull that to begin with, would go more like this:
Management: "train your replacement, or you do not get any severance."
Entire IT staff: "you try to pull that bullshit, and we all walk out"
Management: "fine then, you're all fired, we'll just hire your replacements and not train them, we don't give a crap."

My complex has never signed for packages; there wouldn't even have ever been that ability, nobody would be there to sign for it. If a package can be dropped off without signature, they'll just leave it in the lobby sometimes (occasionally they don't feel like it, which is annoying).

However, given that I have a job and am thus not there during the week during the day, if I know a package will require a signature, I have it *sent* to my work. My work receives packages all the time, so it doesn't mind occasionally signing for an employee's package and having that employee drop by the mailroom at the end of the day to pick it up. You could see if yours does that too.

"...as it attempts to transition from a hardware-dependent business to one that more fully embraces my butt..."

Well, that about sums it up, IBM-wise.

That would be "grinds" (or "ground"), not "grounds".

I saw your post title, and was super confused. Normally when someone says "Link to the Onion", it looks more like, say, this.