and reaping the benefits by selling it at some indeterminate point in the future.

Or when the company declares a dividend, but that's a bit of a quaint idea nowadays.

"In that case, if you write me a check for $12,500 I'll start ripping this bed out right now and we'll both come out ahead!"

Serious question (from a non-American); can companies in the states increase the amount they charge you without notifying you first?

Depends on your contract. If the contract says they can, then they can and probably will at some point. Regardless, it pays to watch your bill like a hawk - plenty of U.S. providers, cellular providers in particular, have gotten in trouble for charging customers for stuff they didn't order. I've been fortunate, I guess. My provider hasn't tried to raise my prices, but they have tried to upsell me to higher tiers of service when they often can't provide the bandwidth I'm already supposed to be getting.

The heaviest haul vehicles *do* use electric drive. The vast majority of trains today, for example, are electric drive, and increasingly large haul trucks are switching to electric drive.

The crawlers that transported the Saturns and shuttles to the launch pads are also electric drive.

If they really wanted to line their pockets, they'd sell them to the black hats.

And who's to say that he doesn't have another three dozen that he knows about, but held back?

Yes, I know this. My point was that there may come a time in the not-too-distant future when insurance companies push for legislation to allow them to deny coverage/claims on that basis.

But of the people I know, $20k isn't even a tenth of their yearly "fun car money", and compared to the reoccurring cost of insurance coverage that is a sunk cost even if you are never in an accident, this method can be much much cheaper for them in the long run.

If you're making enough that you can spend $200K just on fun car stuff, then yes, it's quite likely you can self-insure and not worry about that. The vast majority of people that like to tinker with their cars aren't in that income bracket, though. As regards the $20K bond - good luck if that's all you have to pay for in a serious accident. That quite possibly won't even cover the cost of the other car if it's totalled, much less medical expenses for another party that's seriously injured.

That has no chance of being prevented by this.

By this, probably not. Your insurance company might have something to say about rolling your own ECU though, and you just know they'll jump at the chance to deny more claims.

For all the complaints leveled at the NSA there has been no proof that they have ever used that information against it's own citizens.

From this Reuters story:

One current federal prosecutor learned how agents were using SOD tips after a drug agent misled him, the prosecutor told Reuters. In a Florida drug case he was handling, the prosecutor said, a DEA agent told him the investigation of a U.S. citizen began with a tip from an informant. When the prosecutor pressed for more information, he said, a DEA supervisor intervened and revealed that the tip had actually come through the SOD and from an NSA intercept.

"I was pissed," the prosecutor said. "Lying about where the information came from is a bad start if you're trying to comply with the law because it can lead to all kinds of problems with discovery and candor to the court." The prosecutor never filed charges in the case because he lost confidence in the investigation, he said.

Many of us have seen what happens when that oily salesguy you'd like to to kick sells something which is complete fiction, and that it is now someone else's problem. His check clears, he gets a new car and a vacation, and everyone else is stuck building a fucking unicorn.

Scott Adams summed it up nicely.

although I always found it rather pleasant as it helps ignore pain as much as anything else.

That's pretty much what morphine does to me. It does very little to reduce the pain, but it makes me completely not care about it. That, and throw up a lot, like most narcotics do with me. For the life of me I can't understand how people get addicted to the stuff. I'd *much* rather be in pain than feeling nauseous.

I can see near-UV -- this caused some confusion in high school Chemistry class when I could see some spectrum lines that nobody else could.

Interesting that you mention that - I've never really thought I could see UV, but I have noticed that black lights and UV LEDs have a weird intense brightness that makes me squint even though the visible light isn't that bright, and I can't really perceive a different color. Germicidal lamps don't cause the same effect for me.

Govt believes it needs to do whatever it takes to get the bad guys.

For varying interpretations of "bad guys".

Not needed, thanks. I've had enough exposure to enough platforms to know that they all have areas in which they suck equally.

They're excellent for web dev, because they're the only machines that are capable of running every browser.

Which would be great if the code they're writing needed to run on anything other than the Windows versions of IE, Firefox, and Chrome in a very homogeneous enterprise/industrial environment.