Shingles sucks, that's for sure. I had it make a visit via my trigeminal nerve when I was 29. The eye doctor was freaking out for a little while, but fortunately it ran its course without any eye complications.

I believe that the survivors are generally thought to be immune to further infection as well, so it's a bit scary that the virus can still find repositories in the body where it can hang out for longer periods of time.

It's not anything particularly new - we've known for decades that anyone that's had chicken pox still has the dormant virus in a number of nerve ganglia near the spine, and sometimes it reactivates and causes shingles.

O.J. didn't have qualified immunity. The cop you're going to sue does, and the civil case is likely to be tossed as a result.

Carry on, my wayward company.

by the time dell got big, hp and compaq were both considered, at least in the people i know to be inferior products to others available at the time

And this was really a shame, because Compaq's early machines were awesome.

I usually get one or two of these spammy mails every day. My favorite was one I got several years ago, which described an interesting opportunity, but I wasn't (and still am not) willing to relocate. So, I wrote back and asked the guy if the gig could be done via telecommuting. His response was "yes, but they require that you work from the office. Will that work for you?". I wrote back asking if he knew what "telecommuting" meant, and never heard back.

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.