Don't forget plastic stretch wrap: until they get wrapped up tight many pallet load are too dangerous to move more than a few feet and impossible to move over the bumps of a dock plate. Rope, tape, cargo nets and other options can kinda work but the modern pallet freight system would slog down without cheap, disposable (and recyclable) plastic wrap. (Aside: I have been witness to what happens when a Walmart store runs out of pallet wrap. It is... awkward.)

The company I work for has a list of "brands we do not advertise" as a result of the agreements we have to buy stuff from the makers of those brands. But when a print ad goes out listing a "Major Name Brand" laundry detergent next to a picture of a big orange jug, everyone still knows its Tide. The oblong yellow box of melting cheese is Velveeta. And a directive to separate search from all the things that help search make money is an attempt to screw Google.

I think that many Americans also think that buzzfeed is crap, some are probably outright hostile. Critics have derided it as fluffy and poorly written. But with over 300 million people in the US, you do not have to attract a large share of the population to still end up with a large enough number of people to make a go of things. Particularly if your cost to produce is low and the cost of distribution lower (real example: http://slashdot.org/). But unless you can really minimize your localization costs (like with machine translators rather than real people), then there will not be enough people in the long-tail of the bell curve in a smaller market like France, so you need broader appeal.

But hey, if buzzfeed can manage a higher level of market share in France by sucking less, perhaps they will try something similar on this side of the Atlantic.

Or the Chinese have gotten lazy and/or really smart

I see a lot of cars driving around 80% empty. To and from work, I must admit that one of them is mine.

the strategic value of satellite navigation and general asshole-erly at the top of the Russian government, I am guessing that Europe's very expensive satellites ended up exactly where Russia wants them.

People point this out a lot, and it is very true, and merchants love to whine about it, but they never point out the costs of handling cash.

You have to count it into the till, make change, balance the till, count and recount your deposit, and then haul it to the bank to deposit and pick up your change order, or pay an armored car service to do it for you. And hope nobody robs you in the meantime, or slips you a bogus $50.

For cards, big stores don't even need to print slips for their records, it is all in the system. For small stores you can just staple the slips together by type and drop them in a box in case someone gets a stick up their butt and decides to audit you.

The heating coils are there for situations where you want (or that the controller board thinks that you want) a lot of heat right now. Like when somebody manually ups the temperature setting about five degrees. With a heat pump, slow and steady (and a programmable thermostat) wins the race.

No, but is an excellent propaganda phrase.

What is really 'funny' is that is probably easier for the NSA to get access to your e-filed tax return via your email account than from the IRS directly, and with less oversight.

Fortunately, I can not. Neither can I put an exact temperature to 'hotter than a freshly fornicated female fox in a forest fire.' Some things are simply better left unknown.

'Avoirdupois' has nothing to do with mass, or at least nothing to do with mass in the customary system, much as the UK pint has nothing to do with anything expect British pubs.

You are thinking of that bastard unit the pound-mass, defined as the mass that produces one pound force at normal Earth gravity. The true mass unit for the US customary system is the slug which weighs in at 32.2 pounds at normal Earth gravity. Just as a kilogram weighs 9.81 Newtons in Earth gravity. No tweaking required.

And don't forget the metric system's own bastard unit: the kilogram-force. Which, I might add, is far more commonly used than pound-mass, unless all of the metric world's cheap bathroom scales are really sophisticated mass-balances in disguise. And whereas pound-mass is always specifically stated, kilogram-force seems only weakly attached to the force.

While I work in a different department of the store, I still hear the stories in the breakroom and 'mostly rational' is not an accurate description of the now diminished hysteria shown by gun buyers over the past six months.

Actually, there are at least two and possibly three different variants of the 787-8 model in commercial service right now. And they won't actually reach the 'final' configuration off the factory floor until somewhere around the 100th airframe. There have been changes to the engines, systems and the airframe itself, some will be retrofitted to the early deliveries during heavy maintenance, others are permanent and adversely affect the fatigue life or range of the aircraft.

And then there are the first few flight test airframes which are so different that Boeing had to abandon its plans to actually deliver them to customers.

is that Win8 is an utter pile of crap. Windows 8 Pro might possibly be less crappy, and is apparently the version all of the pre-release 'you can get used to this' reviews were based on. But from the pointless non-locking lock screen that you can't disable, to the tiles thing to its ridiculous insistence on making documents full screen on a widescreen laptop, regular Windows 8 does nothing but get in the way of user. And I will be darned before I pay Microsoft another penny to remove some of the suckage they went to extra effort to ram in there. And so, my shiny new core i3 laptop is less useful than my 10 year old pentium-m/WinXP system, at least until I get some flavor of linux installed.

And once that happens, Microsoft, know full well that I will not be going back.