I'm guessing somebody didn't put their doobie out before going in the house.

If there's to be fucking involved, I think it probably is their business. A more appropriate answer might be "you've gotta buy me dinner if you want to find out."

Dude, if prison is the worst thing that happens from promising two different women that you'll never leave them, you got off light. The real horror show is when you come home and they're sitting on your couch, having coffee.

The northerner solution to that situation is to park our butts at home and wait it out. Hills + polished/wet ice = trapped at the bottom of the hill.

Sometimes, the blizzards hit late at night, and the county is cheap, so you're dealing with the roads you've got. Not every place is urbanized, especially between Fort Wayne, IN and Lansing, MI.

If you've never dealt with black ice, let me assure you that you don't want to. What you had was visible ice. Easy to behave right because it's visible and obvious. The black kind, it looks like safe pavement, but isn't. The gentlest touch of the brakes and your traction slips. A gentle touch to the gas and the rear end of the truck wants to come around. No pre-warning it was going to happen. So you stop doing whatever you were doing when the slipping started. You downshift to slow down, or back off the gas.

And mostly, as mentioned, you don't drive on it if you can avoid it. Because it's ice and without skates it's hard to move on it.

We get black ice on the highways here in Michigan all the time. The difference is that we don't panic. My truck loses its grip, I quickly stop doing the thing that made it lose its grip. If heavy snow starts, we don't all rush out into the streets at once. We tend to stagger our leave so that traffic has a chance to clear, and we have a chance to not be in the worst of it. We check road conditions before heading out. I've driven across multiple states during ice storms and blizzards without problem, and without plows or salt trucks providing any relief.

A million salt trucks wouldn't have saved Atlanta. The key is keeping your head and knowing what to do. Everybody in Atlanta buried their heads in the predicted snow, pretending it wouldn't happen, then lost their heads when it did. Their emergency management response was poor to non existant, and they paid the price. They're going to need a leadership change if they don't want this to happen again.

Now you're not trusting a single third party, you're trusting -every- third party. That's just begging to be compromised. If secrecy is important to you, take steps to make sure nobody realizes you're communicating. Eliminate or reduce the ability of outsiders to figure out who you're communicating with, because that can be just as damning as having them intercept the communication (e.g. the phone meta data that the phone company must maintain in order to do business). Don't use untrusted third parties to facilitate the communication (like services promising anonymity), because they don't have a stake in protecting your privacy. And most importantly, don't use services or tools that advertise the fact that you're trying to hide things. That only makes people curious, and while curiosity is said to have killed the cat, the cat's curiosity ended a lot more mice.

Trust that at your peril. If you think the people who tracked down Osama bin Laden and killed him in his bedroom can't get ahold of your email, I'd like to make sure I'm not near you when the inevitable very bad thing happens. Too often bystanders are considered acceptable casualties.

It's like expecting your dog to ignore the roast you left on the counter while you went to work. Sure, it could happen, but there's no reason an intelligent person would expect it to happen.

When you trust a third party, with whom you have no actual connection, to keep your data private, you are pretty much asking to have it compromised. The best encryption and anonymity schemes in the world are useless in the face of a court order or questionable system administration. Did you really think some anonymous person was willing to go to jail for your privacy? You're both silly and naive if you think so.

I have a significantly higher interest in older technology than my kids. But my workshop is always open to them, on the off chance that they're interested in learning hand tool woodworking. Of course, that's not really old technology. It's still the way that fine furniture is made. It's just that they're unlikely to see solid wood furniture outside of our house. Unless you've got money to spend, you'll be buying the termite vomit from Ikea or Value City.

My most recent vehicle purchase was a Toyota Tacoma. Because I needed a truck, and I wanted a stick shift. The truck has no optional features at all. The nice thing is, there is almost nothing that needs fiddling with. Simple gauges. A nice but easy to control radio. No funny collections of buttons. Not even electric door locks or window controls.

Also no cruise control, but it seems like a small price to pay for having a truck that is otherwise simple, reliable and doesn't suck fuel like a three year old with a big gulp.

Amen to that. A Makerbot is a huge maintenance load. They need a lot of fiddling and constant maintenance and replacement parts that a school teacher isn't going to have time or money to do. These machines will sit in a corner collecting dust and frustration. Much like the one we have here, in an office full of engineers.

I'd be fine with a shop class full of nothing but hand tools. Cheaper for the school, lower liability costs, and the students will learn the same set of problem solving and building skills. Johnathan Starr published an excellent book back in the 1970s about the program he ran.

Dell's taking the blame, but the cat still isn't trustworthy. First the mouse is gone, then the track pad smells like wee.