Really the only thing you can be reasonably certain about with a UID pissing contest is that you'll pretty much inevitably lose. :-)

That would have been perfect this year, with the new MLP show. Oh, well.

I'm personally hoping for a non-gimped Android tablet in a smaller form factor.

There are a few around, but they're locked down too tightly, and I'd like to see something of a standard, even if it's just "Oh hey, here's our Android phone without the phone."

Because the one thing that most people (especially fake people like corporations) have a greater amount of hate for than their love of money is taxes.

Government employees are paid mostly through taxes.

This is why they traditionally are paid lower than the private sector. The public sector traditionally appealed to employees for a variety of reasons, among them:

1) Stability. Your job isn't as prone to market upsets as the private sector.
2) Benefits. Because "the government" is a pretty big employer, they can get great returns on the economies of scale. Pensions and health care benefits are usually the result of this.

The "costs" to the employee are various, including:
1) Lower wages than the private sector. If you do a super job, you might get a pat on the back, but bonuses and/or raises are usually not going to happen.
2) Greater job stagnation. If you want more than the standard cost of living pay increases (which for some places hasn't happened in 5 years), you usually have to change jobs. If you want training, you're usually on your own.

Well, they're not so bad after a run through the autoclave.

Sony did a good job with a "justaphone" they recently released, the Naite.
I bought one a few months ago for around $120. No contracts, basic phone, no sliding, good screen, some free games that are good, bluetooth, a decent camera, small form factor, and really good battery life. It even accepts standard microSD cards, if you need it.

The free Sony management software is really pretty good, too. It offers phone backups, you can send/receive text messages through your machine while it's plugged in, and it didn't come with a lot of BS carrier lock-in stuff.

Check it out, it's been perfect for me.

I don't know about the GP, but I also only applied to one school. I put in my application in September or October, had a reply before Christmas, and had a very relaxed Spring semester.

Had I not been accepted, I still had plenty of time to think about "fall back" schools or other options.

Or that they have a good sense of humor.

Like that one school I saw a flyer for:
"Attend Harvey Mudd! Then you tell people where you went to school can say it quickly and make people think you were saying, 'Harvard Med!'"

Well, for starters, it was a provision to provide Medicare payments once every 5 years for an optional consultation with a person's doctor to go over end of life issues such as Hospice care, living wills, and other related topics.
Here's a quote from Wikipedia because this is Slashdot and not a formal debate:

I removed some citation stuff and bolded that one sentence. Palin was intentionally and in my opinion maliciously misrepresenting a vital service that everyone should be informed about. The worst time to learn about the intricacies of funeral homes, hospice care, living wills, powers of attorney and all of the other things that can crop up when someone's dying is when it's actually happening!

There is an entire industry on informing expectant parents on their upcoming child.
There is very little when it comes to options for caring for a family member who is getting older.

Nope, my family went through a rough patch a while back when my grandmother passed away suddenly. My mom had been trying to get her to talk about this kind of stuff, but she never got anywhere.

Don't forget that the right wing mouthpieces had their part in affecting the debates. The whole "death panel" debacle was completely distorted rhetoric on something very sensible and important: end of life planning and counseling. Which was proposed by a Republican and accepted until it became too much of an albatross to carry.

Grocery stores and gas stations both have products that are easy to steal and difficult to catch without video proof.

What is there to steal at a movie theater? The seats? More than your share of the large soda and popcorn?

Sure, there is some risk of someone capturing a "screener" of the movie, but IMO that's not worth the loss of customer goodwill that is already strained with sub-par feature films, expensive ticket prices, even more expensive refreshments, and spotty disciplining of bad behaviour.

I can only hope I remember to remind my kids of this newest loss of privacy when they start dating in a few years.

You didn't even need Fireball. Just hunt around until you get an Apocalypse staff and run around nuking people behind walls. Recharge the staff when you're done.

I was able to kill everyone except for Diablo in D1 without dropping the walls, and even the big guy himself only took a few pops to drop.

What I hated the most about D1 was the fact that if you died in multiplayer, some joker could rush over, gank all your gear, and you're left with nothing.

But he's also considered a villian HERE, because of his actions as shown in the documentaries.

And since it happened long ago in a galaxy far, far away, I think it's not totally inaccurate.