Obviously, it's couldn't be most people's mom. This is about your mom, XxtraLarGe!

Perhaps someone who needed money soon, home was at risk, etc, is today employed by Tesla? This wasn't a bailout of a tired, failed company that's never going anywhere - this was a loan to a company that did quite well once it got past its cash crunch. Many jobs were saved, many were later created. Big win for taxpayers.

That seems to be the entire, comprehensive list of old Google products. Unlike, for example:

Google Answers
Lively
Google Reader
Deskbar
Clic-to-Call
Writely
Hello
Send to Phone
Google Audio Ads
Google Catalogs
Dodgeball
Google Ride Finder
Shared stuff
Page creator
Marratech
GOOG-411 (which was awesome)
Google Labs
Google Buzz
Google Gears

and on, and on, and on (that's maybe 1/3rd of the graveyard)

Spaces muthafucka!

This can only be settled by a cage match, with the cage suspended over a shark tank filled with ravenous clowns!

The rule of thumb is lower - 100 months rent maximum (and lower in times of high interest rates). Anything above that is land price speculation, not investment. Rental stuff gets built in Cali precisely as speculation on rising house prices, not as a sound rental investment.

That 100-month rule is based on cost of money, property taxes, maintenance, property management, etc. You're doing well to keep your long-term-average ongoing costs down around 1% a month. At 100 months you can expect to break even for some years, so if you think conditions will improve it's a way to "get in early" without losing money every month to do so. In sensible markets you can usually do better, however.

Lucas is just using his "fuck you money" as such, not to make a profit here.

Wait, people buy games as boxes, in stores? Did you buy the game that way in Ye Olde 20th Century, and haven't bought anything since? Have the Amish started gaming now?

The 5 cents a bag thing is different, because it's a political statement. I switched stores immediately when that happened, as I find it politically offensive (and when my city passed a law requiring it, I moved to a new state - no joke). And I have/use re-usable bags since they work better, but it's a matter of principle.

Have to agree, as the home owner is becoming what is essentially a competing power company. If not the entire meter, then at least the difference in cost from a typical one to the bi-directional variety.

False analogy. There's a huge difference between a personal assistant, who by definition *I* know personally, and a faceless business entity who I know not at all (read adversarial entity) scraping 'enough' information about me to presume it knows me sufficiently to second guess what I want and give me that instead of what I requested. Truthfully, why on earth would I trust such an entity?

That's the problem with hypotheticals. They don't reflect the reality we live in.

"We hate the most in others that which we see in ourselves"

Reflect on that last sentence as pertains to yourself and your initial diatribe.

Can you point to a single state's laws that use that terminology? I've never heard of one. It's all about "fired for cause" vs "fired without cause". You may prefer the terms "fired" vs "laid off", but that's a newish meaning for "laid off".

What really matters to me is "do you get a respectable severance package?" You don't necessarily get one even if you're 'laid off", as some companies are really broke, and some are complete assholes.

I've never been able to find "shut down" in the Ubuntu menu tree - does it even exist?

On my Windows boxes, the (soft) power switch works just fine, thanks. It's set up to do a graceful shutdown, so it won't shut down if an application foolishly needs to ask me whether or not to save changes, but that's mostly the application's fault (see Notepad++ for how to do it right), and I could set up the power button to do a "maintenance shutdown," which force closes everything, if applications were written better.

Powering off without any notice at all, safely, would really limit performance in many ways - I'm just as happy to wait a second or two for unsaved changes to be parked, all the write caches to flush and so on.

Basic physics will keep persistent storage slower than volatile memory, but if you're content with 1990s performance, you could probably build a PC that worked that way. Heck, it probably exists for some exotic use case.