This and the Netflix app are the ONLY things I use my (Samsung) TV for, actually!

And I thought my opinion of art critics couldn't get any lower.

Owner of an '84 300TD here. You bet your ass. Sanely designed to be easy to service, and run bloody forever.

They may not be technology themselves, but they are enabling patent trolling.

Text for lameness filter.

"keep your medical bill down"? You have clearly never been to a doctor.

I wish I could bike more, but there are several considerations that make it far from a good solution for me.

I live about 15 miles (via an interstate) each way from work. Since biking on said interstate is suicidal and illegal, I'd be looking at closer to 20 miles taking local routes instead. That's each way. 40 miles a day seems a bit excessive to me for a biking commute, not to mention the time it takes to get to/from work goes from 40 minutes to 2-3 hours.

I would bike locally to errands within a reasonable distance (grocery store, and such). But often when I get groceries, I find myself picking up perishable items. And a 45m bike ride in 90F weather would undoubtedly render anything perishable unsafe. I also tend to buy a lot of groceries at once, and carrying that much crap on a bike would be bad for my already iffy back. One of those adult-sized tricycles with a large basket in the rear (with a cooler) would solve both of those problems, but those are bulky and impossible to store in an apartment, unlike a standard bike.

That's the ugly truth. I did a side-by-side comparison of two identical vehicles once (1994 and 1995 Ford Escorts). The 1994 had a driver's airbag, and the 1995 had driver and passenger airbags. The dash bulged slightly more to accomodate the airbag. Other than that and the airbag hardware itself, they were identical. The difference in weight? 200 freaking pounds. For one airbag. Modern vehicles have as many as seven or more of them.

All this five-star safety crap is heavy. It's that simple. You can't have a small, light car anymore because it'll never pass modern crash tests. And those crash tests simulate a large, heavy vehicle. It's a catch-22.

Buy used. The hoops have already been jumped through, or if it's old enough, it's exempt (as is my ancient Mercedes).

That article (while informative) misses an important point: poor people often have children, which entitle them to additional governmental benefits. My sister for example was on WIC, SNAP, and old-fashioned food stamps at one point, and her family ate better than I did when I was working full-time.

"Her mother, a bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus), and her father, a false killer whale (Pseudorca crassidens), met on the job in the Whaler's Cove show. Since they were two very different animals, it was not expected that they would produce an offspring, but they did, making Kekaimalu the world's only known living wholphin."

What was that you were saying?

Whatever happened to the video game console industry model of selling hardware at a loss initially, but making a profit at some point into the lifecycle? People like to complain about the "anemic" hardware in the TouchPad, but it's embedded hardware, they all have some drawbacks. I love the hell out of mine, I only wish I'd been able to buy more than one at that price.

Forcing these standards onto an industry that is ill-equipped to provide them (American automakers have shown time and again that they are very bad at efficiency and reliability) will only drive up prices on used vehicles that the restrictions do not apply to. Who thinks up such short-sighted crap? Don't they see that this will just drive people away from buying new cars when we just barely coddled the American auto industry back to life again?

Why doesn't it get more love? It was one of the most elegant interfaces I've ever used. All the best of Windows, Amiga, and Mac OS (the classic years) rolled into one. I sometimes fire up Haiku just to get a taste of it again.

Actually, I don't buy into any of that crap. Except chiropractic. Despite all the MDs shitting all over it as useless, it has been more help for my chronic back problems (and cheaper!) than all the muscle relaxers and surgery they've tried to give me over the years. I have proof (in the form of xrays) that chiropractic undid a bone spur in my lower spine over the course of several years.