According to the very article linked in the summary, car stereo theft is virtually nonexistent because aftermarket car stereos are virtually nonexistent. Auto manufacturers put in good enough radios that practically nobody replaces them, and the original equipment radios only fit in that make/model/year of car.

The cost of a radio has nothing to do with it. There's no market for a radio that only fits a couple years of (as an example) three models of Ford products. Thieves don't steal things that they can't sell.

In some cases, there isn't really even a separate radio to steal; it's deeply integrated into the car rather than being a discrete and easily aftermarket replacable component.

For a couple months I was buying stuff I usually never buy, because i was shopping for my mother-in-law, because she was having an especially hard time getting around.

She's getting around better now for around a year, but I still get coupons for frozen meals and store-brand applesauce popping out at the registers.

I also get coupons that are for a different brand of something I bought a couple trips ago.

No, I think they're doing it to generate the personalized post card coupons and coupons that spit out at the cash register, so when I stop buying Stouffer frozen food they can give me coupons to entice me back.

It varies a lot.

I don't really travel that much, but I have encountered TSA two or four times a year for most years since they've existed.

Some are friendly and as helpful as they are allowed to be. Others are clearly just tired of their job but doing it. Just like any other job.

If you read the blog in the summary, the author talks about letting little stuff go (and thereby breaking the rules) when it makes no sense. Like not confiscating the swiss army knife in the airline pilot's bag, or making up excuses to keep toddlers out of the scanners during the early days when they were not exempt.

Don't blame the guy at McDonald's making the burger if you don't like how the Mac sauce tastes, either. He didn't make it, he just squirted it on.

You definitely have to look at the "active" guns per capita.

I, for example, have what appears to be a nice semi-automatic pistol in my basement on the high, high shelf, behind some other stuff, in its original box. My grandfather was a Naval officer for a time, and it was his sidearm. He died in the early 1970's, and I doubt it's been fired since some time in the 1960's.

I have no bullets for it, and also no Firearm Owner ID in a state that requires it.

My mom has a rifle or two that were his in her basement. Once again, she has no FOID, but she might have some forty year old ammunition laying around.

The likelihood of any of these guns being used for a crime or other violent act is essentially zero. There's no point to even considering them for purposes of US gun statistics.

I don't know what the software architecture of these games looks like, but there is an alternative to faulty hardware tripping this test.

It's another execution unit (thread or similar) running rampant through memory.

I've "fixed" bugs in cooperative multitasking software by putting big buffers around variables that were getting stomped on. Usually the buffers got removed before the software was considered "done." But not always.

And they're cheaper. I don't ship a lot of stuff, but I usually check price between Fedex, USPS and UPS on packages.

USPS is consistent cheaper.

The thing where USPS does the "final mile" delivery for UPS sucks, by the way. The tracking is a mess and it's quite slow. I hope it's really cheap at least.

Absolutely, the USPS should be responsible for funding pensions and retiree health care just like any other governmental or private entity.

But that's the problem - so far as I can tell, they've had stricter funding requirements related to future retiree health care than any other entity. This was imposed by Congress in 2006.

Here's an article --> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ron-bloom/reality-check-postal-service_b_1927634.html

I consider myself pretty savvy, but I've been fooled a couple times by "fake" emails harvesting login credentials when I was tired and not thinking.

Both times I realized within minutes that I'd been had and went and changed the passwords immediately, but it's really easy to be fooled if you aren't paying attention.

He's talking about licenses and what is OK at his place of employment. And he's right.

Where I work everything has to be approved, but BSD or MIT is a easy approval.

They don't really like any of the GPLs - feels too risky, what if internal work somehow "catches" GPL - but v3 is way worse.

Yes, that's my understanding. He was paying restitution for destroying government property.

Sorry that it wasn't clear from what I wrote.

Yes, that's absolutely true. Even the cheapest of modern cars will happily go that fast. Times have really changed since my first car that I only got up to 100 by going down a very steep hill. ('74 Mustang II.)

When you get into slightly higher performance cars (like a police-edition Crown Vic) it's way past that and speeds are limited by the computer to what the original tires could handle.

I was driving my '02 VW GTI a few years ago and got pulled over for going about 100. I honestly didn't even realize I was. I knew I was cruising along pretty good, but I had missed my turn, was going to be late for a meeting, and was just trying to get to the next exit so I could fix my error.

Shockingly, when I said I was sorry and said something about "this stupid car, you can't even tell you're going fast" he let me go with a verbal warning to be more careful! I guess there are occasionally advantages to being a middle-aged geeky looking white guy.

Exactly, but it's hard to get people to actually believe that this is how a professional's work should be.

I have worked on one interactive system that was originally designed in the mid 1980's by people with a mainframe background. If anything goes wrong in one of its programs (except for validating user input) the program exits immediately and a cryptic error message is displayed.

The system is still in use and still in development, and it's very hard to get the development team to break away from that mindset and actually give useful error messages to the user, preferably without dumping all of the user's work in the bit bucket.

I drove a '98 Grand Marquis (essentially the same car as this Crown Victoria) for a few years. It handled better and was faster than the (V6, 3.8L) '96 Firebird that I totaled right before I bought it.

The Lt. Gov. paid for the car he crashed by writing a check for under $9,000, so it was probably a former police car. Those are faster.

Well, for you it would probably be "left turn on red" but it says that, if you're turning right, you can go on red once you come to a stop. Only applies to the right-most lane that is allowed to turn. There is also left-turn on red if it's one-way street to one-way street.

People often don't come to a stop, and ignore the "rightmost lane" rule.

It was introduced in the US in the 1970's due to the energy crisis of the time, and was universal (per Wikipedia) in the US as of January 1 1980, except for New York City where you can't do it unless there's a sign that says you can.

As a practical matter, I'm sure you've sat at a light with no other cars in sight. This rule lets you get on with your travels if you're turning right.

Also according to Wikipedia, it's allowed in New Zealand occasionally, but there are signs or other markings saying it's OK if it's OK.

It would be nice if the rental car companies handed out information about local driving laws, since there's really no easy way to know what the law is. We did our best to research it before we went to Aruba, but just went with it in Puerto Rico and Canada, hoping that they were both sufficiently American-like to get away with it. In all three places, my wife and I had a few times when we looked at each other and wondered if we'd just broken the law.