Did I say I'm not sympathetic? I happen to have kids, so I come at this from the "think of the children" angle.

I'm just surprised cabs let people not use seatbelts, is all. It wouldn't take too many sting operations for them to change, though...

I find it fascinating what we freak out about, versus what we tolerate. The same set of points can be made about city buses. I get that seatbelts are harder for them to use. And that they are heavier vehicles, so the relative force imparted on collision is less. Still, no belts. And what about Greyhound buses? No belts there the last time I road one (ten years ago).

A taxi that they were riding in was struck by another vehicle and the pair were ejected from the taxi.

Why don't we wear seatbelts in taxi cabs? Is it even legal to not wear seat belts?

@jabberw0k And you said that in under 140 characters! WTG! #AnnoyingOrange

Indeed. This constant "boom" was given an unfortunately misleading name. It is more like an infinite Tsunami, able to sweep over and inundate everything.

So that employees go back to work in 60 seconds instead of 10 minutes.

Or this one:
(x) make up most of the story.

The math on what was taken doesn't add up. "Several hundred gigabytes" ~= 200GB. Users ~= 2M. Dividing and we find 100,000 bytes per person. What photo do you know that a modern cell phone camera can take that only uses 100,000 bytes? What other data is there? x & y coordinates of finger swipes?

Yes, they could be transmitting things like web sites visited, but is that really a big deal?

Or, this was a microscopic "break in" of a handful of accounts.

Stabilized, huh. Is that why the Earth crescent bobs up and down like a cork? Or was that just the boom mic.?

Barber or Masseuse. Something that requires your customer's physical presence.

So, your solutions are (1) use a different type of coffee and (2) "use more grinds than is needed", except you don't just add more grinds, you recurse to (1) above.

(1) Using a different type of coffee is not a solution. Look, I have caffeine pills here as well. Maybe I can just throw in a few caffeine pills with my brew to make it stronger? Or how about a few chunks of charcoal? I can see you as a salesman, telling people they have selected the wrong car, or business suit!

(2) I WAS adding "more" grounds. I was filling the cup, with my blend of coffee AND using the least water setting. As I said originally. Do you seriously think I would be half-filling a K-Cup, and then be complaining about it being too weak?!

You have almost no control of the water to coffee ratio in a K-Cup, AND it brews a cup in 20 seconds. If you follow the directions of a French press (my normal method), you let the water sit on the coffee for around 4 to 5 minutes (I choose 5). Do you think just maybe 300 seconds of brew time is going to make a stronger brew than 20 seconds of brew time?

Thanks for the detailed and thoughtful reply.

The main counterpoint I would make is that Microsoft made the decision eons ago to stop supporting XP. So naturally, today, it is out-of-date in many serious ways.

The time for Microsoft to act differently regarding XP was ten+ years ago. Instead they chose the more money route of forcing us all to upgrade. Reminds me of the Keurig decision Slashdot is discussing today.

This. Luckily I think this (horrible, nasty, awful taste) will help sink the whole Keurig ship.

I prefer strong coffee. Impossible to make in a Keurig, because you don't control the ratio of coffee to water. There is a cup size setting -- I set it to the smallest cup, assuming that would extract the most coffee essence per ounce -- but that still didn't make it strong enough for me. I was also trying it with my preferred blend (in a reusable K-cup) and it tasted bloody awful. I would rather eat my group coffee. Seriously.

I think the only people using these regularly are people without taste buds...and the corporate world where they are happy people aren't spending 10 minutes making a cup of coffee.

K-Cups are a weapon of mass destruction, accounting for 1% of landfill waste.

It is rather mind boggling that such a congested city would still be saturated with World War II Decker tanks. Unfortunately they are too reliable. Still, I imagine in the not too distant future a change in pedestrian-killers so massive the Earth will indeed shift. Possibly enough to create a 4.0 earthquake.

At the same time it is also true that Microsoft is famously tolerant and encouraging of software professionals. Offering software at cost (like offering me Office 2000 for a hundred bucks, way back when), providing dev tools and beta products for free or close to it, and tolerating staggering levels of out-and-out piracy...in the interest of having their products used by a truly large sample size.

If it wasn't for Microsoft, we would still be on mainframes and mini-computers. Paying jacked up prices. For crap, frankly.

The only part of the Microsoft game I don't care for is trying to ship old wine in new bottles (i.e. every version of MSOffice since 2000) and especially the force-marching of us to a worse product (the downward progression away from XP). With XP, Microsoft could have created a decent 64-bit version. They could have given us (essentially) unlimited RAM usage on 64-bit XP. And they could have left it to us to decide when to move on to a product...IFF we thought that product was better. But then they would have had to make a real effort at making future Windows products truly better.

Ohio -- more payday loan vendors than McDonald's, Burger King & Wendy's...combined.

In Oklahoma, more borrowers use at least 17 loans in a year than use just one.

In 2006 the Pentagon found that payday loans were "becoming a threat to readiness" and tightened up the rules on loans...to military personnel.

- all three from yesterday's NYTimes weekend magazine

I'm getting too old to lift those 5-gallon jugs too.