That would be wonderful. Here's an anecdote as to why this plan fails for me in particular.

I unfortunately have Mediacom in my area. They've effectively got it made so that you can't do this. First, they charge $20/month more (I believe it was) for a non-contract plan, which adds up, and so now I'll get hit with a $200+ cancellation fee if I try switching. I also pay for an internet/cable package even though I don't want cable because it is cheaper than the same speed internet by itself. A lot of the things they do don't make much sense until you look at it from their point of view - they've got you over a barrel and are going to take as much of your money as they can.

The main problem, alluded to in the summary, is that there really is no other option. When I moved to my current town, I tried finding something else - called their main competitor Qwest up, no service in my area. The only other option was Iowa Telecom, which went under and got bought out within a couple months of when I was trying to set up services. The new company was not in the phone book, did not have a functional website, and I think I finally found their number in a newspaper ad or something. It was going to be about $10 less for substantially slower DSL, and was going to take 3-4 weeks to set up if I remember correctly. Mediacom does take 2-3 weeks to make a house call. And as bad as Mediacom's service had been in my experience, everyone from the area told me Iowa Telecom was worse somehow. In fact there are many who get their internet through a cellular company because a wireless dongle with tiny bandwidth caps and an expensive data plan is superior to Mediacom in many ways.

I live out in the ass end of Iowa in a small town where I'm new without many friends. We are actually too far from every single major city to pick up any television stations, and only get a couple radio stations consistently. I was starved for entertainment before they got my internet hooked up and had a lot more trouble keeping up with friends from school and whatnot. Don't get me wrong, I hate this damn ad page that they're talking about. I hate getting hung up on while on hold with customer service/sales/anybody I call there. I hate getting an envelope stuffed full of ads every month so that I nearly throw away my bill with all of the crap I don't want. I would love to switch from Mediacom, there's just nowhere to go.

I guess the good captain recycled a bit of intelligence for enthusiasm.

n00bium?

That's strange, the bartender usually has such a magnetic personality.

Titanium's not tremendously rare on Earth, it's just more expensive because it's a bitch to refine and process. As I understand it, most of the processing steps require either a high vacuum or a completely inert atmosphere to overcome the high reactivity of titanium at high temperatures (around room temp it forms an extremely well-bonded oxide on the surface, which is why it's known to be corrosion resistant.)

As the default state on the lunar surface is hard vacuum, this opens up a lot of interesting possibilities for metals development, if only we were able to get there, and bring along or develop a suitable power source as well.

Very nice, props to you sir. However, it seems you left out a few of my favorites.

Andrew Jackson eats the first marshmallow and declares that if you want to keep the second from him, you can enforce it with your army.

Rutherford Hayes eats his marshmallow just as you re-enter the room, and is awarded his prize only after you confer with your panel of co-researchers.

Grover Cleveland eats the first marshmallow, but gets his second when he comes back two days later.

William Howard Taft eats the marshmallow, then eats you, then gets stuck in the doorframe on the way out.

Warren Harding is dead when you come back.

You promise Herbert Hoover a second, but really just take away the first if he hasn't eaten it.

Gerald Ford tries to eat his marshmallow, but only manages to bite his tongue, fall down the stairs, and get shot at on the way out.

That was kind of my first thought, but the more I think about it, the more I feel like this could be a tremendous poster child for Project Natal. If it's at all like advertised, they could throw in a cheap fake plastic controller or something, maybe even have you map your own equipment to controls and get all the control of a PC game on the console. Or maybe use the standard controller in conjunction with motion capture. Hell, I'd definitely spend sixty bucks to rain destruction from a Mech that mimicked my movements.

I used to love Chegg. It started out working as essentially an online classified geared towards books, and since it started at Iowa State, the school I go to, there were plenty of people using it, and it wound up being a very good deal, taking the cost of books per semester down to almost nothing (except of course when they switched editions every few years).

Now that they're pushing their rental service so hard, it's a lot harder to save as much money. I couldn't find any of my books used last semester, which may be due to my major classes getting more specialized and smaller, so I decided to give them a try. They usually rent at 40-60% the cost of a new book, which I suppose still saves money on both ends when you figure in the new edition cycle. However, it is more expensive if you end up keeping the book, and so I suppose I'll end up going to the bookstore again for anything I can't mooch of older friends next year.

Basically it differs from the typical cycle of buying and selling back in that you get a slightly better deal in exchange for letting them know ahead of time that you will be giving it back at the end of semester. Works well in a lot of cases, but it does imply that you expect no lasting value from the book and generally turn out to be correct.

Sounds like the perfect gift for the ninja who's got it all.

...sorry.

I'm sure there's a way to do it right, though. Guitar Hero's doing all right selling games that require special controllers - not that putting out a new or crazy controller is guaranteed to be a great sales plan, but as long as they put out a few good games to go along with it it ought to do all right on the current xbox.