Canadians want to do with the penny? This is yet another example of a government caving to the tyranny of inflated pocket change. And I'm sure the U.S. will be the next domino to fall. We know puppet autocrats in Washington have been in league with the evil Cabal of Paper Money (see their eye on top of the pyramid on a $1 bill) for centuries and shadow organization called "Amex" is trying to do away with decimals altogether. Living life in integers only is a planned conspiracy to strip God-fearing Americans of our copper-plated zinc liberties! If anything our government should begin re-minting what they illegally usurped from us in 1858 with the "retirement" of the half cent. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half_cent_(United_States_coin) Our founding father, Abraham Lincoln, guaranteed us the penny denomination when his image was first struck in copper and his big house on the obverse....he's rolling over in his grave that he'll only be available to us on paper $5 bills! And this whole crazy notion of rounding to the hugely inflated nickel is just crazy talk. Jefferson used to teach us that if we saved enough Lincolns we could one day have the likeness of him in our pockets...and now he'd be the first increment on the fraction chart? He and his fancy pants are all bunged up in Monticello as we speak saying, "It's called 'penny candy'....not 'nickel candy'!" I say, "Nay!" Unless the government cushions this effrontery by, at the very least, reintroducing the three cent piece (perhaps with Ron Paul as the missing Founding Father on the back)....it will be just just one more case where our out-of-control government is stepping on our necks and depriving us of life, liberty, and useless small change. Demand re-minting of the Half Penny and Three Cent piece NOW! Call your legislator NOW!

I swap the 1% of cash that I do have in a safe, turn off my cell phone and leave it at home powered off but not destroy it, pack and fire up the dual sport motorcycle with license plates, and go camping in the mountains. Not sure if I'd take a piece or leave it....it depends if I think I'm being pursued by that assassin from No Country For Old Men (a shotgun and a flamethrower) or just a disgruntled husband (small caliber Bond-like gun). Bourne always seem to cross borders with ease in the movies, but I know I don't have the chops to pull that off so I would just stay as rural as I could and try not to attract undue attention. Maybe in area of the country that distrusts well-dressed corporate henchmen/government officials with aviator sunglasses....maybe somewhere like Idaho. Idaho English is one foreign language that's pretty easy to learn and I can fake it a slight accent already. Also, the bad guys have a hard time navigating those black suburbans with tinted windows on forest service roads and even harder time pursuing a motorcycle. Or, maybe I'd stage a SCUBA accident where the body can't be found......in a deep, cold lake in the same part of the world.

The site is blocked here at a major international corporation! Should I worry that my employer has blocked the site and I can't sign up? Does that mean they've pre-protected me and already signed me up with a special corporate agreement or that I need to start looking up and over my shoulder for funny looking planes orbiting my position?

Through life I've never had a cool new product when it first came out. Not only do I have a Nest installed....now it's part of a big lawsuit! Bonus! Now I guess I should go to a rave and show off.....let people set my Nest via iPhone. Do I have to buy trendy shoes and get a special haircut now? P.S. Honeywell can lick my love pump. I'm keeping my Nest!

After I saw what a water heater explode through two floors of a house, a bullet spin on ice, and learned that flatus burns in two different colors from the show....I don't find much of what they do hard to believe.

President Josiah Bartlett is rolling over in his grave.

I cut the tie from the subscription Cable pig 18 months ago. Just use their high speed internet. I bought a used PS3 for the front end and tVersity to stream, Easynews for newsgroup aggregation and I can usually get HBO and SHO stuff pretty quickly (yes, I'd love for them to find a way for me to pay them without going through a cable company), and rabbit ears for local channels. Flipping CBS, NBC, PBS, and ABC is sort of nostalgic...and cool at the same time since it's HD these days. The downside is that I can't surf and see what new shows may be coming up and sometimes hear a long-time later about a cool new show, but then I head to Easynews and usually find it pretty quickly. A 2TB drive and I'm in hog heaven with a great backlog of great movies and can go watch Charlie Sheen's slow decline into a Season 8. Winning!

That filtering isn't quite as easy as you would think and not just cesium, but a potpourri of nasty isotopes. An evaporator like the one below is pretty common technology and probably the way they'll eventually go to reduce the amount of waste. http://www.hanford.gov/page.cfm/242AEvaporator

Just a follow-up, but I got a call back from a staffer saying I'd receive a direct phone call from Ms. McMeley. Impressive actually.... I did share with the staff person the specific question I had about why they'd share information with a third party when i've asked the specifically not to...and that if they send out an apology e-mail they need to include contact information and to share it with their whole company including phone staff. We'll see how it goes....

Just got mine from Christin McMeley of Charter Communications. Conspiciously, it didn't really answer any of my questions nor did they provide any contact information other than a generic www.charter.com/security website totally silent on the subject. When I tried to call Charter they had zero clue about it and thought I had been phished and suggested ignoring the e-mail. Reluctantly and with at least 20 minutes of phone tech and manager consternation they transferred me to their privacy department and ended in a voicemail I have zero faith I'll get a call back on. Rather annoyed I decided to find Ms. McMeley directly and totally surprised to find her actual personal phone number via Google and an incident where they had....wait for it.....reported 12 stolen laptops with personnel data in 2008. http://www.oag.state.md.us/idtheft/Breach%20Notices/ITU-157541.pdf And when I called the number...I got Ms. McMeley's cheery voicemail...in her own voice! That alone was great satisfaction to just leave a message...and asked her nicely to give me a call back on this most important issue. I'm still waiting, but cautiously optimistic she or a staffer will call. And if not...I'll persevere until they explain why my data was stolen when I asked them expressly to not share my personal data with anybody. And if that doesn't work wonder if those fine folks at anonymous are busy?

They should give him command of his own starship!

Sorry Fraser but it seemed a bit more pragmatic than calling it a "Megaptera novaeangliae vessel". Are going to tell me next that hammerhead sharks aren't really hammers? Pbhrrrbt redux!

Why am I having the profound sense of dejavu? I suddenly feel like I'm 20 years younger....wandering around Salt Lake City for the elusive Mormon tail at University of Utah.....reading the newspaper about Cold Fusion discoveries. Wait, it was a hoax then. I wonder if it is now? If not....maybe this time I'll finally succeed in doing the deed with a hot college Mormon and flimsy moral standards. ;)

About $200 at Costco will get you a nice 2TB ioSafe USB Drive. Throw in some freeware backup software and you've got two of the three issues covered for disaster. Secure it somehow and the third of theft is covered with a nice tidy package. http://www.iosafe.com/products-solo-overview

Seems like a perfect material to build a REALLY big fish tank. Anybody know the trajectory to slingshot around the sun really fast?