I live in the suburbs of the suburbs of a major metropolitan area. My commute home from work is about 15 miles. On a good night, it takes 35 minutes. On a shitty one, it takes an hour.

So, when all the fucking traffic is going in one direction, why the fuck does it still have to slow down to ten miles an hour on a road where the speed limit is 55?

If you can't solve the gross case of "get everyone outside the city as fast as fucking possible" then the problem of "do I have to wait one minute to make a left fucking turn" is, quite frankly, TRITE.

It's that the daily standup puts an expectation that "every" day you "will" be at "this" spot for "this" amount of time. And I find that overbearing.

With that attitude, I wouldn't want you on any development team I'm on, nor would any manager I've ever worked with in my entire career.

It turns out that we have only a vague idea as to where Earth got its water, and it will take a long time until we have any hint of this life-giving resource on worlds orbiting stars thousands of light-years away.

Where does this idea that water might be rare and special come from? Our own solar system is teeming with the stuff. It's on several planets, several moons, many comets, and there's probably a bunch of it locked up in asteroids as well. It's a simple compound of the most abundant element in the universe plus an element that is certainly not rare.

The default position should be to assume that our solar system is NOT unique. Other solar systems stars like our own will contain elements and compounds in similar proportions to our own, because they will have been formed from a similar quantity of a similar mixture of gasses and interstellar junk.

We've discovered many many planets orbiting nearby stars already, enough so that we can safely assume that planets are normal. It makes sense that water should also be pretty abundant as well.

Stuck? Why not go prepaid with an MVNO?

I recently canceled with AT&T and converted to TracFone. I bought a Motorola phone outright for $90, which came with a "triple minutes for the life of the phone" deal. The triple minutes thing brings my per-minute cost down to $0.047 per minute. Text messages cost me 0.3 minutes of time, and browsing the web charges minutes during usage.

Over the three months I've had it, I've been paying a little less than $17 per month on average. Compared to what AT&T was charging me -- and I was on the cheapest voice and data plans -- the phone paid for itself before the second month was up.

The only change I made was to start using my computer to make voice calls when I'm at home -- and my bluetooth headset allows me to talk away from the computer once the call is connected.

The "customer retention" tool that took my cancellation call tried to tell me that TracFone coverage would be lacking. TracFone runs over AT&T's network.

So how the hell can a third party resell AT&T pay-as-you-go service for half of what AT&T itself charges for that same service? Somebody is really getting screwed. And it's not me, at least not any more.

I do that at a macroscopic scale and at room temperature on a daily basis. Quantum mechanics is a huge scam.

QM predicts and experiments have verified that when pairs of entangled photons are passed through polarizing filters, they correlate at a rate that is a function of the difference in angle between the filters. If you do the same experiment with pairs of non-entangled photons, the results never correlate.

Go wrap your head around that. Seriously, think about it. In order for that kind of correlation to happen, each member of the entangled pair must be connected in some way across time and space. You can't replicate that kind of experiment by flipping coins.

After you've understood the thing well enough, then try calling QM a huge scam.

There are a lot of incredibly smart people who make this kind of thing their life's work, and a random anonymous nobody like you has no right at all to disrespect them or the truths they are working to discover.

I had been using smartphones for over four years, until just recently. I had an iPhone for two years, and before that I used a Pocket PC that could do everything an iPhone could do except it didn't have such a slick interface. All that time, I had a basic voice package and a decent data plan.

Recently (tough economic times and all) I decided to really have a look at what I was paying for and what I was getting. I found out that more of my "rollover minutes" simply decayed after non-use than I ever actually used. I never used more than 20% of my "evening and weekend" minutes. I never used more than 10% of my Internet bandwidth cap.

Basically, I was paying $85 or so per month and letting most of the value of it go to waste.

So, I switched to pre-paid TracFone. I bought a decent Motorola that has a touchscreen and a decent collection of features. I lost GPS navigation, but that's ok because I have a GPS in my car now. Other than that, I can still talk, text, browse, play games, and anything else I could do before.

The phone came with a "triple minutes for life" deal. Basically, that means that so long as I use that same phone, I buy my pre-paid minutes at $0.047. If I browse the Web, it charges me for the time in minutes, instead of metering my bandwidth. Text messages are about 1.5 cents apiece to send and receive.

And all of it goes over AT&T's network. I have the same service provider as before. Same signal quality. Same Internet bandwidth.

Another thing I did was invest $30 in a decent headset for my computer. When I'm at home, I now use Google Voice to make outgoing phone calls. I get great sound quality and don't pay a penny for it. These are my new "evening and weekend" minutes...

I paid $90 for the phone, and I charged it up with a little under 1300 minutes at a price of $60. That was 2.5 months ago. I still have 430 minutes remaining. That basically means I'm using my phone for a hair under $16.50 per month now. That's a savings of about $70 per month. The cheaper service has already paid for the phone. Anybody want to buy a used iPhone 3GS?

If you use the hell out of your smartphone, you might be getting your money's worth. But if you're a more "casual" smartphone user, then you're getting seriously ripped off.

I understood that six degrees was supposed to be the maximum, not the average.

was on a guitar forum when someone posted the question about bands with mediocre guitarists. One responder (not me) commented something along the lines of "John Flansburgh of TMBG qualifies... and I'd still rather listen to them than anything by Yngwie Malmsteen."

Hmm. I don't quite get that. I've always considered him to be a very underrated guitarist. He's incredibly versatile and amazingly subtle. But what he's really got is the gift of finding a great hook. There are plenty of amazingly skilled guitarists out there. But most of them aren't part of my mind's internal soundtrack. John Flansburgh's stuff is. So is Peter Buck's. And Ed Robertson.

Most people don't know who any of those guys are, but those are some of the best guitarists in the business today.

According to Wikipedia, Flans once stated Factory Showroom was his favorite TMBG album. Clearly they thought it was some of their best work. However, they parted with their label afterwards, and one of the reasons was a feeling that the label failed to adequately promote the album.

I think Factory Showroom is their best work to date. There are parts of every single album before and since that I love, but for Factory Showroom I know every lyric of every song by heart.

I bought the CD when it was released. It wasn't long before I recorded a WAV of the line "HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO LET YOU KNOW THEY WAY I FEEL ABOUT YOU" from Exquisite Dead Guy, and made it my Windows startup sound. :) That was back before XP.

there is a bit of irony in protesting against corporate greed while blogging about it on the most expensive and fashionable laptops

How is it ironic? Apple provides quality products at a price point many are willing to meet. Also, I don't recall them ever having been in the news for screwing over their workforce. Plus, they haven't screwed up the global economy by committing real estate fraud on a global scale. As far as I know, they are not heavily subsidized by the government. And, you tend to associate Apple with Silicon Valley instead of Wall Street. The protest is "Occupy Wall Street", not "Occupy Silicon Valley".

Protesting against "corporate greed" does not require putting all corporations together in one group.