The advice I've replied to is exactly right. In my case, I fly almost every week on business, and I buy my own laptop. By the end of the second year, I almost always experience some type of failure in my laptop--either failure of a component or an accident (liquid into the keyboard). I always buy the all-perils warranty for my laptop and I always come out ahead. I am out at the extreme upper end of the bell curve, and so I benefit at the expense of the insurance company.

One of the benefits of the warranty (on my HP laptop) is that I buy the onsite, next business day service. So, no matter where in the world I am working--and I work in the US, Canada, Europe, and Asia--an HP tech shows up and fixes my laptop without the need for me to visit a service centre or return my laptop to depot by courier. This is part of the business value to me.

However, I do not buy any other extended warranties; because in all the other situations I am not out at the extreme end of the risk curve and so I will always lose.

I should add that I use X1, http://x1.com/, to index and access the Aid4Mail converted emails.

I gathered up all my historical email records a few years ago, and used Aid4Mail to convert all the various mailbox formats to the common format I use today. Choose a format that's convenient for you, and standardize on it. Here's the product website: http://www.aid4mail.com/

This assertion flies in the face of common sense; pollen from this seed will float through the air and contaminate non-engineered fields and now those farmers will also have a percentage of their crop that produces sterile seed. This time, lawsuits will flow in the opposite direction: farmers who replant seed will sue Monsanto due to reduced germination rates and reduced yields in future years.

This is exactly what will happen, and so Monsanto will put and end to many farmers' current practice of saving part of this years crop as next year's seed--since their seed yield will be reduced they negatively impact their future yield due to a percentage of the seed being sterile.

Why does everyone need to keep up with the Jones's?

Unfortunately, politicians do not want to eliminate confusion... they thrive on confusion and obscurity. Just like Canadian politicians (my home country), American politicians will vote to fuck over their citizens and do everything in their power to ensure that citizens are disenfranchised and screwed.

This post is exactly right!!! Unfortunately, Americans, like Canadians (my ilk) are dense and stupid and will never do anything rational or sensible, and so their antiquated measurement system will endure.

Exactly... "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others".

Pens and paper are a lot like food and wine: there are good and bad pairings. A well made technical pen paired with vellum is a fabulous pairing.

I concur with your list of complaints about pens, and have personally settled on using the Uni Ball Vision Elite (fine), which comes in variuos size nibs, as my all purpose pen. That said, in the days before convenient personal computing (I abandoned my paper log book in 1995) I addressed the issues you raise in two ways: 1. Using different pens in different situations; and, 2. Selecting the right paper on which to write.

In many ways, pens and paper are like wines and food: the are good and bad pairings. The right paper with the right pen makes all the differnce. My favourite pen and paper pairing were a technical pen with vellum. Another favourite was an early liquid ink roller ball (not sure what brand) wtih dark blue ink on yellow coated paper.

Internet 101: anything you post will eventually become public; if you you want to keep it a secret, don't post it in the first place. The fact that these two individuals thought that they could mantain two different public personas and keep one of them a secret is simply a testement to their ignorance.

Despite this being the 21st century, I still begin by plugging in the TV (to mains power) and turning the set on.

Saying that MS ran out of time is like saying that the iPad's missing enterprise features are because Apple ran out of time. The iPad's adoption is about user experience, not making CIO's lives happier.

Their inherent behaviour is not an optimal color balance; rather, it's the color balance that people have become accustomed to seeing. For those of us with lots of big windows in our homes, the color of incandescent light clashes with the daylight streaming in the windows.