People point this out a lot, and it is very true, and merchants love to whine about it, but they never point out the costs of handling cash.

You have to count it into the till, make change, balance the till, count and recount your deposit, and then haul it to the bank to deposit and pick up your change order, or pay an armored car service to do it for you. And hope nobody robs you in the meantime, or slips you a bogus $50.

For cards, big stores don't even need to print slips for their records, it is all in the system. For small stores you can just staple the slips together by type and drop them in a box in case someone gets a stick up their butt and decides to audit you.

The heating coils are there for situations where you want (or that the controller board thinks that you want) a lot of heat right now. Like when somebody manually ups the temperature setting about five degrees. With a heat pump, slow and steady (and a programmable thermostat) wins the race.

No, but is an excellent propaganda phrase.

What is really 'funny' is that is probably easier for the NSA to get access to your e-filed tax return via your email account than from the IRS directly, and with less oversight.

Fortunately, I can not. Neither can I put an exact temperature to 'hotter than a freshly fornicated female fox in a forest fire.' Some things are simply better left unknown.

'Avoirdupois' has nothing to do with mass, or at least nothing to do with mass in the customary system, much as the UK pint has nothing to do with anything expect British pubs.

You are thinking of that bastard unit the pound-mass, defined as the mass that produces one pound force at normal Earth gravity. The true mass unit for the US customary system is the slug which weighs in at 32.2 pounds at normal Earth gravity. Just as a kilogram weighs 9.81 Newtons in Earth gravity. No tweaking required.

And don't forget the metric system's own bastard unit: the kilogram-force. Which, I might add, is far more commonly used than pound-mass, unless all of the metric world's cheap bathroom scales are really sophisticated mass-balances in disguise. And whereas pound-mass is always specifically stated, kilogram-force seems only weakly attached to the force.

While I work in a different department of the store, I still hear the stories in the breakroom and 'mostly rational' is not an accurate description of the now diminished hysteria shown by gun buyers over the past six months.

Actually, there are at least two and possibly three different variants of the 787-8 model in commercial service right now. And they won't actually reach the 'final' configuration off the factory floor until somewhere around the 100th airframe. There have been changes to the engines, systems and the airframe itself, some will be retrofitted to the early deliveries during heavy maintenance, others are permanent and adversely affect the fatigue life or range of the aircraft.

And then there are the first few flight test airframes which are so different that Boeing had to abandon its plans to actually deliver them to customers.

is that Win8 is an utter pile of crap. Windows 8 Pro might possibly be less crappy, and is apparently the version all of the pre-release 'you can get used to this' reviews were based on. But from the pointless non-locking lock screen that you can't disable, to the tiles thing to its ridiculous insistence on making documents full screen on a widescreen laptop, regular Windows 8 does nothing but get in the way of user. And I will be darned before I pay Microsoft another penny to remove some of the suckage they went to extra effort to ram in there. And so, my shiny new core i3 laptop is less useful than my 10 year old pentium-m/WinXP system, at least until I get some flavor of linux installed.

And once that happens, Microsoft, know full well that I will not be going back.

With alcohol, they will indeed wait at your door for you to show some ID, and they have billed the shipper accordingly. UPS at least will make three attempts, waiting each time, and absolutely ignoring any notes saying 'please leave with my neighbor' because that is a know vector for kids trying to get some booze.

About the only thing that was controlled more strictly than wine were the thousands of envelopes known to contain tickets to a big college football bowl game.

Because if his website is anything like the public appearances of Romney himself, it changes content based on the state your IP address maps to.

The first debate was supposed to be about domestic concerns. The bacon shortage news originated in Europe, and this maple syrup caper is a product of Canada (also, by the by, a leading exporter of frozen waffles), so you will have to wait until the foreign policy debate to find out where the candidates sit on breakfast table issues.

At DFW the airport runways, taxiways, and parking aprons are also very nearly 100% concrete, not asphalt. Concrete is much more expensive, harder to repair, and the expansion joints can be rather murderous. Which is a point the summary left out: a good asphalt surface has fewer joints that can be split open by snow and ice.

North Korea got nuclear weapons technology from Pakistan, and possibly from China many years ago, not from India. Since India is not, unlike their neighbors to the north-west, bat-shit insane, they probably know that selling asymmetric weapons tech to countries that are bat-shit insane does not advance any of India's political or economic interests. As such they have probably already taken measures comparable to the US or France to secure their project rather than cold calling every drug exporting, famine inducing, hereditary dictatorship in their Rolodex.

And for similar reasons, nobody is any more worked up about this than if France tested a new missile, and maybe even a little less concerned than if the US developed a new ICBM.