No. Ads leech off legitimate users' bandwidth. I pay for my bandwidth and don't want it being sucked up by ads. I'd pay more for an ad-free internet, but no ISP offers that, so I use the tools that are offered.

The problem I have with targeted ads is that they are shown to me without my permission. They should only be shown to me when I inquire about purchasing something. That's one of the reasons I never conduct unsolicited business. The 100%, sure fire, guaranteed way to get me to not buy something from you is to try to sell me something I didn't ask about.

Not gonna happen. When I was participating in military exercises on/over private land in the late 1980s, no live ammo was allowed anywhere near the exercise. The only exception was for every 10 or so M-16s issued to us we had to have someone with a "guard gun" with live ammo in case some of the locals wanted to try to rob us. The guard gun was usually an M9 Beretta, but on one occasion we had to use another M-16. We taped up the whole weapon with yellow and black "Hazard" tape. The magazine was also spray painted orange and had "Live Ammo" written on it. We take safety seriously when were practicing to kill people! However, it was quite fun as an Air Force geek to be flying 50-100 feet off the ground in a Blackhawk strafing cattle with M-60 blanks! Rafter Man: "How can you shoot women, children?" Door gunner: "That's easy. You just don't lead them as much!" --Full Metal Jacket

Apparently, the US Gov't treats its own employees much better than it expects corporate America to. A junior, just-starting-out, probationary employee gets 13 days vacation (annual leave), 13 days sick leave and 10 Federal holidays per year. You are *expected* to take sick leave when sick and you are *expected* to take your vacation time. If you are on sick leave for more than 3 days, your supervisor *may* request that you provide a doctor's note, but it's not required. There is no stigma attached to taking leave the way there appears to be in the corporate world.

Unused sick leave rolls over year-to-year with no maximum accrual amount. (e.g., I have over 1000 hours) Annual Leave rolls over as well but you must have less than 30 days (240 hours) on the books at the end of the year. In my agency, if you have a "use or lose" leave balance, you must submit a leave schedule to management showing that you will in fact not lose any leave.

Al Gore created the Universe!

Have you checked the Netflix catalogue lately? Pretty sparse unless you want to watch >1 yr old TV series. I'm 0 for my last 5 attempts at trying to watch the movie I'm in the mood for. After enough searching I can usually settle for *something* but most likely I'll just turn it off.

All the HPDEs I've been to allow data collection as long as it's not visible/accessible during your on-track sessions. None have set up a beacon for lap timing. I'm told that's a restriction of the liablilty insurance provider. During the motorcycle track days I've done, about 75% of participants run a lap timer. There is always a beacon set up.

Personally, I can't wait to try out this app on my next track day.

I remember a telephone add-on device from the 1980s that would intercept your incoming calls and ask you to enter your PIN in order to complete the call. You would simply give that number to people you expected call from all others got the option to leave a message, if you allowed that option. Better than an answering machine since your phone didn't ring until after the correct PIN was input by the caller. I'd like to think that can be done in software now on IOS or Android.

If he goes FPC Montgomery, then I'll likely see him out cutting the grass or emptying trash cans as my office is about 500 yards from the entrance to the camp here on Maxwell AFB. Prisoners do all the grounds and building maintenance on base. Consequently, this place is immaculate -- hardly a blade of grass out of place.

They live in open bay barracks (so they tell me) and cannot have money, outside food & drink, cell phones and many other electronics (They've recently been allowed to have MP3 players). One of the prisoners who's been here since 1999 and works in our building was curious about my iphone as he had never seen one in person. They have a fair amount of freedom (for prisoners) and are very well behaved because they know if they screw up then it's straight to a "pound me in the ass" facility for the rest of their sentence.

Can't it just show me a VR watch on my wrist when I look down at it? Make mine a Patek, please, in 18Kt.

And where is your research that leads you to that conclusion? I love it when people say, "the helmet save my life" just because it cracked when they crashed. I usually respond with "how do you know that? Have you had a substantially similar crash without a helmet in which you did not survive?"

Now I have no doubt that helmets absorb energy in an impact, I just don't think they are as effective at reducing injury as the general public believes them to be. The crash test researchers fully understand, but they are getting paid to reduce risk & liablilty to and absolute minimum. So even a quantum reduction in risk is a positive outcome.

IMO, honing your cycling skills and increasing your situaltional awareness while on the road do more to reduce the risk of injury than simply strapping a beer cooler on your head

So let's play the anecdotal evidence game again: I've been cycling "seriously" for about 28 years. I still have more miles helmetless than helmeted. Everytime I've crashed (sample size: 5) I've been wearing a helmet. Everyone I've known personally (sample size: 3) who has been killed while cycling was wearing a helmet. Damned dangerous things, those helmets! :)

If the insurance companies really want to know how compentent a driver I am, they should record the data from one of my HPDE (High Performance Driving Education) sessions, aka "Track Day without lap timers". Then they'll get to see full throttle acceleration, threshold braking and how well I can recognize and recover from understeer and oversteer on a skid pad. Once you've developed these skills (and I'm only an "intermediate" driver in the schools I attend) driving at traffic speeds is like watching a movie in slow motion. You can see situations unfolding so much further in advance than other drivers, it's ridiculous. Then they should give me a 50% discount on my premium, because I'm now one of the very few who really knows how to drive my car. Instead, my insurance would probably be cancelled because I drove too fast on a controlled course...

BMW have actually been adding some tactile buttons back to their cars in response to (mostly valid) i-drive criticsms -- that of having to take your eyes off the road to accomplish routine tasks. Now what I do like about i-drive is the ability to alter many of the cars settings without having to take it to the stealership at US$125/hr. Full disclosure: my BMW (E46 M3) does not have i-drive. I've only played with it in other people's cars.

An "assault rifle" is a co-opted term of the anti-gun lobby used to describe scary looking semi-automatic rifles. My own personal definition of "assault rifle" is any rifle that a person uses to assault another person, whether it be a Barrett .50 Cal or a Red Rider BB gun.

NB: Many people believe the "AR" in AR-15 stands for Assault Rifle, but is actually Armalite Rifle, a reference to the original manufacturer.

Not flamebait. If the IOC are going to all the trouble of trying to determine if you are male or female then that implies you MUST be one or the other in order to compete in {Male/Female] Olympics. If that cannot be accurately determined then you cannot play. Go start your own mutant Olympics, which I would very much pay to see.

As do I, along with the tape drive, disk drive and a copy of HHGTTG