The way I figure it, VW did their longevity and warranty cost calculations, set the horsepower and price, and then someone came back from R&D to say "We've got a couple extra settings you can tweak! You get extra horsepower and it's only a little more expensive in warranty costs!"

So they sell it as an add-on. Sure, the change is only software, but it's not too much different than they were already doing with things like APR tunes. Get your stage 2 kit installed by an independent or DIY? No warranty. Have the dealer do it? Full warranty, minus the performance parts themselves. Some dealers, if you bought the kit from them, would even self-warranty the bits excluded.

Granted, the whole "Sell the car and it goes away" thing is naff and needs to be changed, but.

She was, as head of the Reagan EPA, the reason we have Chevron deference in the first place.

Long story short? Polluters didn't like some environmental regulations, so they asked Anne Gorsuch's EPA to change them. Bing, bang, boom! The regulations now said what the polluters wanted them to.

This isn't new, or even weird.

Almost thirty years ago I worked for a leasing company. We leased computers and equipment, not buildings, but the two things went hand in hand. Our customers would say they had a new office going in, we'd line them up for all the gear they needed.

And guess what? We'd have the vendors in there months before the place was even complete so they could install the phone system, or pre-stage cubicles, or get the switches installed.

Part of the reason things have been crap lately is that the studios have been running smaller and smaller writer's rooms. Why hire eight writers when you can hire four, work the hell out of them, and then lay them off before production so they can't do any rewrites?

They're pushing quantity over quality.

Re-rejected it, really.

The 'latest offer' was the previous offer along with a threat.

And who also sold Gizmodo to Univision when they went bankrupt due to Bollea v. Gawker.

They're now owned by some vulture equity firm.

Wang is still in business?

What are they making now, monitor arms and PC mounting cradles? Keyboards with useless keys?

> the interplanetary equivalent of sending coals to Newcastle

Famously, one man did this, Timothy Dexter. He was the world's worst businessman, but luck was with him every time.

Buy a buttload of worthless currency issued by a country destined to lose a war to the British? He was the one laughing when the British lost and the newly formed US government paid out. Ship bed-warmers to the West Indies? Well, turns out they make great ladles for molasses manufacture.

Same with the woolen mittens he sent there; His ship got there at the same time traders were leaving for what's now Siberia.

On to the coal. Someone suggested, as a joke or as an insult, that Dexter could make money shipping coal to Newcastle.

So he did.

His ship hit the harbor at Newcastle the same week the coal-miners went on strike and he was the only game in town.

This has the odd side effect of Chrysler now being in the business of selling Chevrolets.

The largest container is 53 feet long. The largest common size is 40/45. So no, not going to fit.

I think in a few years we'll all be having a good laugh about how Oculus doomed themselves with this move. I think there are enough people on this planet like me who are 100% distrustful of Facebook and anything they have to do with anything. I have long size made the vow that Facebook and its affiliates get zero dollars of my money and zero seconds of my attention.

We keep reading articles about how Facebook is on the way out, its core userbase of young hip twentysomethings is evaporating quickly, and soon its largest remaining userbase will be the octogenarian set, etc. The bubble is about ready to pop, and I predict (maybe we can have a good laugh at this in a year or two as well) that Facebook is very quickly going to go the way of Myspace, Livejournal, etc.: Namely, they still kinda-sorta exist but nobody save for a very small core few actually give a fuck, and neither of them are exactly cash cows.

Now slap a friggin' hardware keyboard on it and we'll talk. What's the point of yet another stupid buttonless bar phone? It's got a lot of pixels and a big fat processor so it has miserable battery life and absolutely zero usability improvement. It's like putting a solid gold screen door on a submarine, then. Put a Wacom style digitizer on the thing like the Galaxy Note while you're at it, please, so we can accurately poke at hilariously tiny controls and icons on the screen. I don't care if doing so makes the damn phone .0005" thicker or whatever.

Am I the only one who's noticed that our culture has seemingly started to revolve around SMS and Twitter yet somehow at the exact same time everybody started dropping keyboards off of phones? What's the deal with that?

I think it's a conspiracy. (Okay, okay, so the only 'conspiracy' is copycattingthe buttonless design popularized with -- but not invented by -- the iPhone. But still.)

Show some cojones! Have the courage to do something different for a change. I'd love a phone with a billion and three pixels available on the display, but I'd also like a phone that I can actually type on, select things, draw on it, etc. with all those pixels. If all you're doing is tapping and sliding and swiping and poking ineffectually at a million-pixel-wide but only physically 2-inches-across virtual keyboard the damn thing may as well be 320x240.

Microsoft is already charging for Android, in that they say 'Pay us license fees per handset or we sue' and actually get it from 60% of them?

Do you honestly think that, at a 100% payment rate, they'll charge more per handset?

That's a case of two American chamberings being kinda-sorta incompatible with each other, largely owing to the fact that the "military" 5.56x45 is in reality a modified version of the already existing civilian .223 Remington, beefed up with a hotter load and heavier bullet. The Russians didn't enter into this one, or anyone else's military -- Us Americans did it all to ourselves. The .223 was a pretty weedy cartridge for war use at the time of its adoption in Vietnam, so the designers cooked up a more powerful cartridge of the same size that'd fit in the same gun, and then modified the gun to handle the higher pressures and heavier bullets they used.

In reality, this was never intended to present a problem. The military "should" be using the hotter 5.56x45 loads in their rifles, and civilians "should" be using .223 Remington, but as things go they all got mixed up in the ammo chain and you can buy surplus (and commercial!) 5.56x45 and stick it in your .223 deer rifle and vise versa. Now you can buy guns with mil-spec receivers that are made to accept the mil-spec ammo, which leads to a couple of manufacturers selling mil-spec civilian equipment and others just touting up their stuff as if they wish it was mil-spec (and their customers wish it was mil-spec) but it isn't.

Again, the short version: Forget the whole thing and just buy something chambered in 6.8mm SPC instead.