SUVs get hated on a lot these days for their gas mileage, but they're really awesome for camping. One reason why: I can fold down my back seats. Instant flat bed, more than enough for a 6' + man. Also, a 4WD truck like my Explorer is invaluable for accessing the kind of mountain camping and backpacking spots that I…

Well, I TRIED, but I happened to be on vacation in Los Angeles without a car last weekend. I actually went up to the Griffith Observatory in hopes that I would see something, but all I could make out through the insane light pollution were a few faint stars. The city lights were real pretty, though.

I've yet to have a negative support experience with Apple or their stores, although I do hear that this can vary greatly from place to place. My Retina MacBook needed a screen replacement twice due to burn-in, something that costs about $1000 according to the parts and labor receipt they gave me. I didn't pay a dime,…

I think it really depends on the age of the kid and how fine your dragnet is. Keeping an eye on your eight-year-old to make sure they're not talking to creeps online is one thing, but I think it's pretty ridiculous when people try to stop their fifteen-year-old from watching porn or chatting with certain friends the…

I haven't used it, but the impressions I've heard have been almost universally positive. It's a 1.0 product now, but Yahoo had to do something- Flickr was bleeding users like a stuck pig and had been horribly outdated for years. It was a big change, though, and evidently you just can't please everyone.

So... brilliantly, then?

That cover turned out to be a fake. Here's the actual picture. It still isn't the greatest shot ever, but it's better than the fake.

This post is so edgy I almost cut myself on it.

Billion. It will be too hot for liquid water in a billion years. When you consider that almost all complex, multicellular life began roughly 542 million years ago, this planet still has a lot of evolving and living to do. Human evolution from our last common ancestor with the chimpanzee occurred around 6 million years…

That whole screed about poor people and the supposed lives of luxury they live on the government's dime is particularly amusing in light of the fact that you're a career union man who claims to be a progressive.

You honestly think that if people know about it, that'll stop J.M. Smucker & friends from taking it? People don't care. "A million" haven't seen this post- about 15,000 have, and that number probably won't climb all that much by day's end. Even if everyone did know about it, a big company stealing a patented invention…

Here's how this works out in the Jiff meeting next week:

Well, let me back up here. I do consider myself an "agnostic atheist", although "agnostic" doesn't really mean what most people think it means. To be agnostic is just to be uncertain. I would say I'm 99.99% certain there is no god or spiritual component to life.

I can say it because I base my conclusions about the nature of the universe on the facts and evidence available to me and nothing more. You're correct to say that we do not know everything, and science does not claim to have all the answers. That does not make emotional, non-evidence-based beliefs reasonable, however.…

Our bodies are significantly more complicated than those of ringworms. Our "life force" is simply chemically stored energy procured from food by way of metabolic processes. Wanting something to be true does not make it reality, and as much as we may wish that some deeper purpose or force underlies homeostasis, there…

I don't know about that. If you recall, in the last episode of the series, Peter's girlfriend and Zoe were both starting to figure out what was going on. Zoe was his ally for most of the first season, but now she's clearly starting to turn against him- and as she's shown time and time again, underestimating her is a…

It put broadcast television to shame. This was more on the level of really good cable TV, maybe even premium-access stuff like HBO and Showtime. Broadcast TV, in my experience, has largely failed to put out anything halfway decent in the last ten years.

I just watched the movie about a month ago.

I believe that T-Mobile's $70 "Unlimited Nationwide 4G" plan is actually unlimited, with no restrictions on tethering. For a while, they would throttle you after 5GB or something- but I seem to recall reading that they did away with that.