WordPress.com serves ads to everyone unless you are logged in to a WordPress.com account or are running some kind of ad blocking plugin in your browser. This bit about not serving ads simply because you are running Firefox is simply untrue.
I'm not sure the exact history of it all, but I know that at a State of the Word presentation at a WordCamp many years ago, Matt M said that they were serving ads to Internet Explorer users to try to convince them to switch.
<disclaimer>I am an Automattic employee.</disclaimer>
We do serve ads equally to all browser types. :)
[edited to note that I am talking about ads that can potentially generate revenue, not any other ads we may have run in the past to convince people to upgrade their browsers]
> We do serve ads equally to all browser types. :)
Contrary to what it said on your site when we signed up, it appears that you also serve very much non-text ads these days as well. We discovered this when someone sent us a screenshot of a (large, bright white) ad for a vaguely related product displayed right underneath a (medium-sized, dark-background) screenshot of our new product on our custom-styled (dark coloured) blog.
This was on a blog for which we have paid actual money for various premium features, and to say that we were unimpressed at how unprofessional-looking this made our post would be an understatement. I was really hoping that this was some sort of dubiousware installed on the visitor in question's browser and not something done by the WP site, but I notice that the explanation about ads on your site has since changed to remove the "text" qualifier, though it certainly hadn't at the time the offending ad was displayed or when we chose to use your service and pay you money for the extra features.
It's much more likely that their Firefox user-base had extremely low click-throughs on ads, so they turned it off for them, and in turn increased the overall click-through numbers ... which can influence how much they get per click.
I've found the most effective way to work through a problem is to have to explain it to my wife (who has no programming background). It works wonderfully.
For those of you that don't want to drop the money on a roaster, you can buy an old popcorn popper and use it. Beware - once you start down the path of roasting your own coffee, you won't want coffee any other way.
I think you are mainly right. There are a small subset of us ex-Army folks with special skills that weren't signal or intel guys. That number is dwindling every year, partly because those highly skilled jobs (mine was calibration related) are being pushed to the DA civilian side. Also (as you correctly mention), you can do a short 4 or 5 year active tour, then get out into the civilian world and make literally 3 times the salary doing the same type of job.
I think the Army tries to pride itself on training people to get out ("Hey we pay for college, we help find you jobs when you are outprocessing!"), but the reality of the situation is that most of the Army isn't getting trained for their exit to the civilian world.
Heroku does support Rails 3 (3.0.0beta). I ended up porting my stuff from 2.3.5 -> 3 and was up and running in no time at all. See http://docs.heroku.com/rails3 for more info.
If by "affiliations" you mean "works for" or "is paid by" DuckDuckGo, it's highly unlikely. DDG is the product of solo founder Gabriel Weinberg (epi0Bauqu). Check out his awesome blog: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/.
