combinatorics

For LPC and other urban cache types, how do you ask permission from a business for placement? I've successfully asked permission from a couple, but from others I've received a "no". From most I simply get no reply at all after calling or emailing. Has the community found a "best practice" to follow when asking permission that yields successful results? Do you find it more successful when you simply show up with the cache 100% ready to go and just walk in and ask a store manager? Is asking a store manager enough permission when many stores / restaurants / etc don't actually own the land they are on but rather lease it from a development company? Any advice on getting permission for cache placements would be greatly appreciated.

Where I live, there are a good number of caches. When I create a new one and start looking for a hide location, I have a hard time figuring out what spots are already covered by the 1/10th mile rule. So, I would like to have an option to click a checkbox on the map view and have little 0.10 mile radius discs appear around each cache. That would make it easy to look at the map for an area, hopefully a nice park, that isn't 100% saturated. I get really tired of doing the manual work to do what a feature like this could do in less than a second.

I've never attended an event cache (yet). So, I don't know the full story, etiquette, whatever. But, shouldn't event caches been archived if the event has passed? I keep seeing this cache on the map in my area, but it was more than a month ago. http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.aspx?wp=GC3RZAH Do they get auto-archived after X weeks? Does the owner have to archive it? What's the story here?

I would quit in a half a heartbeat. The one problem would be that with $20 million, I would be able to retire instantly and live off of investment income. Then I would have the extra time I've been wanting to go caching, but not be able to do it. I guess finally I would have time for woodworking and fishing. I'm still hoping that one day I find that cache out there that contains $20 million. I'll make sure to drop in a little trinket in exchange.