I had DEV AUTO on my car back in '92 or so. After a few years, the car died, and I went for a while w/out (sharing only my wife's car). Some years later, I put the plate up on my office wall, at which point a co-worker promptly registered the tag for his own car. He's still got it (probably about 10 years for him, now). Bastard.

Recently, I saw "NICE -20" on a car (a 'Vette or similar fast muscle car). Laughed out loud when I saw that one....

Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't we already name newly-emergent virus strains from the city or country in which they were first identified? (hence Ebola Reston, etc.)

So Mexican Flu is not only accurate (that's where it first appeared, even if not strictly accurate as to its exact origin), it's also in keeping with past practices.

And I do agree that we should start calling it something else -- even though it probably is too late. Seems like every day they're devoting time on the news to debunking rumors about getting this from pork or from visiting a farm or whatever. Time that'd be better spent on substantive matters, like how virulent is this thing, really, or what Brittney Spears thinks of it.

...isn't this easy?

Plaintext: "Attack at dawn"
Ciphertext: "lkaoiuast98u;aw"
Search query: "oiua"
Result: "lkaoiuast98u;aw"

What could be simpler?

(no, I'm not an idiot, this is a joke.)

It's not like people didn't already know (or guess) this. But I am curious what laws or FTC rules might apply to this. I frequently see modest "open box" price reductions for electronic items like TVs and such, and honestly. I'm not sure it's unreasonable to expect the same of software that is no longer in original, manufacturer-sealed state.

I like that quote, but have never heard it before. It didn't quite ring right for Jefferson, so I dug. According to WikiQuote, it's actually from Gerald Ford's address to Congress in August, 1974.

I think the industry should all stop using the Netbook name, immediately. And then take out multiple advertisements to "clear up the confusion," pointing out how much better their fully-functional micro-laptops are.

Tag line: "Why buy a Netbook(TM) when you can have a Dell?" (with proper attribution for Netbook, naturally).

I think it might go the other way. It's one thing for a few geeks with home-brewed media center PCs to start streaming lots of movies and run up huge bandwidth totals.

It's a totally different thing for "Interweb" users with a cable modem and a single PC they use for online banking, when they get something like AppleTV or Roku and can start watching lots of stuff that way.

That is, once this starts to go mainstream, when average home internet users can start using these devices, there'll be a lot more pressure for ISPs to NOT impose those bandwidth caps.

At least, that's how I'm hoping it goes.

I've always liked this, but more because it's actually from a real source:

"The US has broken the second rule of war. That is, don't go fighting with your land army on the mainland of Asia. Rule One is don't march on Moscow. I developed these two rules myself." - Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, in the House of Lords on American policy in Vietnam, 1962.

I can beat that.

I took a class (actually, an Electrical Engineering class) that taught the basics of assembly and low-level computer design. We interfaced FORTRAN with Assembly on a Sperry-Rand UNIVAC 1100/90 mainframe. With a line editor. It was actually pretty damn cool.

Then I changed majors to Comp Sci and learned all about mathematically verifying programs using some kind of weird "Program Calculus" that I strongly suspect was based on Dijkstra's research. (I wouldn't be surprised if he was one of the authors of our textbook, but since this was 20 years ago I'm not sure which came first -- the theory or the EWD).

Hard to do that with Gas, though.

Plus, you'd have to measure the main (not impossible, but it might be harder to find a clamp-on inductive ammeter that's easy to interface with a computer), and you'd have to monitor it *continuously* in order to integrate over time. Whereas the webcam can even sit powered off for most of the day, and just be activated long enough to grab an image of the dials.

Erm, hm. Not sure. One nice thing that dd can give you is the ability to process in specific blocksizes, which (if chosen well) can speed things up quite a bit, though that's probably less of an issue with today's hard drives than with drives of old (it used to be essential when dealing with magnetic tape). Also, you can send a signal (might be USR1, I forget) to the dd process and have it spit out a status message showing how many bytes it's processed so far (which can be nice, both to verify that it's actually working and when you're working with a big file).

The find command is definitely a good tool to be familiar with. Also, I've done a lot of really wacky stuff with sed in the past. (and sed experience can help you to work with ed and even ex, for those times the system has crashed so hard that's all you've got) (though I don't think I've had that happen since I left Ultrix).

dc and bc are good things at times. Really, I do a whole lot of really complicated manipulation of data with the various utilities, sometimes all in one long pipeline and sometimes in multiple complicated stages. An example of that is where I'll often take a du output, use sed to convert G, K, and M to the proper amount of zeroes (or maybe there's a du option to do that automatically, I forget), awk out the 1st column and print each as "$1 +" with no returns, echo a "0" at the end, and pipe the whole thing through bc, to get a "grand total." (maybe that's a bad example, but the ([do something]; echo 0) | bc is definitely something I've done a lot over the years.

I used to have aliases to call dc to do radix conversion (like echo "2 o 1337 p" | dc to get "10100111001"). (there's also a great .sig line out there that does some kind of crazy dc stack program to print out an ascii message, that I wasted a good chunk of time figuring out on paper to understand how it worked).

Another great trick I've been using for 20 years is dd piped through ssh, to copy a local hard drive image over the net to another machine, or vice-versa (well, okay, 20 years ago it was rsh). (like boot off a live CD, "(ssh remote cat /my/image.dd) | dd of=/my/dev" to rebuild a local drive from a remote backup.

There are lots of other things, way too many to write here. I'm sure there's a website out there somewhere.

Oh, and another great one from the days when I'd get files with untypable characters in the filename -- "ls -i" to get a files inode, then "find . -inum [inode] -exec rm {} \;" to delete that (or mv {} newname to rename it). Not sure I need that much any longer, but at the time it was VERY useful.