And by all that's holy, don't be in a dialog with unsaved data, and go to the command box and use "/n" as a prefix to leave the current transaction and launch your new command (like typing "/nWE02".) Because it will happily throw away all unsaved data with zero warning before launching the new program.

Don't ask me how I know this.

our more flexible constitution

and our more independent judicial system

the smaller number of relatively powerful provincial governments, all of which serve as strong Darwinian checks on our federal government

very significant regional differences,

Wow, that sounds an awful lot like the America that used to be. Trust me, it's not that we intended it to be the Federal Government of America, it used to be the United States of America. Then we had a whole lot of people who decided that Statism was a whole lot juicier idea to ram down our throats; they began to put in judges that would rule in favor of the Federal government over the state's rights, and once the school system had enough drones to all chant that More Government is Better Government, well, the devil hasn't had a day off since.

But not for lack of trying. We ever rail against the machine hoping that we can reverse course.

That's funny, given the way that the Quebec drivers whip their cars around when I see them in traffic here in the US, I thought that the translation was "Drive like a dickhead."

But I never was very good at foreign languages.

Gonna be hard to piss off Barack Hussein Obama Sr. - he's been pushing up daisies for quite some time now.

Well, they're mostly made by hand meaning a hand will insert and position the cables, but the crimping machine itself is pretty substantial and probably not something that you'd have in your house.

The op-ed page of the local fishwrap had another suggestion; Every US-flagged merchant ship should have a Phalanx gun with a Navy operator. When the pirate ship approaches, the navy man turns it into wood chips and fish chum in a few seconds. Bingo, no more pirate problem.

"Six munce ago I cudn't evin spel Injuneer - and now I are one."

I worked for a company that put flock on polypropylene ribbon - the fuzzy velvet lined ribbon that you buy at Christmas. That crap is all nylon fibers, cut a couple thousandths of an inch high and dyed. It's then electrostatically charged and deposited onto the substrate, which has had glue applied. Because the substrate is an opposite charge, it stands straight up. The glue is nasty, the fibers are EVERYWHERE. The line workers are basically covered in red 'dust' (actually nylon fibers) at the end of their shift.

And, of course, we had to do this all in the summertime, in order to fulfill the orders for the following Christmas...

My job was to maintain the server, which was on the shop floor. In a closed room. I don't pretend it was sealed, because the server was an odd tinge of red as well. The network hubs were there too.

The horizontal wiring was all silver satin cable - the guy who did this (the 'chief engineer') must've gotten an incredible deal on it somewhere, there were reels and reels of this crap. No way would he let me put in twisted pair, and he was always complaining about server performance and demanding that I put in more memory and that would fix it. One day I went into a closet in the front office and found the silver satin cable terminated with wire nuts. I swear to Christ it was wire nuts. That is the day I printed out my resignation and left it in my wallet for the day I found something better.

Dude, I'll bet that comments like that are exactly what caused MS to go all squeamish.
They're ensuring that their next failure can't be pinned on an on-site pub.

And where are those NiMH batteries now? Hmm?

It isn't defaulted to "Don't share." I never visited this link before and the four lines on my Family Share Plan were all wide open.

I can't wait till my two year agreement is up in July.

If documenting your technical procedures puts your job at risk, then you aren't the right things, to be valuable enough to your company in the first place.

Amen to that. I actually won a bonus one year because I make it a point to teach ANYONE who wants to learn how to do what I do. My entire goal in my career here is to learn something, then as fast as a learn it, teach it to someone else.

The problem is that nobody ever wants to take the job completely, so I still have a whole bunch of little crappy jobs floating around that I'm more or less in charge of. However, as fast as they pop up, my manager yells at people to take them off my plate. (It's nice having a supportive manager.)

Especially if you live in Piedmont, Arizona. Didn't anyone here read "The Andromeda Strain?"

They certainly have a way with words. "The participation of women in spaceflight piques the interest of the public in issues relating to pregnancy and fertility in space."