The conditioning happens earlier than that, I'm afraid.

You need to put a television show on aimed at preschoolers. Make it have a fuzzy stuffed bear who helps kids with things they don't know how to do themselves. Make it a "special assignment" for this bear to help the kids.

The kids are told to do X or Y (make their bed, change the lining in their rabbit cage) by themselves with no parent guidance. That's key number 1.

So how does this external agent, this "stuffed bear" change agent, know how to visit the children to help them? How else? A flying ladybug, that conceals a camera in it. The camera flies in the neighborhood, sees the conundrum of the child, deploys the camera and takes some footage. It then flies to a line-of-sight position, and sends the signal to an orbiting satellite, from where it's beamed to the special agent bear's headquarters. His employer then takes him off of whatever he's doing to go help the child with what they want to accomplish. After all, "it's all part of the plan" (we'll make that a tagline of the show, too.)

Farfetched? No, it's going on right now, unfortunately.

>

This.

I make fun of people who carry around their life in their PDAs while I use paper and pencil. I take them to the parking lot, put my "PAA" (Personal Analog Assistant) under one wheel and dare them to put their PDA under another one as I put the car into drive and step on the gas.

At least I did until Motorola retired the ST7868 and my daughter gave me her cast-off iPhone. I then got assimilated. Someone shoot me.

We more or less had one of these.

It was third shift at Purolator Courier's data center. We'd just finished the night's batch run, we were running the backups, CICS was getting ready to come back up.

We had had some squirrelly underfloor sensors all day, because the cleaning people had been in to vacuum under the floor which always stirs up dust and sets them off. It would kick the trouble alarm rather infrequently through the overnight. We'd yawn, wake up, go over to the annunciator panel, hit "Reset" and that would be it.

A gung ho tape jockey had come in to relieve the shift supervisor, who had retired to the shift supervisor's office for a nap after a hard night of pressing the "Enter" key. GHTJ sits bolt upright at the next sounding of the alarm and goes over to the annunciator panel, opens it, and apparently not realizing it's a trouble alarm figures he'd save the night's work by hitting the Halon Dump Abort switch so that we wouldn't have to evacuate the data center - halon being not very breathable, you see. However, the annunciator cover was open and his head was in the innards, and his aim was a bit off...

Yup.

Right for the Emergency Power Cutoff.

BAM! The breakers all popped, lights went off, fans sighed to a halt here in the operations room. The one where the tape drives and consoles and printers were. We knew with a sinking feeling that the same thing was happening on the floor above us, where the CPUs and DASD (Direct Access Storage Device, "Disks" to those of you from Rio Linda) were now sighing to a halt, their circuit breakers tripped and un-resettable except by an IBM Customer Engineer.

In the deafening silence, the phone rang. It was the Indianapolis air hub, which all of a sudden had sudden blank screens as all its planes came in for sorting the night's volume of packages...

Whoops.

The next night there was a plexiglass cover over the Emergency Power Cutoff switch. The Gung Ho Tape Jockey I think went back to hanging tapes. I don't remember.

My clock is pointed so the clockface is towards my feet - it's on the nightstand and I can't see it without raising my torso and turning my head.

As far as I'm concerned the poll is invalid on its face, since as I'm falling asleep my eyes are closed.

"we don't think paying a per-vuln bounty is the best way."

-- er

"We can't afford the hit to our bottom line if we were to start paying people to find the bugs in our software."

This brings back memories of when I was a kid. I and my friend had a 'fort' which was coincidentally under one of those "high tension" (what, about 50KV?) power lines.

We had the bright idea that rather than run an extension cord out from his house, we could just shoot an arrow that had a conductor attached to it over the lowest of those power lines, then use a transformer to step it down to the right voltage, and Bob's your uncle; instant television in the old fort.

Fortunately, we were much more interested in the architecture than the elctrical provisioning of said fort and quickly realized how in over our heads we'd be to try something like that.

As another poster in this article noted the term is "feather" the blades, not "fan" the blades.

First thing I thought of was Heinlein's Shipstone. That too would blow up if anyone tried to disassemble it, ensuring the Shipstone Corporation a virtual monopoly on the assembly process, without the tedium of a patent.

I was going to mod this but decided instead to comment. I faced a similar situation in my freshman year in college. My English professor's only comment for my final paper was "This paper gets an 'A' if you answer my verbal question correctly, and an 'F' if you do not." Needless to say, I did answer the question correctly and in the process learned a valuable lesson about how I should attribute sources more completely in my subsequent papers. (Thanks, Mrs. G!)

A super computing grid?

Oolcay itay.

>>keep in mind she rarely wears underpants.

Is this apocryphal, is it something she's admitted, or do you have direct knowledge? Inquiring minds and all that.

I hardly think that our pissing in the pool is going to affect the pool one whit.

First thing I thought of was Scoop. And not that icky new version either. Saw that and cringed. Give me my frickin' lasers in the central core.

Not true. I deactivated two months ago and just reactivated by logging in.

Came in just to clean things up and install the FBP script. :)