If the school and the cops had actually believed or even suspected the clock was dangerous, they would have evacuated the school and called in the bomb squad. The fact that they did not indicates that they knew there was no danger...but, if that's the case, why did they come down so hard on the kid? I put that down to insane "zero tolerance" ( = "zero intelligence") policies. And, in doing so, they played right into the hands of the kid and his Muslim activist father, who I suspect deliberately baited the school to provoke such a reaction so they could claim "Islamophobia." The two of them shouldn't be allowed to profit from that.

This is one of those lawsuits where you wish both sides could lose.

What can I say? I believe in old-fashioned values like working code. ;-)

The one and only criterion that will be used to determine whether a contribution to this project will be accepted is the quality of the contribution and how well it solves the problem it was contributed to solve. Period.

I do not give one milli-micro-nano-fraction of a fuck what race you are, what gender you are or identify as, who you want to sleep with, how old you are, what your height or weight is, what if anything may be different about your body or brain, what language you speak, what country you're from, what God you pray to, where you work, how much money you have, et fucking cetera. Is your contribution any good? That's all that matters.

There is one exception to the above rule: If you're an asshole, you're banned from the project. Permanently.

If your contribution is not accepted, and you start whining about how it's "actually" because you're of some-or-other gender/race/religion/nationality/whatthefuckever, you are attempting to have the deck stacked in your favor because you're "special." That makes you an asshole. And you're gone.

This project explicitly rejects the "Open Code of Conduct" as published by the TODO Group. Anyone complaining about this is an asshole, because who the fuck are you to tell me how I should run my goddamn project? And you're gone.

I reserve the right to change this as I see fit...but anyone who tries to force me to change it in ways that are offensive to me is an asshole. And they're gone.

(Reprinted from my Quora blog)

...who wish that The Martian was based on a true story.

Because the world as depicted in The Martian is a world that still gives a shit about space and the space program. And that's the kind of world I, for one, want to live in.

That sort of tariff, namely, a wage- and environmental-parity tariff, is a good idea, as it would also bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. from countries like China, where companies are able to save money by employing de facto slave labor and spewing poisons into the ground, air, and water. Once the economic advantage to outsourcing is thereby neutralized, the jobs will come back.

This story brought a quote from Gibson to mind for me: "The street finds its own uses for things." (from "Burning Chrome")

Obviously, it's not the Star Trek translator, it's the Firefly translator. :-)

Mark Watney: Stranded on Mars, with nothing but disco.

We will fight until no Harkonnen breathes Arrakeen air!

"Making enormous Swiss cheese?"

Or pop a lot of popcorn.

"Climb the steps of Mount Seleya..."

...and a failed test case at that.

At one point a couple of years ago, I received an unexpected delivery from Amazon, containing a bottle of PreSeed Fertility-Friendly Lubricant. This surprised both me and my fiancee, as I hadn't ordered it, nor would I order something like this, as my fiancee and I are deliberately not trying to conceive a child. (For one thing, she has DVT and is on Coumadin; a pregnancy would be potentially life-threatening for her.)

Checking my Amazon order history, I found no reference to any such order, nor did I find any reference to the order number on the invoice. I E-mailed their customer support, asking how I could return this item, since I hadn't ordered it and didn't want to be charged for it. They replied, saying that the shipment was in error, I had not been charged, and due to the nature of the item, they couldn't accept returns on it.

I wound up offering it to my Facebook friends, and shipping it to a friend in Illinois that spoke up first to claim it. She didn't say why she wanted it and I didn't ask.

The movie version of Hitchhiker's was different from every other version of Hitchhiker's that came before it. To my mind, that makes it perfectly legitimate, given how much all the other versions differ from each other. And it did add some original gags to the mix.