Alex Trebek: Yeah, it was a trick question, Mr. Connery. Why don't you pick a category?

Sean Connery: I've got to ask you about the Penis Mightier.

Alex Trebek: What? No. No, no, that is The Pen is Mightier.

Sean Connery: Gussy it up however you want, Trebek. What matters is does it work? Will it really mighty my penis, man?

Alex Trebek: It's not a product, Mr. Connery.

Sean Connery: Because I've ordered devices like that before - wasted a pretty penny, I don't mind telling you. And if The Penis Mightier works, I'll order a dozen.

Alex Trebek: It's not a Penis Mightier, Mr. Connery. There's no such thing!

Nicholas Cage: Wait, wait, wait.. are you selling Penis Mightiers?

Alex Trebek: No! No, I'm not.

Sean Connery: Well, you're sitting on a gold mine, Trebek!

The resolution to that case was fairly interesting. FOr those not familiar with it you can see the video here. Basically this officer, Patrick Pogan, picked a guy out of a huge group of cyclists riding in a rally and decided to body check him, hard. In the video the cyclist clearly steers away from the cop and the officer charges him. The officer then arrested the cyclist, writing in the police report that he was weaving in and out of traffic, forcing vehicles to swerve or stop, and generally disrupting the normal flow of traffic. He said that he suffered lacerations on his arms because the cyclists steered his bike into him and knocked him down, and that when he tried to arrest him he began flailing, kicking and screaming, "You are pawns in the game!". The cyclist spent the next day in police custody charged with attempted assault, resisting arrest and disorderly conduct.

The charges against the cyclist were dropped. Pogan, after being a police officer for three weeks got put on desk duty during the investigation. Then on Dec 16, 2008 he appeared in court and pleaded not guilty to felony charges of of falsifying business records and filing a false instrument and misdemeanor charges of third-degree assault, second-degree harassment and making a punishable false written statement. After the indictment, he was suspended. Two months later he resigned as the department prepared to fire him.

In a way this cyclist was lucky, the cop was so stupid he did it in front of at least 100 onlookers. His partner saw it all and still went along with it which doesn't say much for him either. Had there not been so many people around the outcome could've been very different.

If you use the computer a lot and only have one monitor do yourself a favor and get a second one. I prefer at least 22" widescreens but anything will work.

You can keep code on one screen and documentation on another.
You can watch a movie/show on one screen while you use the other.
The NYT reported dual monitors increased productivity 20-30% (although I think it's more task-dependent). If you don't want to buy a second monitor but want some of the benefits there are programs that can split a single monitor into multiple desktops. There is the donationware Gridmove which is an AutoHotKey script and if you're willing to pay there is SplitView, although I'd rather just shell out the extra money for a second monitor.

I see your point, I hadn't thought of it like that but it makes a lot of sense.

The difference between writing software for a UAV that can kill people and writing software for an automobile is that the code for the automobile isn't usually responsible for the deaths, whereas without the code running a UAV is essential to the ability to kill.

I do think it is a necessary job and does accomplish a lot of good, it all depends on how you look at it.

UAVs keep our men and women out of harms way, increase our technological capabilities, lower cost of operations, allows us to be in more places at once, and as the technology matures and flows to the private sector there are tons of uses as well.

We could use them in forest fires to collect better data and fight the fire better. In natural disasters they could be deployed to scout large areas. They could cover large areas in search and rescue missions. They could fly around and help guard our borders. They could monitor the environment, power lines, gas pipelines, etc. They could be used for urban planning, and I'm sure others can think of a bunch more.

A lot of people that are now in their early twenties got exposed to 68k ASM with the TI-89 and TI-92 and z80 ASM with the TI-83 and TI-84 calculators.

What originally got me started programming was my TI-83 in 9th grade Algebra 2. I was horribly unprepared for the class so I learned how to make programs to do the quadratic formula, solve equations, expand polynomials and the like. Now this was just in TI-Basic but translating the math into code really helped me understand the material.

Then I found ticalc which was and probably still is the best resource for everything involving TI calculators. I must have printed almost a thousand pages of code, books, FAQs, and tutorials. I'd trace through the code to learn what I could from and then try writing something myself. Most of the games used z80 assembly and there were tons of them to look through. I think early exposure to assembly definitely improved my ability to work in higher level languages.

A few years later for Calculus I got a TI-89 which used the Motorola 68k processor, however I was never as interested in learning to program the TI-89 as I was with the TI-83. I'm sure I'm not the only one whose first exposure to programming was on the TI calculators, they probably bred a new generation of programmers through their calculators.

Not to be confused with LOLCODE. Here's an Hello-World example taken from their site.

It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

I used to work at a very popular seafood restaurant and most people would kill the lobster before cooking. You just take a 10" of so chef's knife and cut lengthwise right behind the eyes, pretty much cutting the head in half. Very quick death.

Rolling Stone had an article in the latest issue titled AIG: The Big Takeover. Here's a small excerpt from it.

It is truly an amazing article and the presents the clearest picture I've seen of how this came about. I suggest everyone read it.

This was originally posted Saturday here

Anyone know why the last one was closed?

Aero Shake in XP withAutoHotkey

To only show icons in the taskbar open regedit and go to

In right-side pane, change value of MinWidth to -300 and reboot, you may have to tweak the number a bit but -300 works great on my system.
I know this works in XP, I haven't tested it in Vista.

Also to get rid of the start menu I use RocketDock for a MacOS like dock and Launchy to pop up an enhanced Run dialog (and I mean really enhanced). Some people prefer Executor

Also I've tried off and on for years to use only Linux but I've become so proficient with XP that I after a while I get frustrated with not being quite as productive. So until I can force myself to get better at using Linux than I am at Windows I'll continue using Linux as a secondary OS. I'm not flaming Linux by any means, I've just gotten too used to my setup in XP and the tons of modifications I've made to it that it's difficult to give it up and invest the time to match it in some sense with Linux.

That was just their excuse. First they said all bills would be online for public review for five days, then they said 48 hours. They actually made it available 10 hours before they voted on it. It was 1071 pages long. By comparison the Patriot act was 342 pages long and nobody read that.

Is isn't as if bags of money started flying out of the treasury the second it passed. The assholes in Congress allocated almost $1 billion of taxpayer money for every page of the bill and nobody really reviewed it or even had time to.