They'll just get you like Al Capone. You didn't pay taxes on your illegal activities? Well, we can't imprison you for murder, racketeering, gambling, and bootlegging, but any money you didn't report as coming from those activities? BAM! Prison for tax evasion.

Good god, I hated professors who did that, who told us to "sit and listen" because there was no need to take notes, they were already provided. It isn't even just that the slides provided where often terrible; it has to do with my personal style of learning. The very act of writing down lecture notes -- which for me involves summarizing, synthesizing, and integrating the subject matter being discussed -- is how I learn. I will probably never again look at what I wrote down either.

This was especially true for me in engineering or physics. Working my way through complex equations was the only way to really understand them; it was ten times harder to try to follow pre-printed steps for me. In law school, I would write analytical summaries of the material I had heard or read to retain knowledge. Worked fine.

And while I think it would have been just awful for taking notes in engineering (with all of the equations, diagrams, etc), the laptop was a godesend for the massive volume of notes taken during law school. I seriously wonder how many trees are slaughtered at the end of every semester when people print out their notes to prepare for finals. Most classes, I ended up with 50-150 pages of dense typewritten notes. While I didn't print those out like some did -- as I noted, I usually never look at my notes again -- I would still create and print out a 5-20 page outline of the essentials to study for each of my classes.

A large part of opinion on this really comes down to how the student learns, I think. For me, I learn best by listening to a lecture, writing it down (which includes thinking about the material and summarizing / synthesizing it), and then never looking at my notes again. It's the act of writing / transferring it that works for me; the actual notes are superfluous for me afterwards. It about killed me when a professor who was big into powerpoint would quickly flip through densely packed slides -- I just couldn't absorb it and telling me not to take notes, that they were available to print out, didn't cut it. I had a couple of rough classes where the material itself wasn't bad, but I could have learned the same material in a class hour listening and notetaking that actually took me 4-5 hours to muddle through slides instead. (My undergraduate was in physics, EE, CS).

Some people, on the other hand, learned best by reading and repetition and I suppose this would work for them. Not me. Even in law school, with its horrifying amount of reading, it was the oral lectures and notetaking that cemented the material for me.

I like lots of light. Bright-sunny-day kind of light, especially in the bleak middle of a grey winter. I took the three lamps in my room with 100w incandescent bulbs and replaced them... with three 105w CFLs. I had to special order them online, since I have yet to see a Home Depot/Lowes/Walmart/Target/etc with anything close.
    They're big suckers, but they fit a standard socket, use basically the same amount of energy, and they give me almost 1600-incandescent-watt equivalent of light (21,000 lumens). Great way to wake up in the early morning.

http://apps.life-ware.com/iclient/

This is a good place for it, so I'm going to be the shill and plug the new iPhone app my friend helped develop for his company. It interfaces with that company's product line for complete home automation. Lighting control, home theatre control, video & security equipment, climate control, you name it. Their prices place their product in the luxury category, in my opinion, but it's a great start -- and the end result is pretty sweet.

I still stick to my 15 year old X10 equipment, a home theatre PC, and some apps I developed awhile pack, but if you've got the funds, I recommend checking them out. When they were testing their iPhone app, it got a lot of previously uninterested people a lot more interested :-)

Well, I happened to be by my local CC yesterday and went in to see what they had left. Very little, but I did get some deals. Today they were selling off all of their racks, shelves, etc.

I got:
Two toner cartridges for my laser printer @ $14 each.
A PCMCIA USB port for my laptop with broken USB @ $3
Several DVD-R DL disks for $0.40 each.

On the one hand it is said that they are gone, because there is basically no competition hereabouts (unless I want to drive 70 miles to Best Buy), but on the other hand, it took a 90% discount to get me to buy from them.

Not quite. We're a common law nation and the courts have defined what obscenity is. Sort of. And it isn't what you probably think.

The Miller Test

Something may be considered obscene only if all three apply:

(1) The average person, applying contemporary community [local] standards, would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest

(2) The work depicts or describes sexual conduct in a patently offensive way [specifically defined by applicable state law];

(3) the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value. [This branch of the test is based on national, not local, standards.]

~ ~ ~

Profanity is something else entirely. It is going to be covered by the 1st amendment. See Cohen v. California (Supreme Court said that the message "F*CK the Draft" in big letters on the back of a man's jacket was constitutionally protected political speech.)

Basically, if South Carolina's law could conceivably be applied to censor such speech (which, duh, it certainly can) then it will be unconstitutional for broadness, among other things. If this thing somehow miraculously makes it into law, the Federal Courts will not take kindly to it.