Not the DMCA threat, of course, but the author of TFA who restrains himself from using a car analogy for a whole 5 paragraphs.

But was the use gratuitous? It needs to be gratuitous use FTW, if I recall.

It should reside at something like www.Government.us/research/

Hey, there's hope yet. We still have Change We Can Believe In, remember? One of the Changes was greater transparency. (cough)

RTFP again. He didn't say every American, he said every unemployed person.

How do I keep Obama + Congress from handing them money?

Write.

Write to your congresscritter. Every chance you get. Add the email address to your congressperson and your two senators to your address book.

Go to OpenCongress to see what bills are coming up, which ones have been introduced, which ones are headed for debate, which ones are headed for a vote.

Tell your reps what you think about the bill and why it's a bad idea. If they don't hear from us, they start operating in a vacuum. They start guessing. And there's a 50-50 chance that they're NOT doing what you want them to do.

And after the vote is over, send another message. If they voted the way you wanted, thank them. If they voted against your wishes chew them out.

Write letters to the editor. True, you can usually get published only once every 30 days with most papers but hell, that's 12 letters a year. If you make them cogent and well written you can make friends with the editor, who's looking for good stuff. (My last letter got printed just today as the leadoff letter, which means it was printed in a gray box with an attention-getting border.)

I have had it up to here. I will NOT go gently into that good night. At the very least, people will know where I stand on something. It may not do any good but the more people who do this the more our government will work the way it's supposed to.

Two things about UltraEdit sold me. Column mode is tres cool. What does it for me also is how seamlessly it integrates FTP open from/save as with MVS servers. Can't tell you how often I just FTP open a member of a partitioned data set on the mainframe, save it as a local file, do a column mode operation on it and File FTP Save As back to the 'frame.

There are so many cool things about it, however. It took me about a week before I bought a perpetual license.

I have two kids' cord blood banked. It was about $1 grand per collection kit, now it's $95/year for cryo.

Cheap, cheap insurance.

We just got a communication from our corporate overlords specifically prohibiting us from recommending, commenting on or in any other way disclosing what software we are using/have used/will use. A vendor may include our company in a list of clients, but That's It.

Don't ask me why.

I remember seeing a documentary called "First Flight" which detailed how they went about designing and building the 777. They were interviewing a Boeing engineer, ISTR, to talk about the whole number-of-engines versus ETOPS (Extended Twin Engine Ops) time, which had to be increased for the 777 to allow a greater 'envelope' of airports to divert to.) According to this source, the 777 is now at ETOPS-207, a very enviable range.

One of the (imperfectly remembered) memorable quotes from this engineer was in a response to an interviewer's question: "Why do we [sometimes] have four engines on the wing of a plane? Because there's no room to fit 5." The rationale being that more engines raise a comfort level for a pilot, but they also of course raise complexity and maintenance concerns.

For a commercial airliner, ETOPS-207 or even ETOPS-240 is satisfactory. For the plane carrying the President, it is probably not.

Well, solar + battery + grid = 24/7 power for large values of 'grid.' However, I remember quite clearly an article by Andy Grove (past CEO of Intel) in which he argues that electricity is more or less "sticky." Meaning that it isn't portable across continental barriers, especially when these barriers involve a good bit of water.

A grid that encompasses North America is not going to do much at high noon on the other side of the world. Likewise a grid in Africa or Australia are going to be useless about 9-12 hours a day no matter how you slice it.

just instituting #3 would have saved hundreds of lives and the suffering of thousands during Katrina.

Instituting #8 would most likely ensure that you won't be dictator for long. Geez Louise.

Where the hell are my mod points? +1 Insightful.

Be careful; there's mini USB and faux mini-USB. The Motorola RAZR, for example, has a mini USB connector but plugging it into a garden variety USB cable will NOT charge the battery.