Also, eat yogurt while you are wandering around. Just like Michael Westin from Burn Notice. :)

Just as long as they don't make a movie out of that ET the Extra-Terrestrial Atari game. That one sucked!

Thanks Joe Biden!

I first heard about the case being dismissed on NPR on April 1st. I was assuming it was an April Fool's Day gag that all the news outlets were picking up.

Outstanding advice. I went back ~35 after a career up until then in network engineering and information security, though I went back and picked up a finance degree. gw0ntum makes a valuable addition. You're going to find it awkward, especially when you have some profs your age or even younger. Some suggestions I'd make:

1. BE HUMBLE: even if you're an alpha, don't play one. set it aside and adopt an alternate persona. your classmates not only don't want to hear about your experience but they're ready to reject you if you show any signs of it. instead, humility is your friend. when you kick ass in assignments and show you're naturally good at some things, your younger classmates will likely respect you then for it. but always keep the humility as your persona. they're going to be intimidated by the age difference and when they find that 15-20 years of age difference really doesn't mean jack u-know-what, they'll be cool with you.

2. HANDLE PROFS CAREFULLY: show your creativity, innovativness, eagerness, etc. by DOING, not by saying. this screws so many nontraditional students up. yes, its important to let the prof know you're eager to learn/succeed. but do it by doing, not by showing off. understand that you're an outlier, so every subtle action you make in the classroom will have 10x the effect. this pisses off your classmates and makes your prof uncomfortable.

3. FIND YOUR PERSONA AND STICK TO IT: my dad's long-time faculty at a university that has a good amount of nontraditional students. i've learned that even the faculty has stereotypes of the nontrads. eager beavers (over-eager volunteer for everything desperate to show their worth low self esteem types), suck-ups (total poseurs that will flunk out but will suck up at first and try to play the 'hey prof, i'm a grown-up like you, give me preference'), one-class-ponys (typically 60+ gals who take one class and blow the damn curve cuz they have no freaking life outside of that one class), over-committers (usually the nontrads who have just come back to academic world and are so clingy and over-committing trying to prove their worth to self and prof), and dominators (nontrads that want to give input to everything, dominate the discussion, share their "worldly" experience on everything and embarrass everyone in the room except themselves). Those are not good choices. Find something subtle, quiet and driven. Sit in the front row, kick ass and let your work show your drive. Let the prof call you out because you get stuff right. They will balance the dialog and keep you from being seen as a show-off - hey, when your work is good, that's the game.

4. FRIENDSHIPS: Be open, kind and friendly to all. I ended up with friends spanning the total range - from girl jocks to geeks to poet-thinkers to hard core achievers. All I had to do was smile, be relaxed, be damn good, and be a team player.

It's a weird situation but if you handle it right, it'll be very rewarding, and that degree does open up tons of doors. Good luck!

"When my parents built their house 29 years ago the ISDN and cable stopped 2 blocks away. Now 30 years later how far is it? Why 2 blocks away, of course!

Nobody has laid any lines or upgraded shit around here in years because it might hurt the short term stock price if they actually spent a dime"

Sorry bro, tell that to my 20/5 FIOS connection at home.

After 30 years, perhaps you should move from your parents home so you can have better internet connectivity? :)

funky49

I'll only buy TTS books. I own a Kindle2 and have more than 20 texts (philosophy works for my degree and debate coaching) on there already. I've spent more than $500 in the past week on my Kindle investment.

As someone who also commutes, I find the TTS to be invaluable already. We'll see if that continues to last, but as I'm reading for educational purposes, not entertainment, I have a utilitarian informational need. I don't need an actor reading Baudrillard's "The Illusion of the End" (the words are powerful enough). And incidentally, good luck finding any of that material on books-on-tape... there's simply not the market for it.

So if an author or publisher refuses to allow me to listen to it, they take away a core functionality. I'll find another version (on older philosophical texts, that's common), or simply check it out from the library, depriving them of the sale. The TTS audio quality is no threat to your books-on-tape business, you offer no such capacity on most of the works I purchase, and the TTS allows me to make use of two hours a day of drive time during which I need to study.

It's happened before.

It will happen again.

(BSG reference FYI)

YES! I'd want to brag about my LED backlit LCD screen and she'd say "AWESOME! Let me look at it" and then I'd let her look at it, admire it... maybe even put her hands on it.

So did the people with the dead sat tell the people with the living sat?

The full extent of the operational abilities of the non-function sat aren't known. Maybe they didn't need it anymore and just powered it off. Plus, it is still the Russian's responsibility to keep track of their space objects and maybe even warn others there might be a collision. Maybe they'll issue an apology, who knows? We don't know what exactly happened except that this is a shame and shoulda/coulda been avoided. Littering space is fearful and could be even more 'impactful' (ha!) in the future.

Was this really bound to happen? I always assumed that when nations put stuff in space, they always included a way to make it de-orbit and burn up in the atmosphere. Littering space is dumb. Can someone please be less politically correct and put some blame on the non-operational Russian sat? Iridium Satellite should file a claim against the Russians. How come a "conjunction analysis" isn't done for all of the objects they're tracking in space? Does there need to be a "Tracking@Home" app for the ps3? In any case, I have a new development idea for the techno-thriller I'm writing... in the future nobody has satellites because of space terrorism. Or maybe I'll start an orbital mechanics company whose job it is to clean up debris and old crap around Earth.

Funny, I kinda wrote about this in my song "Starblazer"...

earthlings, knee deep in things
in orbit there's garbage rings

Sir,

You are so awesome and I'm so glad the mother of your child was willing to go along with the picture.

Seriously, like this is some kind of weird correlation. No shit Nobel prize winning papers would have excellent page ranks.