Actually, GOTO would be considered harmful.

I'm just waiting for Google to send a fleet of their black vans around the Milky Way so we can see it all on Google Street View. Perhaps one day we will be able to see the view outside the Restaurant at the End of the Universe.

Everybody is unique.

Almost everybody in the large crowd murmers agreement, but then a lone voice at the back replies "I'm not."

I'm gonna get a "First Post" patent and bring slashdot to its knees.

There was a British comedy duo called the Symbolics. One member of the pair introduced themselves to audiences with "We're the Symbolics. I'm Sim. And he's the other one."

I think we have enough for a beowulf cluster of state governors... All we need to do is get them to run Linux and drive around in a bad car analogy.

This just in... It seems the governor's office was right to be wary. The FBI have confirmed that all the laptops are infected with Windows Vista Basic. Truly nasty.

My story is different, but some issues in it may be of interest.

There was a clasue in my employment contract stating that anyting I did of a copyrightable nature while employed belonged to the company, even if I did it outside of office hours on my own computer. The verbal assurance of the manager who hired me (he was one of the company's founders and my PhD thesis supervisor) was that they would not enforce the copyright ownership if whatever I did was irrelevant to the company's business, but he said it would be polite for me to ask for transfer of copyright ownership if I was to do something for myself.

Several years later, the manager who hired me had moved to a different part of the company. I did start to write stuff for myself. I did ask my (new) manager for a transfer of copyright ownership. In principle, he was happy to do this, but he had to run it past the legal department and get the CTO to proofread the draft of my book to ensure it didn't say anything embarrassing to the company. Of course, looking after the core business of the company and meeting quarterly revenue targets took a higher priority than dealing with my request, so the transfer of copyright ownership took 6 months. That was for the first book I wrote. It took 8 months for the second book. The point I am making is that if your employment contract states you own the copyright of non-work-related stuff that you write on your own time then that will save you from dealing with frustratingly slow bureaucracy.

I work in the consultancy and training department of the company, so I travel a lot. For this I need a laptop. It would have been impractical to carry 2 laptops with me: a company one and a personal one. So when I was working out details of the transfer of copyright ownership, I requested that I be able to keep my own stuff on the company laptop. Both my boss and the legal department were concerned with the possibility of "my stuff" and "company stuff" getting inter-mingeled on the same disk drive. We solved this concern by me buying a compact flash card and a compact-flash-to-PCMCIA-card adapter. I put these into the PCMCIA card slot on my laptop and used it as a separate drive for "my stuff". (By the way, I discovered that Windows has dreadfully slow drivers for accessing flash-based devices, but Linux has very fast drivers.) I got a written letter stating that I owned a "project" that was on the PCMCIA-card drive if my employer pre-approved the "project". The need to get pre-approval for projects was irritating-but-tolerable for a few years. Eventually, I paid off my mortgage and my wife's university fees. At that point, I realised that I could afford to live on far less money, so I negotiated to switch from being a full-time employee to being a part-time one. Suddenly the issue of copyright ownership became a non-issue because under UK law the company can demand copyright ownership only for what I do during the part-time work hours; what I develop under the rest of my time is automatically mine. I have been blissfully happy ever since.

One last point. About a year ago I bought a netbook. It's powerful enough for the needs of my projects--running PowerPoint, LaTeX and developing small C++/Java programs with "vi" and "make" or "ant"--your mileage may vary. I plug the netbook into an external monitor and keyboard when working in my home office. When I travel on company business, the netbook is small enough for me to carry it and the company laptop. So now I have a more complete physical separation between "company stuff" and "my stuff" and I don't have to endure Windows' slow drivers for flash-based disks.

There is a great book called The Lucifer Effect: How Good People Turn Evil by Philip Zimbardo. The author was the guy who conducted the Standford Prison Experiment a few decades ago. The book discusses that experiment and how it relates to other well-known acts of evil that have occurred, such as massacres during war, genocides, and abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

In the book, the author argues against the idea that some people are intrinsically good and other people are intrinsically evil. Instead, the evidence from the Stanford Prison Experiment indicates that if you put good people into an evil situation then they will behave in evil ways. Of course, this viewpoint is exactly the opposite of the assumption made by the person who wrote the AI program in the article.

Some people have expressed scepticism about the readability and maintainability of the generated Java code. That's a simple concern to deal with. Just run the generated Java code though a Java-to-Perl translator. Then there won't be any question at all about its level of readability and maintainability.

An alternative idea is to buy a good-quality folding bicycle, such as a Dahon or Brompton. These fold up small enough that you can take them as hand luggage when boarding a bus or train, without any need for bicycle racks, or you can put them in the boot of a taxi.

With a folding bicycle, you can cycle to work when the weather is good. And if the weather is not to your liking (and you do not have wet-weather clothing) then you can fold up the bike and take it with you on public transport. Folding bicycles are also compact enough to store under your desk at work or in your hallway at home.

A folding bicycle won't work for somebody who has, say, a 50-mile commute on a freeway, but for shorter commutes it can be great.

If you look at a dictionary definition of "harassment", you will see it means to trouble or torment a person persistently or repeatedly. Since this was a once-off incident, it does not qualify as harassment; at least not under the law in England (which is where I live). I would be surprised if US law was different in this regard.

Hey dude, it's just got to be a Beowulf cluster.

Preferably a russian one.

And don't forget to use low-profile car tires for extra performance.

There is a famous story of a patient in hospital complaining of an earache. The doctor doing the rounds wrote a prescription for a nurse to fulfill. The prescription stated that several drops of a particular drug should be put in "R ear" ("R" being an abbreviation for "right").

The nurse dutifully put the earache drops in the patients anus.

Yes, I know this has nothing to do with texting, but abbreviations are common in text messages so I was reminded of this story.