Hah... same here - CS201? Intro programming for engineers? My CS friends all had CS101 in Pascal at the same time.

Correlation is NOT causation. If you are already a child molester, chances are you'll probably view some CP during your down time. So - does viewing that CP make them a child molester? No - it's just a correlation. Do you see hundreds of FBI agents running out becoming Chester the Molester? Nope... but they are plainly viewing hundreds or thousands of hours of CP. There are millions of porn viewers out there watch things they know they can't, or won't EVER get to do with a significant other as well (bondage, anal, rape fantasy, s&m, DP, menage, etc.) - You don't see them all running off to pay for an S&M prostitute - it's a chance to explore something they find curious or interesting. There are probably millions of actual CP viewers out there who have checked it out due to curiousity, perversion, or a side interest -- but they check it out there because they know it's wrong to act on it in reality. Child molestation existed LONG before CP - and will exist long after all these efforts to ban CP - just the way it is.

Has anyone considered that maybe these notes ARE the one time pad for decrypting another message that hasn't been discovered yet?

Actually you can - quite easily. All you have to do is go to a carrier and buy the cheapest dumbphone with SIM that you can (AT&T is good for this) and get it on a "no contract length" plan (so.. a dumbphone will probably be about $100 - you'll have to pay that) - get the voice service you want on it with no data plan. Take the SIM out and put it in your android or blackberry phone. Your data services will not work, your voice services will.

I live in Canada and have an unlocked Blackberry Bold 9700 on Rogers with a normal blackberry data/voice/etc. plan for around $60/mo. I travel to the US regularly - many weeks a year. I went to an AT&T store and bought a $129 dumbphone with a $24/mo voice plan, no data, etc. I have that service automatically charged to my credit card each month so I just ignore its existence for the most part. When I travel to the US I pop my Rogers SIM out, pop my AT&T SIM in, and I'm good to go - I'm on a US phone number for making and receiving calls, and I have no data or blackberry service, but whenever I'm around WIFI I can use that for any data apps / web browsing.

Previously I had been paying around $600/yr in roaming costs when in the US. (typically ~$50 per week I was there). I now pay $300/yr for my US phone service and I get more minutes than I'll ever use while there and I use the Blackberry just fine with no data plan. My wife does the same with her Android phone using my SIM when she has to go to the US as well.

To be more accurate, it depends on the environment you work in, but there are software engineers who *are* engineers and differ from programmers and developers.

In the last company I worked for (a large well known much hated (but not as much as MS) software firm) - there were software engineers who never wrote a line of code -- that wasn't what they did. To use the old automotive analogy, they were to software what the guy in a studio with modelling clay is to the car design and building industry (the guy who never touches a part of the finished car in his job). They simply worked on design and architecture - how should the UI feel, how should this software work with other software, how should this software work with the OS and file system, how should this software accept incoming data, how should this software present its completed data, etc. These engineers took the fields of mathematics, philosophy, psychology, and information systems and tried to design frameworks for the software that the developers and programmers could then implement.

Luckily I worked as a network admin so I got to avoid all of them as long as I kept my stuff running.

Not to mention "texting heavy" teens (2500 and up texts per month - sometimes 25000 per month) LOVE the physical keyboard. Most of my nieces, nephews, and cousin's kids all have BB's - they use Blackberry Messenger heavily amongst themselves and their friends with BB's, and standard SMS with their non "BB" companions. My nephew (age 17) just got a BB Bold 9780 for $99 on a 2 year contract, and in the first day he had it he said he sent around 500 BBM messages and another 150 or so SMS messages.

There's just no replacement for a good physical keyboard when you are texting 500 - 1000 times a day from what I've heard from these kids. And most of them say that they can use Opera or the BB Browser fine on pretty much any website, the phones do videos and mp3s just fine, there's facebook and twitter apps, and that's really all they need in their phones. Several of them have iPod touch on the side for gaming - but won't go for an iPhone because of the expense of all the plans (especially here in Canada - you can't get an iPhone serviced for under $100 a month really... but these kids get BB plans for $50/mo that takes care of all their needs). Have only seen one Android phone so far - my niece has the Galaxy S - she likes the phone, but says it took her a long time to get quick at typing using Swype, and she still can't keep up with the BB kids.

10 times that much or more... building a computer with 500 TFLOPS for under $1mil is a pretty good deal no matter how you look at it.

Is that you Steve Ballmer?

We briefly cared about baseball for a period around 17-18 years ago - when the Jays won the '92 and '93 world series... once we were done showing those south of the border that if we set our mind to it we could kick their collective backsides, we got bored and moved on...

As sad, convoluted, and unusual as the IT field has become, my manager (the director of IT) at my previous employer told everyone in the IT department to put all their critical passwords and important passwords and any other passwords that we regularly use onto an Excel spreadsheet including what the password was for, when it was implemented, and when it would expire if it would expire. Then print that spreadsheet, delete and BCwipe the file off the computer, and lock the printed spreadsheet in one of our desk drawers. The passwords were utterly complex and hard (our policy was 12-16 digit passwords, at least 2 digits, 2 capital letters, 2 lower case letters, and 2 symbols) but none of them ever had to be memorized - take the spreadsheet out, look up the password, re-file the spreadsheet.

Now this won't work for people who have to travel around - but a highly encrypted file (or Truecrypt file system) on a USB key with the same basic premise and only one long password memorized to access the key would make it relatively possible and secure. Lose the key - who cares - its content is useless - by the time someone could break the encryption on the key you would have had time to go back to your office (or safe at your home office), get out the hard copy, log in and change your password on every system involved, and build yourself a new USB key.

Not that complex... relatively friendly to newb's and other people who aren't super technically adept... and does a nice job. If you need more security, it's time to switch to SecurID and give everyone a token.

Where are you shopping that you can build a decent HTPC that can play 1080p video files over HDMI output in a nice small form factor for under $250? Just the motherboard, processor, RAM, case, hard drive, power supply, and video card (I'm assuming a stand alone video card, but if you go for a motherboard with integrated video add the appropriate cost to the board) for pretty much anything you can build will be $300 - and I didn't include any optical drive there. And as for TVs that can do it - the price premium is generally several hundred dollars as well - and would require most everyone to trade their recently purchased $700-$2000 LCD or Plasma TV for one with the capability. At this point the PS3 at the $249 sale price point that is now regularly being seen is a steal in what its capabilities are - web browser, web video and audio player, DLNA player, blu-ray player, not to mention you can actually play a game or two on it if you feel like it sometime (many free demos on PS3 store, etc. so you don't even have to spend a cent to get dozens or hundreds of hours of casual games).

Two providers - les.net and AtlasVoice - one for incoming, one for outgoing respectively.

You've met one now - I've got the antenna on a small pole on the back of my house extending it about 10 feet above the roof line. I have a spare battery I charge with it in the base as well and always carry the phone and spare battery with me -- it works from my house all the way to my office - as well as all over my neighbourhood. I have it connected to an analog digium card in my asterisk pbx. It's nice having access to my home phone and free voice over IP calls from anywhere within 3-4 km of home, and the phone isn't much bigger than the old "candybar" style cell phones of the late 90s/early 2000 vintage.

Remember that 240 wind turbines spread across 36,000 acres does not *use* 36,000 acres - not anywhere near it. Every wind energy corporation I've worked with allows farmers to farm right up to within 10 meters of the turbine tower base. The wires are almost universally all run underground with these new wind farms. The actual footprint of the turbine tower base with the 10 meters of safety space, is less than 1/2 of 1 acres. 240 towers will use an area around 120 acres. The remaining 35,880 acres will still be prime viable agricultural space. In the meantime, the typical turbine lease involves payments to the landowner of approx. $10,000 per year per turbine on their property. That means if you have a farm that is 1000 acres and have suitable space for 10 turbines, you'll lose about 5 acres of your growing space, but be paid around $100,000 a year. The loss of 5 acres of crop space may see something in the order of $5000 in lost revenue from the growing space.

The farmer comes out $95,000 a year ahead - that just might keep their farm operating when otherwise economics might say they couldn't. Also, note that for every MWh of power generated by a wind turbine, that's typically 1220 pounds of CO2 emissions avoided from traditional power generating plants (coal, gas, oil, etc.) - a 600Mw farm running at 25% capacity for a 20 year life span generates 26,280 GWh of power - potentially keeping 16 million tons of CO2 out of the environment.

Mmmm vt-100.

I think the only thing that makes non-tech people cringe more is "bright orange on a dull orange background" - something reminiscent of the amber screen w/ hercules graphics cards