Seconding this. My US power strip not only fried itself, but cut the power for half the hotel I was staying at. This happened late Friday night, and it was almost 2 days before they fixed it.

It was a crappy hotel, but the point stands. :-)

We live in a world where thousands of children starve to death every day, people are killed or imprisoned for expressing their beliefs, women/minorities/everybody are oppressed, and few people really care about any of it, because it's all someone else's problem. I find it kind of funny (and more than a little sad) that the use of a driver can be blithely written off as "immoral" just because you can't download the source.

I wish I could mod this all the way to the front page. Excellent comment.

I haven't subscribed to a landline telephone service in at least 7 years. I've never had an irrational desire to make use of those few little wires running through the walls in all that time. Just think, someday when little Tommy asks, "Daddy, what are these strange holes in the wall for?" you can share with him your fond memories of the technology of yesteryear. He will then share with you just how old he thinks you and the house are by saying, "you used to talk with wires?!?!"

This doesn't seem like a significant improvement over, say, carrying a pencil or marker, some paper, and a flare. Write message on paper, strike flare, hold up paper, and hope the good guys have a pair of binoculars handy and happen to notice you.

It seems like if you got into a situation where you couldn't use electronics but were close enough for someone else to see you and you didn't care if the enemy sees you, either, the set of messages would be pretty small. Probably mostly along the lines of, "OH SHIT! SEND TANK!"

I've been developing iPhone apps on my 15" SSD MacBook Pro since they were released in September-ish? The SSD is awesome-fast compared to normal laptop HDDs. I have a friend who installed his own SSD before Apple was selling them as a BTO and his is still running fine, too. You'll likely upgrade before you hit any SSD writing limits anyway. It's not something I'm even remotely worried about. If the drive does happen to fail, that's what AppleCare and backups are for. :)

Is it better when they are limited by the books they read?

I've heard of The Six-Million Dollar Man: he's a traditional punch line to jokes told by old people, right?

No, he made a bunch of money because he was there on day one with a ton of press lined up and ready to go and managed (against all odds, IMO) to actually be one of the more decent games at launch. (The prices were a lot higher back then, too, since no one knew how the market would evolve.) He either got lucky or was a marketing genius... The app doesn't sell for $4.99 anymore, either. I'm leaning towards luck.

I don't get why these local businesses and parents are willing to pay for ads on a math test when they could just drop off a ream of paper and a laser printer cartridge instead?

Why doesn't the teacher just ask for the supplies that are needed? Have kids bring them to school in exchange for some kind of bonus/credit/bragging-rights or something! Does it really have to jump straight to advertising? On a freaking TEST? Come on!

Yeah.. tell that to some of the admins over there... The way they reject things for being non-notable (as if there was a lack of space in wikipedia) and the other rules they fling at people sometimes, it's getting to where whole areas of the site aren't worth even trying to edit anymore simply because of the egos that might be stepped on.

Well at least it isn't Iowa. Wait.. *I* live in Iowa! Dammit!

A problem to watch out for is that if you add your own research to Wikipedia (even with all the proper citations), you'll get slapped by some self-important wikipedian because it is apparently wrong and evil to have the person directly responsible for the research itself to be included in the creation of encyclopedia content about said research.

Thanks for showing me what true cleverness is.