Well that brings me to a fun story of how I got into D&D. I was trucked off by my parents to Florida one summer to stay with a relative for a few weeks. Lucky me there was a hobby store nearby and I had stashed a jar of quarters that had been untapped all year. After looking around for a few hours (what else was there to do in Florida when you're 14?), I found the D&D books, they were already second edition but something about them intrigued me. They were way beyond the scope of playing a video game (we're talking monochromatic consoles/handhelds back then), but they offered so much wealth in terms of creation and exploration. I made the decision to buy a kit complete with DM Guide, Monster Manual and a few starter adventures. I went to the register to inquire if my terms could be met.

I asked the nice lady behind the counter "Can I pay with all quarters (in my New York accent which I didn't know until that day that I had one)" To which the lady replied "What are kawters?". I hadn't brought any with me, so it took me a few minutes to explain that 25% of a dollar was a coin that had a $0.25 value. When she finally got it she said "Oh you mean Kwat-ers." I came back the next day and paid with my Kwa-ters, laughing the whole way. It's one of those things you never forget, and part of it was because it was about D&D, a game that literally helped saved the bored skull of a preteen.

In the end, I actually became friends with someone I never got along with previously, simply because we wound up at a rather raucous D&D game together. Still best friends decades later.

Bart: I'm rapidly becoming a big underground success in this town.
Jim: See? In another twenty-five years, you'll be able to shake their hands in broad daylight.

Hedley Lamarr: My mind is a raging torrent, flooded with rivulets of thought cascading into a waterfall of creative alternatives.
Taggart: God darnit, Mr. Lamarr, you use your tongue prettier than a twenty dollar whore.

And can just as easily settle for any amount without worrying about the plaintiff getting huffy about it.

It's the security of the infrastructure that matters. A company is rarely going to lose their shirt because someone found their marketing material in cyberspace, two weeks before it would be released. Of course your mileage may vary.

A few weeks ago an older relative asked me "What's all this We're up for Mexican Lucky about?" I was admittedly boggled.
Turns out he thought We're up all night to get lucky sounded like a nice riff about gambling across the border.

Just when will the CIA get off its high horse of believing that this program, in its former form, or any newer form, produces value for the American citizen or state as a whole? They need to stop defending this indefensible stance that it's okay as long as the CIA is in charge of capturing, detaining, violating rights, and denying everything it does or has ever done.

My first instinct was if you can't correctly describe your indictment under the law you're not going to do very well in at any data-centric job. In IT, a proper description of the nature of a system, problem, solution or outcome is highly contingent on using the right words. "CPU Cycles" won't do when "Memory Leak" is the correct statement.

So The Onion's online edition is essentially worth some small fraction of what a reader is willing to pay for their $1 to visit 50 websites per day. I guess that amounts to about $0.05 per subscriber or considering 10 pageviews per visitor that's $5 CPM. No matter how bad ads are, they pay out closer to $20 RPM for USA visitors and most of these companies claim they are barely breaking even right now. How would getting less revenue help more?