People were excited when they said Duke Nukem Forever had been ported to HTML 5 <canvas>, but man, Doom 5 uses plain old HTML 3.2! (Though I'm fairly sure Carmack is ashamed of the fact that the highly broken Microsoft HTML generator was used.) Clearly more impressive, even when the engine may be a bit outdated by now!

It'd be nice if I didn't have to go to Wikipedia to find out.

Except that Santa Cruz is synonymous with crackpot on slashdot due to people with silly names working for SCO.

The SCO that operated in Santa Cruz is not the same SCO that sued IBM. The Santa Cruz Operation company came out with Xenix, SCO UNIX (OpenServer) and Unixware. They purchased Tarantella earlier this decade, and then sold off their Unix-related business to Caldera. As their primary business was now Tarantella, they changed names. Caldera then took over the SCO moniker eventually becoming The SCO Group. It was that company, formerly Caldera, that took on Novell, IBM, et al.

While the first two are perhaps ambiguous (although why are you clicking unknown links at work?), with a name like nakedgirls4.jpg, you can't honestly have expected puppies and kittens, could you?

A big red octagon stands out. A green octogon with half inch lettering against a multicolored green background does not.

First, there's prior art for this of course. Second, it's just like the old con of putting "on the internet" on the back of any old idea and claiming it's new.

Is Apple going to get one upped when some super-genius comes up with the amazing idea of Advertising on the OS...on a netbook! or Advertising on the OS...on a laptop! It's ridiculous. Advertising on _anything_ is inherently an obvious idea.

Linked from your site

http://www.usnews.com/money/blogs/flowchart/2009/10/15/why-stocks-are-surging-as-jobs-disappear

Well DUH. Their "earnings" are only up temporarily as they no longer are paying all those salaries. Just like the analogy I have used before, some tradesman pawning all his tools friday night, so all weekend he looks like he got rich and his "earnings" went up. Then monday morning comes and no work and no earnings at all.

    These pseudo earnings, that have nothing to do with their core business and actually reflect failure rather than success, will disappear shortly and we will be experiencing a rather hard crash.

  Stocks are, for the most part, highly and irrationally over valued. BUT, they are because that's all the market knows, buy/sell/TRADE stocks. It can't do anything else, so that's what they do. If everyone went to rational buy today after careful consideration then hold forever and watch over the management like a hawk model, the market would collapse anyway, because it is predicated on trading, not holding. Speculation, not investing. Various flavors of charting voodoo and magickal incantations and "waving" your hands around in the air "theory". Gambling and the pet hot system of the day. No diff really from those little sucker pamphlets you see for sale at the quickstore checkout about lucky lottery numbers and various ways to beat random chance.

    Default is, spin and shill to keep that churn churning. We are probably at or damn near at peak in general terms, because jobless recovery is an oxymoron. The "greater fool" theory of taking profits out of the market and walking away from the casino table while still ahead will be kicking in soon, and we will be seeing who is more rational or not. There will emerge a few percent rational, and the bulk irrational. And a lot of the ones rational are "stealth rational", they are the same ones who keep running the shill games, because THEY know they will exit, and when, and by sheer volume of their trades, influence the rest.... but well after the fact of this being useful information to the "marks" or suckers.

Clear cut recent example: as the full blowout of the shilled and lying housing bubble got close, the players who caused it EXITED in advance of the rubes and went to basically more corn and oil trading, creating yet another huge fast spike and bubble, where they skimmed off trillions or some huge number. They got out early in housing and hedged by taking those fast profits and reshilling them again in another direction. The herds ALWAYS follow, so the big players can always stay ahead, because they cause and choose the direction in the first place.

You can't beat the house, you just can't, not forever anyway. They will *encourage you greatly to think so*, but that's part of the shill.

A while back I tried to start a trend by tagging such stories with "pimpmyblog", but it never really caught on.

For God's sake, say it any way you want, and write it in ISO YYYY-MM-DD format. Since no-one in the world uses YYYY-DD-MM, it is perfectly unambiguous.

Personally, I'm constantly irked by the fact that, in Canada, when you see something like 05/10/2010, you never know whether it's month or day first. In general, I see DD/MM more often, but because of strong American influence, every now and then you get a form with MM/DD, so you always have to look out for that.

Quickly, convert from 1234 kiloinch to miles!

$ time units -v '1234 kiloinch' miles
        1234 kiloinch = 19.47601 miles
        1234 kiloinch = (1 / 0.051345219) miles

real 0m0.046s
user 0m0.040s
sys 0m0.008s

That didn't take to long at all!

Seriously, the metric system has a lot going for it in some ways, but is harder in others. For example, while 10 is a great multiplier (since we tend to think in base 10), it doesn't have a lot of factors. For example, dividing by 3 doesn't work so well. Sure, you and I know that 1/3 meter is 33.33333 cm, but that's not as easy as 1/3 foot being 4 inches. 5280 (the number of feet in a mile) is divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 11, 12, 15 and a lot more. Not that a 15th of a mile comes up a lot, but if it does, you can be assured that it's exactly 352 feet!

The metric system units are also more calibrated to scientific use than everyday use. The meter is too long and the gram is too light (the liter is about right). Other things, like degrees Celsius are too big (not to mention as arbitrary as Fahrenheit). And metric time never really took off -- you still have seconds, minutes, hours, etc.

All in all, the metric system is optimized for scientific work where conversions between units happen more often, and knowing that 100 million micrograms is .1 kilograms is useful. But it doesn't work so well for common, human scale use.

I'm on a wireless keyboard - in case someone's listening, I gave it a nickname that seems like online gambling. Someone listening will think my transfers and bill payments are wagers... at least that's my intent.

After it gets past the keyboard, it should be safe with encrypted WLAN and SSL, right? (ok stop laughing).

Point is, wireless keyboards caused me to rethink some things.

My curiosity lies in the area Assistive Robotics, and TI's graphing calculator looked pretty good at handling external peripherals using LISP. There are other chips out there that can do the job. I quite frankly do not understand why TI gets their panties in a twist when people want to buy their products?

You can report sites that use cloaking here: http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html . I don't know what good it does since the sites I have reported have never been acted upon.

Here, I meant "correctness of speech". The courts do other useful functions that need to be correct. The British courts do, in my view, handle issues of liability and punishment for criminal behavior more sensibly than their US counterparts. My apologies for the typo.

At work, at home, for friends, and for family. I don't charge anything. I just like (1) to stem the propagation of malware, (2) help people not spend money on over-priced tech support, (3) help people save money on unnecessary computer purchases.

My list of things to do:
Clean the start-up list (I'll be rebooting a bit!)
Remove Malware
Uninstall unused programs
Clear out temporary file caches
Update drivers/codecs/plug-ins
Install useful freeware (Clamwin, Firefox, etc.)
Defragment
If the users want better performance, turn off all the default flashy UI stuff.
Lastly, I assess whether or not a RAM or video upgrade is required to extend the life of the computer for another year or two.

All of this can usually be done (on one computer) between getting home at 6pm and going to bed at 11pm. I like saving people money... even I don't take a piece of the savings.