Living on Mars time is difficult when you're living on Earth and are subject to Earth's day/night cycle.

Exactly this. 24h40m days are exhausting when you're embedded in a 24h day/night cycle and have to mesh with others on that cycle. It's tough being out of phase with your surroundings. On Mars everyone else is on the same cycle you are, and the only contact you have with the 24h civilization has a significant time delay which makes real-time conversation impossible. Give it a few sols and you'll be right on track.

40 extra minutes of sleep per day... Not exhausting at all!

On the one hand, I know flash is bad and HTML5 is good. And even though advertising is bad it follows that advertising in HTML5 must be less bad than advertising in flash.

So, um... yay?

The premise reminds me of Unexploded Cow from Cheapass Games. There's a free print-it-yourself version and a $25 deluxe version.

Europe. Summer. 1997. You and your friends have discovered two problems with a common solution: mad cows in England and unexploded bombs in France.

You've decided to bring these two powderkegs together just to see what happens. And you wouldn't say "no" to a little money on the side.

So round up your herd, march them through France, and set them loose behind the Cordon Rouge. If you're lucky you'll come home rich before Greenpeace figures out what you're up to.

Either way, there's something magical about blowing up cows.

I used a transparent squid proxy with access control lists appropriate for the kid and intercepted and redirected DNS queries. (With more than one kid, I needed multiple acls, ymmv.) Initially I limited internet access to specific times and a whitelist and discussed what they were doing daily. Over time and with age and maturity, I relaxed the acl to just record what was being accessed and just reviewed their browsing with them when they made questionable choices.

Pretty much what I did. Block the kids' MAC addresses at the router so the only way to get to the net was through the squid proxy. I didn't filter anything, just recorded the URLs and emailed a daily summary to the kids, my wife, and me. Making a 13 yo boy discuss with his dad (or worse, his mom!) what he was doing on tentacle.hentai.com is generally sufficient to get them to become self-policing.

I had hoped that there would be the side-effect of getting them to learn about MAC spoofing or other techniques to get through the firewall, but no such luck. Either that or I taught them to be *really* sneaky about it. If it did teach them that much stealth I'll still count that as a valuable lesson in networking and security.

I read the paper and their premise seems to be that MINSETs can be browsable/searchable and good enough to let programmers figure out whether a given function is worth investigating further. Basically they're a better replacement for text search and class browsing.

I'm skeptical about that, especially looking at their examples, but I can't dismiss it outright. I think it might interact in a favourable way with metaprogramming techniques, whether C++ templates or Lisp macros, but that's just speculation.

"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

Best dietary advice I've ever heard. We've evolved a wide tolerance in living conditions, including diet. However, for most of our history plants have been abundant and meat less so. It makes sense that that's the basic balance that works best for us. Not some fad gluten-free paleo Atkins diet, just a simple "everything in moderation" mentality with an extra helping of veggies. Done. That, and delta weight = calories consumed - calories expended. Nothing magic there either.

Mind you, I don't actually follow any of this advice. IMHO, plants aren't food, plants are what food eats. And they taste icky. But if I were to get serious about my health and weight, "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." would be my mantra.

Why was Malaysia Airlines "worthy" of the attack? At a guess, I'd say because they were an easy target. It's unlikely that MAS was specifically targeted. They probably poked at every company big enough to have a recognizable name, and MAS was just the first to be vulnerable.

Being a police officer is not meant to be about being a revenue machines on the clock but a peace officer assisting the public in upholding the law and providing a first response emergency service.

Aww, that's so cute. Look everyone, someone who's not completely jaded and cynical yet!

Yes, if police wanted to prevent minor traffic infractions that's exactly what they'd do. However, they typically use unmarked cars or hide their marked cars behind corners, trees, or other obstructions so they can't be seen by oncoming traffic. Then they wait for someone to come zipping by. Cha-ching!

Slightly less cynically, the practice of hiding and pouncing should actually reduce speeders by inducing a sense of doubt. Potential hiding places are everywhere, you'd better drive the limit because you never know when there's a cop back there. In theory it multiplies the effect of a sparse police force. In practice it doesn't work that way because the odds of getting pulled over are still pretty darned low.

A couple of "large" trackball vendors:

BigTrack - http://www.bigtrack.co.uk/
Kensington - http://www.kensington.com/

FWIW, I love my Kensington Expert Mouse. Despite the name it's actually a roughly billiard-ball sized trackball with four buttons and a scroll ring. Two caveats:

1. I use it with a Mac, and I had to get a third-party driver to map the buttons.
2. I made the mistake of registering the product. Now I get weekly spam from Kensington despite repeated attempts at unsubscribing. Kensington is permanently routed to my spam folder now.

I got it because I was developing RSI from use of a regular mouse with my right hand. I tried switching to my left, but had trouble training myself to use almost-but-not-quite the same mouse motions. The trackball has a completely different motion from the mouse, so I was able to easily train my left hand to use it. Now I use the left-handed trackball at work and the right-handed mouse at home and haven't had any more RSI issues. (Yeah, using the trackball right-handed probably would have had the same effect, since the motion is different. But at the time my right arm really hurt and it was more comfortable just to give it a rest and train my left to do it.)

Space Rangers!

Nah, just messin' with you. B5 all the way. No contest.

To install python libraries like scipy, matplotlib, etc. Apparently that is such a pain in MacOS, and there are so many half-assed distributions methods that you can really botch your system.

Huh? You do sudo easy_install scipy just like on any other Unix-y OS.

At my work we have an equal number of men's and women's restrooms, and those restrooms are sized to allow the same number of people (so if the men's room has 2 stalls and 2 urinals, the women's room has 4 stalls). This is despite the fact that we have 4x as many men as women working in our facility (it's not a hiring issue, we just don't get the applicants).

We had a similar issue. Way more men than women here, but equal toilet facilities: two four-person restrooms (one for each gender) on both of the floors in the office. Solution? Convert the 1st floor ladies' room into a men's room. Problem solved, right? Except that when interviewing, nothing tells a female applicant "You're not wanted here" like making her go down to the basement to piss.

Thankfully we've come to our corporate senses and restored the upstairs ladies' room.

The end result is that on average men can expect to wait 15-20 minutes before getting an open stall to use, while the women generally will not even see another person in the restroom unless they came in together.

Sounds like you just need more toilets, period. Even in the worst case here I've hardly ever been unable to find an open men's room stall in time of need. Yeah, sometimes I have to go to the one on other floor, but that's life.