Same situation here, but I had lasik done around 30. Now about 12+ years on, my distance vision has degraded, but not back to originally bad condition. I don't regret the choice at the time, it was a tremendous improvement from my original vision.

The problem (as I've been told) is around the early 40's. The lens of the eye hardens. It causes a shift in vision. My eye doc described this sort of like cooking the white part of an egg. Once it goes from fluid to hardened, there is really no going back. Although I think working in front of screens all day for a decade plus has biased my vision to near-sightedness. Had I a different job that required distance vision, maybe truck driver or something, then I might have ended up that way.

Sometimes I find I can focus on distant things, but it takes quite a while. The lens hardening seems to really slow the focal change speed. I find if I'm looking down reading something close and someone asks me something from a distance, when I look up that person will be blurry, and it takes quite some seconds to focus on them better. Similarly if I drive for an extended period then I seem to be able to read the roadsigns better.

They may try, but at eight minutes they pale in comparison to my experience with AT&T. It was at least 10 years back, but in trying to cancel an AT&T DSL account it took me four freaking hours. And no that's not hyperbole. It took so damn long that the cordless phone I had at the time went from fully charged to near dead (it started beeping near death).

It went sort of like this - call DSL dept, "I want to cancel"... Oh you have to talk to billing, let me transfer you... 10 minutes later, billing says "No that's a DSL service, you need to talk to DSL dept", let me transfer you... Transfer .. Wait .. Repeat .. Transfer .. Transfer .. Disconnected .. Repeat again. Went through over a dozen people, and apparently they were taking notes along the way, by the time I finally got to someone with authority she said "Looks like you talked to just about everyone in the company". Yeah, no shit, you think!?

It was such an aggravating experience, I have not had AT&T service of any kind since, and never will again.

It will be fine. The guy planting the explosives is going to be wearing a red shirt (for safety). Last name was Smith or Jones or something, didn't catch the first name.

I'll second that. I actually played SR3 before GTA IV. I thought SR3 was an excellent game, with good gameplay and good humor (occasionally over the top on the humor). I liked their vehicle customization also.

Then I played GTA IV, which made me decide not to buy GTA V. They should have called it "Boatville" since every car drove like a freaking boat. Awful gameplay with a mind-numbingly boring story. Absolutely hated it. No degree of realism could counter what a bad game it was.

Well the NEW Turing test should be to write a believable load of hype. In related news, it was discovered that half the posts on Slashdot are generated by AI-powered bots whose purpose is to argue about the validity of the Turing test.

Well doesn't it seem rather odd then that in a ranking out of 60 ISPs, Verizon DSL comes in dead last?. (hit the include small ISPs button)

Even their Verizon FIOS ranks at 50. How is it that 49 other big and small ISPs come in faster than Verizon's FIOS when most of them probably do not have peering agreements. Seriously, who in the heck is going to pay for Verizon FIOS when it can't even stream Netflix as fast as a small broadband company. Verizon can complain all it wants, but I suspect Netflix has data to back up all their claims.

Absolutely. Openbox is one of the few WMs that can create a fully customizable right-click menu. One that is not filled with inane useless unmovable crap like "Create Folder" (GNOME).

Indeed. In this article (talking about the same interview), there was this interesting quote:

I'm sure there is a statistician out there who could tell us the odds of running 5 years of trading with only one day of losses, in a system which was not rigged.

SEC Chair Mary Jo White is full of shit, and quite the opposite of reassuring us all that the markets are indeed not rigged, it just verifies that the SEC is complicit in this whole system.

I use this: Freeplane

It's not the right tool for long verbose text, but for collecting ideas and arranging them together it works well. I tend to think of it as a free-form web page. A few key things:
- It is portable, at least I run mine off a USB flash drive. This is a key feature, if it were not so then it wouldn't get used. It's not "cloud" but then I think of this as being better than a cloud version, as it does not require network, and you don't have to worry about cloud security.
- It can support links to other files (local on the drive) or web links to external sites. This ability to organize an amorphous collection of things (text, local links, remote links, images) is what makes it a good idea tool.
- It can collapse/expand parts of the map so you can focus on topic at hand. Just make sure to enable the setting that saves the state of the map (for some reason IIRC it defaults to everything collapsed when the map is first opened).

Once you setup a couple keybindings, and get the hang of creating and linking new nodes it becomes a pretty fast tool to work in also.

O,RLY? Well let me introduce you to our local Austin Energy, which despite being public utility does not run a "zero" margin. In fact the city of Austin steals $100Mil/year from it to dump into the city's general fund (things absolutely unrelated to power generation - it is effectively taxing people on their utility bills without all the annoyances of passing an actual "tax"). I can guarantee you if our local corrupt, incompetent city leaders could steal anything else out of it they absolutely would. You want to hear whine and bitch, try cutting off that $100Mil/year flow and watch what happens..

In fact I would challenge anyone to find more corruption and incompetence in private industry than you can find in our local Texas gov't - TTC anyone? It explains well the level of corruption and incompetence that the gov't operates at:
So while TTC-35 committed to construct $8 billion in infrastructure Cintra-Zachry expected to collect $114 billion in toll revenues as shown in the preliminary plan.

For me the Freespace series took over that genre (back when it existed). More recently the X-series games (X3AP). Upcoming X-Rebirth is looking pretty awesome.

The thing I don't get though - I would be honestly surprised to find a single gamer in the executive staff at LucasArts. I really don't know how execs get placed who have no knowledge of what their product is, or what makes it good or bad. People rail on it in reviews and yet they keep churning out the same garbage. Anyone with 1st person experience of some of their games would know that, so it is obvious their execs have none. Worst of all, Star Wars basically invented the concept of movie-based merchandise and tie-ins (toys and games). How they can turn THAT into a money-losing venture is a really amazing story of FAIL. Not that it is an exclusive club (*cough* SimCity)...

This exactly. Encrypt the laptop but don't actually keep anything important on it. Instead use Truecrypt and a USB thumb drive. Have the thumb drive keyed to a different password than the laptop.

Further, as far as customs, drop a live CD of any variety in the CD drive, and have the laptop default to booting the CD. Now when custom guys asks to inspect your laptop, say sure, and let it boot the live CD. You can be amused while they laugh at how slow your laptop boots. In the end let em clone the HD, whatever, even if the NSA cracks it there is nothing on it. Everything important is on the thumb drive that you have "hidden" away (usually in plain sight on a keychain).

As far as the article, carrying your corporate secrets encrypted in your pocket will make any thieves job harder, and having the laptop encrypted will force them to install keylogger hardware, a more time consuming and harder thing to get away with. If I were such an executive and had real concerns I would just get a throwaway laptop, or better yet have some fun and epoxy all the case screws in. There are possibilities.

It causes more than that. This is a good read on the problems caused by CSD.

Well you must not use very many programs. Their ridiculous flat organization method quickly falls apart and looks like crap. Just take a look here (images 3-5 on that page pretty clearly demonstrate). So yeah, you enjoy that needle in a haystack...