although I always found it rather pleasant as it helps ignore pain as much as anything else.

That's pretty much what morphine does to me. It does very little to reduce the pain, but it makes me completely not care about it. That, and throw up a lot, like most narcotics do with me. For the life of me I can't understand how people get addicted to the stuff. I'd *much* rather be in pain than feeling nauseous.

I can see near-UV -- this caused some confusion in high school Chemistry class when I could see some spectrum lines that nobody else could.

Interesting that you mention that - I've never really thought I could see UV, but I have noticed that black lights and UV LEDs have a weird intense brightness that makes me squint even though the visible light isn't that bright, and I can't really perceive a different color. Germicidal lamps don't cause the same effect for me.

Govt believes it needs to do whatever it takes to get the bad guys.

For varying interpretations of "bad guys".

I don't think you understood what was meant by "efficient". Greater mass (the ethanol plus the absorbent material) makes it a less efficient method of transporting ethanol. This product does not produce a drink nearly as strong as regular 80-proof, 40% liquor. It's not even close. I'd carry some 151 (75.5% alcohol) and be much better off. There are lightweight non-glass containers that would be more than suitable.

Did you ever consider that they already know that? These are people who jumped through so many hoops to get where they are that they just enjoy being in control, flexing their muscles, and feeling secure in their positions by using them to real effect. Frivolous shit like this is the low-hanging fruit for control freaks. The very fact that it doesn't involve anything important means that the degree of serious, committed opposition will be minimal.

The important part for this mentality: if it doesn't work, nothing is really lost and you can wait a bit then keep trying until it sticks; if or when it does work, it establishes a "useful" precedent, giving an appearance of legitimacy to the idea that yes, the state can regulate this thing, too.

This is how sociopaths think. It's about winning and winning is about strategy. Most of that comes from a good knowledge of history, what others have tried beore, which things worked and which backfired, and what one is willing to risk. The campaign promises and speeches are just part of playing the game. The problem, the disconnect, is that average people don't think this way. They keep misinterpreting the actions they're observing.

As long as that keeps happening, things are unlikely to change. It's really difficult to solve a problem you haven't even defined.

Not needed, thanks. I've had enough exposure to enough platforms to know that they all have areas in which they suck equally.

They're excellent for web dev, because they're the only machines that are capable of running every browser.

Which would be great if the code they're writing needed to run on anything other than the Windows versions of IE, Firefox, and Chrome in a very homogeneous enterprise/industrial environment.

I have never seen one which came from the factory with two different sizes of battery terminal bolt.

Me either - I was talking about the bolts that fasten the battery cable brackets to the frame and engine block. :-)

and even when there are standard parts (such as tires), they use so many different sizes that you will be lucky to own two cars with the same tire format.

Even more annoying than that are the myriad of fastener sizes in both metric and standard. Why do I need 2-3 different sockets just to remove the battery cable brackets? Is there *really* a solid reason that one bolt has to be 14mm and the other 1/2"?

Yes, not all requests are reasonable(you need a color-calibrated monitor that covers at least 99% of aRGB to write code, why?)

Funny that you mention that - the guy running the web side of the house recently talked the boss into MacBooks for all of the web staff, along with a bunch of extended gamut displays. We do no OS X or iOS development whatsoever, nothing that involves having to ensure what's on the display is the same as on the printed page, and everyone else (the vast majority of our staff) works exclusively with MS tools on MS infrastructure, and our IT guy has been fighting for years to get something better than the T1 back to the home office. I don't get it.

At least we're allowed to have as many displays as our desktops will allow.

Look no further than Samuel L. Jackson, who's a talented individual, but came off as stiff and wooden in the Star Wars movies.

"Hand me my lightsaber."
"Which one is it?"
"It's the one that says 'Bad Mother Fucker" on it."

At least he had a sense of humor about it. He was pretty damned funny in the Robot Chicken parody.

and insisted on directing (the one of the six he didn't direct was by far the the best film of the lot).

Lucas didn't direct "Return of the Jedi" either - that was Richard Marquand.

"What is it?"

"Your father's HOSTS file. This is the weapon of a Jedi Knight admin. Not as clumsy or random as a DNS server; an elegant weapon for a more civilized age."

And that was with already having a much better headstart on her career than most, having been descended from Hollywood royalty.