but how often do you need to accelerate from a dead standstill to 60mph, as quickly as possible?

Eight or more times a day, each time I get onto the freeway in the middle of fast traffic. Merging into 70mph traffic when your can can only get to 42mph on the onramp and the odds of getting slammed from behind go up exponentially. Personally I like to be going about 10mph faster than the rest of traffic while I'm merging in, so I can ease off it a little to fit into the most appropriate gap in cars (at 70mph, most cars decelerate down to 55 or 60 a LOT faster than they can accelerate up to 80 or 85.)

8G ipod touch = $200
16G ipad (2nd generation) = $400

My guess is that the ipad mini will split the difference and retail for $300. They may take the difference between the ipod touch ($200) and the ipad 3 ($500) and retail out the ipad mini at $350, but I'm thinking that the Google Nexus 7 retail price is going to pressure the price of the ipad mini to come in at $300.

Civilization Revolutions.
Hate to admit it but I spent an hour Googling to see if it was available on the Android before making my final purchase decision on a phone last week.

This.

Want some incredible results from your software engineers? Here's all the culture you need :
Give them a very quiet place to work, free from distractions, and take away the barriers to success / productivity.
- Too warm? That's a distraction that will destroy any attempts at getting work done that day.
- One or more people having personal discussions loud enough that the dev overhears them? Esp if the chatty people aren't on the dev team? Another day's productivity pissed away.
- It takes a good developer half an hour or so to 'get in the zone' doing heavy / hardcore coding and debugging. If he has to get up and go find food all those balls in the air drop to the ground and he starts over again when he finally gets back from eating. Find out what they eat and have it magically show up at their desk about 11:45am and they will feed their face while they continue being productive. If they're billable that extra hour, then there is nothing on Earth that you could feed them that costs more than that billable hour (but odds are they will be happy with a subway sandwich and a bag of chips.)
- Need to request permission / wait for a signature before doing something routine? Need to wait to have someone else make changes that the developer could make (perfect example : DDL or DML changes in the developer database)? Another day's productivity lost.
- Figure out who the slackers are and cull the herd a little. A small team of shit-hot developers that work well together can deliver rings around a larger team mixed with good / weak players.
- Any meetings that are useless? Don't make them attend. Any meeting with 8+ non-developers in it is probably useless, from the 'does a developer need to be here' perspective.
- Give the heavy hitters more hardware than you can imagine them possibly using - they'll find a way to put four monitors, two servers and two laptops to good use, and anything they don't use they will pass on to someone that can. Nothing says 'I love you' to a good developer than a new tech toy, or a new laptop when their old one is about two years old.

All that 'team-building' crap? Save it. Want a real team-building exercise, send a few of them away to a conference and only give them one car so they have to stick together, give them enough rope to get in trouble together. When they come back they will be an Olympic quality team.

You know I can't do that, Dave.

I couldn't believe it so I went searching. My research supports everything you said.
My previous post was incorrect. The funny thing is that everybody above was making fun of the Yaris' ability to stop at 1G, but based on what I'm finding that's pretty close to the truth. That also surprised me. Two in one day. Ouch.

I read this as 'When I don't know what I'm doing, I hack at it until I get something working and then I document what I did.' Fair enough. At that point you are documenting it at a fairly detailed level (hopefully). This happens when software development is done as 'Art'.
When software development is happening as 'Science', odds are you can at least outline your intent and design before you start coding the solution.

I've done both. Computer Science usually produces better results than Computer Art.

A Toyota Yaris with a much higher deceleration

No way a Yaris could out decelerate a sport-bike (motorcycle.) A decent sport bike will brake right up to the edge of traction, meaning it will decelerate as hard as it accelerates, and no stock vehicle can accelerate as hard as a sport bike (carrier deck catapult launched fighter jets being the single exception.)
Citation
(Note : I said stock. As in walk in to the dealer, buy and drive it off the lot. Funny-car dragsters are not dealer stock vehicles.)

But the OP story was still awesome, using physics to beat a bull-shit traffic ticket. I'm still waiting for someone to use the concept of absolute velocity with respect to the universe to demonstrate that they were traveling within 1% of the same speed of all other vehicles, and that even the officer when sitting at rest was traveling 100x the posted speed limit (when taking into account the velocity of the Earth around the Sun, coupled with the 1000mph rotational speed of the Earth around its axis.)

I think a more appropriate change that I would love to see, is the ability to treat a red light as a stop sign.

In some states, motorcycles can. Citation

Ahhh - I missed the 'you take physical access of my machine for a few minutes without me being present' part.
Yes I agree with you on that part - the minute someone loses physical control of the hardware all bets are off.

I was more interested in how effective the setup I described was against anything I could accidentally run across on the web on my own, while still being the only one touching the keyboard. I prescribe it as the Holy Grail for people that surf indiscriminately, in the wild wild west, but maintain physical control of their box. I was hoping to get either affirmation or a description why I was wrong in that case (and if you're still reading, I'm still interested.)

Impressive. Does that work on against Firefox running NoScript and AdBlock on a Ubuntu boot thumbdrive that doesn't mount the hard drive?
I'm genuinely interested in an honest answer, and if the answer is 'Yes' I'm interested in details, because many on this thread believe that a boot thumbdrive running FireFox or Chrome on Linux is the holy grail (myself included.)

Smartest thing I've read all day. It is literally a perfect match to the original question, which is probably the dumbest thing I've read all day (drive image your work laptop, smoke it and install your own warez, and restore the drive image before giving it back to them.)

OP - here's the one piece where your plan fails : the active directory connection establishing your machine as a trusted member of the domain, and your user as the domain with the same name ... disconnects if it hasn't been refreshed in a while. I don't know how long it takes, but it happens. And it is a particularly uncomfortable discussion with corporate IT explaining why, given that your machine looks exactly like it did when they gave it to you, and you have been using it for a few months. The question is going to come up 'What did you do to it?' and you are going to answer just like they expect you to 'Nothing.' ... and it goes downhill from there.

Technical answer for you is same as Anrego : USB Thumbdrive install of Linux : Pen Drive Linux has a zillion distros you can pick from, and they give you step by step instructions on making it work.

If technical answer #1 doesn't work for you, here's technical answer #2 for you : remove the work hard drive, install a new hard drive, install your own OS on that and swap out drives for work / pleasure. Downside is limited to the danger of physically borking the work drive while removing it or storing it while it is out of the machine. Explaining how you managed to mangle the SATA connector on a work laptop is a very difficult discussion.

Personal preference answer is also same as Anrego : don't do anything on your work laptop that you wouldn't do with representatives from corporate HR, IT, your boss and his boss standing over your shoulder. Buy a cheap used netbook for $150 on Craigslist and take it with you to do your warez/internet surfing/pr0n viewing.

Or when your company only makes $1.0B in profits that year, unlike the year before when they made $1.4B in profits.

I'm guessing part of their security comes from not being connected to the 'net. Hell, DOS and Windows 3.1 machines were some of the most secure machines in the past 25 years history of computers, assuming you secured them physically - because by and large they didn't have dedicated connections to other (external) machines. I'm guessing if you didn't plug it in to an Ethernet connection and physically secured the machine, even an unpatched XP box is pretty secure.

How about through shared interests, say a running club, hiking... basically anything but ideally something with wide general interest.

Go outside and talk to real people? Fuck that. Try Craigslist.

I answered one ad seven months ago, spent a few days establishing a rapport via email, met in person over a nice non-committal dinner, established a nice rapport in person, started dating in earnest over the last few months. We're getting engaged on Valentine's Day.

Seriously, first and only hit on Craigslist was a grand slam. It's not just for pervs and fat girls anymore.