Interesting that the special formatter is only available for Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh, and apparently only in binary form. Even if I had such a computer I would not be comfortable formatting my disk with non-free software. Who knows, it might be putting an encrypted child porn picture on a hidden part of the disk, exposing me to the risk of prosecution. No thanks.

A very thought-provoking post. I had trouble understanding why Bob would pay $100 a month to have his car washed, until I realized that washing his car is a euphemism. Upon realizing that, your argument became much more persuasive.

In 2002 I found the same licensing regime in Houston, Texas. One of the dancers I talked to said she worked illegally because she knew that registration created a public record, which could follow her the rest of her life. In response, I registered as a nude dancer. The people at the licensing bureau were remarkably polite, even though an audience would pay to not see me nude. I still have the identity card: call me 007735 Robert.

Thank you for the grep. When I ran it on my little web site I found I had been probed. The log line looked like this:

I wonder what would happen if we all starting pinging that last IP address.

Our puritanical culture condems sexual entertainment. I don't agree: I think hiring a prostitute is much more fun than watching a violent movie or attending a loud concert. However, to each his own.

The section of the Secret Service that protects the President.

That is why you hire the judge's granddaughter. The judge will be reluctant to declare the effort insufficent, because she won't want her grannddaughter to lose her cushy job.

Well, it works everywhere else, why not in Germay?

And her supervisor will reply that there is no money in the budget for hiring more people, so she should do the best she can with the resources she has been allocated.

Google should hire the judge's granddaughter to read and respond to the e-mails.

More importantly, they would not be able to consume us for nutritional value.

Just because I can prepare a presentation that people will listen to does not make me a professional. When I started doing it, the ability to communicate with customers effectively was considered part of the normal duties of a software engineer. Today's professional communicators will invite you to a free dinner and sell you a timeshare. I'm not in their league.

I would disagree with you only on this point, and only slightly. I would say that a trained or experienced communicator in the loop is a very good idea. I have never had any formal training in communication, beyond a class in public speaking in summer school.

I would liked to have met her. As far as I know my slides never had any approval process, but I think your editor would have liked them.

I started doing presentations back in the days of 35-mm slides. I didn't have to prepare them myself—I sent the text to the corporate slide presentation department, and they sent me back the slides.

I prepared my presentation by first writing out what I wanted to say, word for word. I then distilled that document into a few topic lines, which I had made into slides, generally about three topics to a slide. At this point I discarded the original manuscript. When I gave the presentation I glanced at each slide to remind me of what I wanted to say, then spoke extemporaniously.

Today I prepare the slides myself using LibreOffice Impress, the free equivalent of Microsoft PowerPoint, but I use the same method.