Get off me lawn, you youngsters!

When I was young we carefully wove ALUs using 74xx and 40xx, and we saved our programs to paper tape!

Sheesh, I remember, when "high-resolution graphics" meant 256*192 pixels. Not necessarily colorized ones, so forgive me shedding tears when I look at old Amiga ads remembering the stunning first sights of the 4096-color Hold-and-Modify mode...

Unfortunately, very few developers actually test their stuff with ~ on NFS. Firefox is another program which fails hideously with ~ on NFS -- the bookmark toolbar would fail to load, misc. random errors upon loading pages, etc. (I think it was because of Sqlite, but I'm not sure.).

Ah, the joys of Firefox on networked file systems.

I happen to have my work home on AFS, which has an "official" path /afs/[much longer path here]/home/angstroem -- and the localized official path /home/angstroem

Now guess, which path Firefox uses in its config files, just to fail on that at later restart. After forcing all paths in its config files to /home/mylogin anything is fine and even restart works.

We're talking about cell phone here, not military-strength microwave radar signals :)

Would really astonish me if he could even light up a energy-saving lamp with the cell-phone signal.

With all due respect, you are a dumbass.

Here's one guy who still uses his brain for thinking, and he just doesn't see what this fingerprinting (which you may have forgotten was used as a special treatment for criminals in former times) is all about.

If they want to check his presence, logging him in and out, there are other methods to do that. They don't need his fingerprints. It worked perfectly well with badges and/or company ID cards.

And, yes, his fingerprints are all over the doorprint. Together with a gazillion of other fingerprints. And withoug registration that makes him one of the anonymous crowd.

Before all this "we need your fingerprints for this and that" nonsense, of course, as his fingerprints weren't not registered.

Now they are.

It's easy to ridicule people as paranoid. Instead, however, you should be thinking "why the heck are they requiring my fingerprints".

That customer is lost anyway as you can't treat her right, no matter what you do...

But to come back to technical issues, your example is flawed, because

• You don't need unlimited internet access for sending/receiving eMail.

• Private network access is not required at work, therefore you don't even need access to any freemailers.

• There's the concept of intranet. You don't need to intermingle intra- and internet. Set up two networks with very, very, very strict passing rules, if, for whatever reason, you need to access them from each other.

A regular 25 gallons of diesel would get you to about 750 miles?

Excuse me? That's 95l of Diesel for about 1200km.

Even my 11 year old VW Golf IV TDI (1.9l engine w/ 90 metric HP/66kW) does 950km (590 miles) on *half* of those 95l/25gal and on a real everyday commuting mix, not some fake test course.

And I'm not quite known for my defensive driving, so I like to go fast wherever and whenever possible. The same car and engine can be driven 1200km (750 miles) on a single tank of 55l (14.5gal) if driven fuel-optimized rather than fun-optimized.

A CD is a data carrier on which the audio data is typically stored in way less corrupted way than the Generation MP3 is used to consume.

Maybe my ears differ just enough from the average physical model, but listening to MP3 for longer time makes me dizzy -- and I see no point in buying artificially crippled audio.

I had always wondered how to resolve conservation of light's angular momentum during destructive interference of collinear laser pulses consisting of ph[o]tons of the same "handedness."

Bingo, Sir.

Never been up to 185mph, only 165mph (BMW M350i). It definitely brings your pulse up to speed, although the biggest problem is not wind but other drivers. Especially those who think that the world ends around 90mph and any vehicle accelerates as slowly as theirs.

But what truly amazed me was that according to the board computer it only used 13.5l/100km (abt. 17.5mpg). That is almost reasonable -- especially when compared to e.g. what my Olds Ninety-eight Regency swallowed during my US time... Without even going anyware remotely up to 3-digit speeds.