That's strange...whenever I get power, I just end up with current and voltage. I must be doing something wrong.

Indeed...viewed internationally, we live in an anarchy of nation-states.

The U.N. has no real enforcement powers...the General Assembly is little more than a forum for expressing hatred.

I recently had a job where I had to institute version control, and even encountered a lot of resistance to the idea initially.

Unfortunately, it was a department of the U.S. Army.

Me too. My secret...recreational levels of caffeine. God bless the person that invented chocolate-covered coffee beans.

Someone once asked Linus Pauling what his secret was to having good ideas. He answered that it was having lots of ideas and throwing away the bad ones.

Here's my personal list of genius traits:

1. 1) Read
   Stand on the shoulders of giants as much as possible. No point rediscovering the wheel.
2. 2) Work hard
   Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.
3. 3) Intellectual cross-training
   Learn as much as you can about as many different subjects as you can. You'll be stunned how often principles from one subject will apply in a completely unrelated subject.

Some years back, one of the former department heads at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (whose reputation for innovation is nearly unmatched in history) wrote a book on this subject. I recently read it and enjoyed it greatly. It's called Breakthrough: stories and strategies of radical innovation. I highly recommend it.

Whatever you do, don't use Sony's stupid "web" thing as your media server.

I had to do low-level programming of Sony video-game console hardware for several years. I found this video positively cathartic.

When I was but a teen, and saw the movie Spies Like Us in the theater, I recognized the "decrypted transmission" shown by Dan Ackroyd's character as a hex dump from the Apple //e's monitor program (i.e. what you got by typing "CALL -151" at the prompt).

Time to repost an eerily prescient article from the L.A. Times, way back in 1993, about smart homes.

I believe this idea was explored pretty thoroughly in a famous novel. I also remember trying to argue in favor of such a society with my high school English teacher. She thought I was a horrible person for even thinking that and refused to discuss it. She educated me that day...just not in the way she intended.

Thank you. I thought I was the only one that noticed this.

Why would anyone trust Microsoft security software when it was Microsoft Windows' own pathetic security that created the need for all this whack-a-mole virus-scanning in the first place?

Primary Colors? Granted, the real Bill Clinton seems fictional.
Wag The Dog? We live that every day.
Sneakers? Surprisingly accurate about real hacking.
Max Headroom? Just around the corner...about twenty minutes from now, in fact.
Robocop? Could be shot in present-day Detroit. No need for expensive sets!

I could go on. Hollywood gets it right occasionally.

You think that's bad...think of all the Mohammeds running around in the middle east.

That sort of oversupply is sure to lower their value.