I've seen that one one of my west coast trips. I'm not sure why - I thought California was all about the car. Anyhow, I'm at my firm's LA office, and the folks invite me out for lunch. The restaurant was reached by leaving the office, making a left turn, turning right at the first intersection (which had a traffic light, driving half a mile, and turning into the restaurant on the right. I could have practically walked there.

Anyhow, we get done eating, and the person who drove the other car says to the person I rode with that "I need to follow you, I'm not sure how to get back to the office." They were serious.

You have been fined 25 credits for violation of the verbal morality statute.
You have been fined 25 credits for violation of the verbal morality statute.
You have been fined 25 credits for violation of the verbal morality statute.

Your repeated violations of the verbal morality statute have caused us to dispatch the police to deliver corrective suggestion, please remain at your current location.

Thank you, I was about to post the same thing. The first PC I built came with a CPU that was installed exactly this way - an AMD 386/40 that for some reason they got in a surface mount version, and then mounted on a small piece of PC board that had the pins to plug into the socket on the motherboard. The only point of confusion was that Pin 1 on the underlying pins was at the opposite corner from Pin 1 on the chip itself.

If that doesn't work on the newer chips, I can always go with a competitors chip. I'm by no means limited to Intel.

When I read the summary, I figured the articles were from a United States source. I was quite surprised when reading the articles* to see they are from the other side of the pond. How much higher would those percentages be in the US?

* If you think there's no reason to read the articles, then please get off my lawn!

Damn straight. I took responsibility for video taping basketball games for both teams when I was in high school. If anyone wanted to bully me, they had to answer to the entire basketball team.

From where I sit I saw one of the strengths of RIM turn against them - the BES server and all the administrative control it allows.

For many years I worked closely with the team that ran the blackberry infrastructure at my company. Whenever a new blackberry came out, users started asking for it. When I asked them about it, the answer could often be summarized as follows:

"Yes people want them, but that model has X. Our current version of X does not allow us to administratively disable X. On (date) we will be upgrading our BES servers and will be able to disable X, at that point we will allow people to use them here."

So all the users who got new devices found that they didn't do anything that the old ones didn't. They blamed this on RIM, even though the real culprit was in fact that the company was locking them down. But I've heard this from numerous people at work.

I still have my company issued BB though, because I don't want them and their remote wipe capability anywhere near my real smart phone. Apart from the keyboard though, there isn't anything special about it.

Somehow I doubt the judge would approve that as a Voir Dire question, although it would certainly be funny.

Seriously thought, this guy crossed Goldman. Nobody does that and lives. What the hell was he thinking?

Let's put it this way. I work for a company based in London. Whenever we have to fill out forms that ask for a region, the regions are UK, Europe/Africa, Asia/Pacific, and Americas.

Mind you the UK is a lot closer to France than Toronto is to Sao Palo Brazil. But the first two are in separate "regions" under their nomenclature and the second two are in the same region.

How is that troubling? That is part of the market making job the bank signed up for when it agreed to be an underwriter in the first place. Of course, the underwriter can under-price the issue, and then the stock will shoot up after it starts trading. This does save the underwriter the potential risk of having to buy shares to support the initial market. Of course, that means the selling shareholders lose out on that. I bet if that had happened instead, people would also complain that it was troubling that the banks had taken that profit away from the shareholders and given it to the people who the IPO shares were allocated to.

The rates carriers charge for SMS just shows how much strong, strong regulation is needed. If I were in charge, I would mandate that each carrier send a letter to every former and current customer who had pad an SMS fee, stating that the SMS fee represented price gouging because the SMS messages don't actually cost the carrier anything, as well as illegal monopolistic practices, since all the carriers colluded to raises these prices. I would then mandate that each carrier refund any and all SMS fees paid, with the amounts to be multiplied by a factor of 3 as a form of punative relief. I would further change the regulations such that if the carrier ever wanted to apply for spectrum licenses again, they'd need to multiply by a factor of 100 instead of 3.

Of course this would put the carriers out of business, but someone could buy the spectrum and infrastructure in bankruptcy court, and hopefully they'd learn a lesson.

And while I do not like most advertisements I understand the need to pay for things.

Not to worry in the case of /. though. For a ridiculously low fee you can pay /. to not serve you any ads. Frankly I think this is great and wish I could use it to get rid of ads in many other places where I have to endure them.

Am I the only who still doesn't use a GPS? I got one for my wife because she got lost all the time. She still gets lost!

Personally, before I even had a license to drive a car I had learned to navigate. If I'm going to a new place I've never been before I draw a pencil sketch of the relevant streets around where I'm going and what the relevant landmarks are. When I get off the highway nearest the destination I pull that sheet out and glance at it while I'm stopped at the traffic light.

I find the navigation to be provided by a GPS unit to be a poor compromise at best. For instance, to travel to a friend's place up in the mountains, the GPS will have you go up and down the side of this one mountain twice. Anyone who lives there would laugh at the route and send you down a slightly narrower road that runs along the ridge.

Directions to this place are always sent with the admonishment not to use your GPS.

But someone always uses their GPS when there is an outing there. You can identify them the moment they get out of their car because the roller coaster up-and-down route the GPS provides has left them nauseous.

American Airlines: The same company that decided to remove the baggage handling fee from the ticket price and charge it as an add-on so that even when you do pay it, you're forced to wait on the tarmac as dozens who tried to cheap out and not pay it try to squeeze an oversized bag into an already full overhead bin.

American claimed when they did this that it was more "fair" since travelers who checked bags would pay for the service, and ones who didn't check bags wouldn't be subsidizing them. Of course most other major airlines followed with this nonsense.

The reality in my experience has been I pay their overpriced check bagged fee, and then suffer because of those who didn't, but should have.

I'd already decided because of their origination of that fee that I would never fly on an AA plane ever again. This behavior just reinforces how rotten AA is. Chapter 7 Bankruptcy would be too good for them.

Reminds me of a similar "I tripped and ... fell" statement.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLe0T1rUeDA

And about as accurate, I would suspect!

Remember, AA was the first airline who wanted to be more "equitable" about distributing the fees and started charging fees to check bags.

Ostensibly they did this to be more fair to the people who didn't check bags.

Of course the other major carriers quickly followed suit.

My experience has been that the whole flying experience was heavily degraded by this misguided decision. Even when I pay the fee to check my bags, I'm forced to wait while people who were too cheap to do so try to shove their bags into overhead compartments they just won't fit in. Thus, the checked bag fee slaps me twice - once when I pay it, and again when I have to deal with people who should have, but didn't.

American Airlines came up with that idea, and I don't think I will ever set foot on one of their planes again as a result.