Son, Warner would steal your organs and sell them on the black market if they could get away with it often enough.

Damn straight! 200 years from now NPR will be playing classical rap music. The commentator will come on and be all like "That was Puff Daddy's 'Kill a Ho'... in D Minor. Coming up after the break will be Snoop Dog's 'All my Bitches,' in C. This was a very influential work at the time, in which Snoop Dog asserted that all the bitches were, in fact, his. Many other rappers at the time tried to get the bitches back, but their efforts were, ultimately, fruitless."

I predict that "Happy Birthday" will still be under copyright at the time.

At least he THOUGHT he could crush people's throats with his mind.

I hear the support argument a lot. Again, in my experience the amount of support anyone ever actually needs is significantly less than the price they pay to get that support. And sure, there is some risk in going with an unsupported product. That risk can typically be mitigated, too. Really, if your company needs constant hand-holding from a supplier for one of their products, that would be a red flag to me about the quality of that product or the quality of your employees. Or maybe both.

Funny thing is I've never seen a client that actually needed the power Oracle or DB2 brings to the table. Most of them don't need anything more complex than glorified key/value storage and some standards on where files shall be located. If you're a bank and need to store tens of millions of actually organized data, yeah, go for the big database. If you're a small business and need to store the company's shopping list for the next couple months, something as powerful as Postgres is probably overkill for you.

In other words, try spending as much on actually understanding your data and how it needs to be organized as you do on the thing you plan to store that data in.

By jacking up baggage fees some more, obviously!

I was just noticing the other day that a number of emacs lisp packages I use on a regular basis hadn't had any development work in 5-10 years. It's a bit discouraging to go looking for something and only find a goddamn sourceforge link for it. That's my main metric for the death of a project -- you can only find a sourceforge link.

I guess it's understandable. Those guys wrote those things to scratch an itch and they worked well enough long enough. If a company where trying to maintain all the code that goes into a typical Linux install for me, it'd probably cost billions of dollars. It seems to me it would be fairly easy to subvert entire subsystems in a distribution by, for example, waiting for everyone to be happy with how it works and going off, then picking up maintenance or starting a replacement project because "No one works on that old one anymore!" Next thing you know, the system you used to love is bleeding features left and right and before you know it ends up being a dumbed-down version of Windows. Maybe that's just the open source lifecycle on a scale of decades...

The Illumanati who secretly run everything are building the world's largest collection of dick pics. Their end goal is to be able to look at the penis of every man on the planet. Now you might think that sounds gay, and it is, They just pop them up on the big wall of monitors and masturbate to them. Right now someone in GCHQ is masturbating to a picture of your penis, and there's nothing you can do to stop it. Even if you find their secret bunker and the secret room in the secret bunker with the big wall of dicks, go down there and wander in on them, they won't stop masturbating. You'll be all like "HEY! Is that a PICTURE OF MY DICK?!" And they'll be all like "OHH YEAH HNGGG!" So just sit back and feel secure in the knowledge that the world is safer because every intelligence organization on the planet has a picture of your dick.

I can get by on 6 more or less indefinitely. Some nights I feel like I'm tossing and turning and not getting to sleep all night, but if I get up on those nights I'm even more of a wreck the next day than I would be otherwise. I'm pretty sure I'm just getting a few minutes of sleep each hour punctuated by moments of conscious awareness. So I'm sleeping-ish, but it doesn't feel to me like I am.

Oddly the time I get up also makes a difference. I've found that if I set my alarm for 6 AM, I'll usually wake up a few minutes before the alarm goes off and be ready to go. If I set it for 6:30, I won't want to get out of bed at that time. I figure I'm usually cutting off a deeper sleep cycle at 6:30, which makes it harder to get going. At least that's my hypothesis.

I've found a 20 minute power nap when I'm feeling really tired can keep me going another 4-6 hours, too. I read a study a while back that put forth the idea that you could get by indefinitely on a 4-hours-up cycle with a 20 minute nap between each cycle. Life circumstances usually make that difficult to test, and I'm almost completely positive that strategy wouldn't work for me anyway.

Will not be going to space today.

How to get that economy rolling again after it grinds to a halt. I'm thinking put everything for the next couple of years into farming and becoming self-sufficient, and start printing a crypto-drachma. This will look exactly like a regular drachma, except it will have the word "Crypto" in front of it. People with money eat that shit up. The Crypto-drachma will be backed with the full standing and reputation of the Greek government... and... um... did I mention it has the word "Crypto" in front of it? Say that enough and it will quickly become the pre-eminent currency of the world. Admittedly I know absolutely nothing about economics, but apparently neither did the people who got Greece into this.

That worked very well for PGP.

I believe technically ITAR classifies me as a weapon, because of the things that I know. One of which being exactly how well using ITAR to forbid the distribution of software worked on PGP. And also that putting shit back in the dog doesn't tend to work very well. And that the law was crafted by ignorant people who were under the illusion that was an option. The funny thing is, Americans are actually getting interested in making things again. With their hands. And other parts. And after a couple-three... four... or so... decades of Americans not really being all that interested in that, policy makers have no idea how to deal with it. So they can keep writing their laws and then someone will invent something like a crossbow that shoots dildos, and the legal arms race will continue. Except then at least one person will already have a crossbow that shoots dildos.

There you go, some premium weapon-grade snark. If someone is inspired by this post to create a crossbow that shoots dildos, please credit me. Or at least send me a youtube link.

Yeah, I started ripping my own CDs to MP3 early on in the game and quickly realized that putting my collection in Apple's hands would not let me retain control of my collection. That was back in the days of the white iPod. I currently use git annex to keep my collection synchronized across two computers and my android phone. That mostly seems to work, although the android client does seem to be a bit flaky.

Stores information and processes it in the same place? You mean like every other computer ever?

Smoke plus meat not hard. Og do great!