Yeah, that's a great idea. Think I'll trade my spot at the bottom of this gravity well for a different spot at the bottom of a significantly crappier gravity well. You might think "No problem! We'll do it as a penal colony! After they clean the joint up -- kill all the Mars spiders and Mars snakes, us civilized folks will move in!" Wrong! Those prisoners are the base of the hugely profitable prison industry and if you send 'em all off-planet, you greatly increase overall costs while losing all the extra profits from the massive recidivism rates. Nope, I was the first one to want to get off-planet as a kid, but until they come up with an idea that doesn't involve moving to some other shithole of a planet, I'm staying put!

1. Only to the extent you allow it. With a few simple steps, you can live a practically ad-free existence. If you can't be arsed, you get what you get.

2. Don't pretend you don't get something for your attention. To be effective, advertising must keep you at least mildly amused for some amount of time. Take for example, GoPro or Red Bull's ads. Not familiar with them? Go ahead and google them. I'll wait. Aaah! Almost got you! See 1. Anywhoo, some guy with their logos plastered all over him doing some amazing wingsuit stunt is both reasonably effective advertising and pretty damn entertaining. Clearly those companies think it's effective enough to keep funding it. Hell, I'd say both companies are probably better media companies than they are at making their respective products.

I recently determined that the problem with our ERP software is that it's not getting laid enough. Nothing makes it more difficult to concentrate on processing all those transactions than being all pent up like that. So on the minus side there's going to be more competition for Charlene in Marketing (And you KNOW the ERP software is a much smoother talker than you are) but on the plus side, we should start seeing a couple hundred thousand extra transactions per second as soon as this software gets installed!

At some point there will be less legal penalty if you just murder anyone who accuses you of copyright infringement.

Something along the lines of "Give us free pairing or we'll tell your customers that Netflix isn't available with your internet service." Netflix gets access, you get to... have customers.

I'm pretty sure the entire county's not worth $5.7 million. Clearly the county is just trying to more than double its value.

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.