As a teacher, I often find the need to discuss details with other teachers about a student that I don't want to document in an e-mail (that can be subpoenaed.) In addition, I have students of low-socioeconomic status who don't have a computer at home, can't use work e-mail for personal matters, and rely on the POTS to communicate with the world. I use my desk phone everyday.

The NFL won't let you buy tickets to home games? How droll!

I'm reminded of the Intedictor LiveJournal account during Hurricane Katrina. You do whatever you have to do to get the job done. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interdictor_(blog)

Actually, Level 1 on SpinRite is fine for SDD, as it's read only. Which does what it needs to, verify the data is accessible, and the drive recognizes if the "sector" is bad. http://www.grc.com/sn/sn-338.txt

Seriously, if all the major free e-mail services signed every outgoing e-mail, wouldn't that cover about %MADEUPPERCENTAGE (but certainly more than half, perhaps closer to 90%) of all e-mail? Have Gmail/Yahoo/Hotmail/whathaveyew create a public/private key for each user, create a new e-mail header for keys (so it's not lurking in the sig confusing people.) This covers most of the Joe User situations (people who run their own server would know enough to sign their own email) and puts the onus on Hotmail/Gmail/Yahoo/whathaveyew policing their own users (heaven forbid!)

r/DARPA/ComStar

And bring on the Fourth Succession War!

How long until Facebook has Disambiguation pages?

http://www.hpmuseum.org/hp01.htm

LED Calculator watch. From 1977. Waterproof to 10 meters, and Magnetic-Field-Proof to 60 Gauss.

Sometimes I feel we're working backwards here.

Nobody thought about those poor children at 10 AM. On a Wednesday. Because their cameras were all at the Media Day. Or whatever NFL was doing at the JerryDome today

The Super Bowl will take as much power as a medium sized town. Good news for those Texas doctor's offices and schools who got power outages of 2-3 hours. Clearly we're not as important as JerryWorld.

"french military victories" comes from the comedy site albinoblacksheep.com. "recursion" is another one, though. More poking fun at itself or the search terms rather than "mountweazels"

Wait a minute. I thought "Beta" on Google's products just meant they hadn't figured out how to monetize them yet.

Part of the reason for the poor translation is, rather than translate to the end of a sentence, it translates one line at a time. So, in the "Peligro" example (which the first word is rather blurry and thus not properly translated for that reason,) it has to translate "se require", "casco en", and "esta area" with no context of any of the other lines of Spanish. "It is required" is a good translation of the first line. "Casco" is probably not in the limited vocabulary of the app (I'd assume 5000-10000 words, and "helmet" is probably not in there.)

As for the green sign, I'd add to the above argument that it is already translated from English to Spanish by a machine, and translating back with this device provides nice opportunities for some major Engrish to develop.

Poor choice of Line Feed location. I didn't see the negative before. 269.5 C didn't seem that bad.

In games of chance (which Google giving away fewer laptops than there are requests for one,) different municipalities have different rules for fairness purrposes. Google can't be expected to know the rules for every city, county, parish, province, state, or country. c.f. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skill_testing_question