"By morning Ira figured out a solution. Selenium may be a poison to the nitrogen-based aliens as arsenic is to carbon-based life-forms, based on their similar positions in relation to each other on the periodic table. Ira's two worst students, Deke and Danny Donald, reveal that selenium is the active ingredient in Head & Shoulders dandruff shampoo."

- Evolution, the movie :)

This is a really good point. The city of Madison, Wisconsin has a ridiculous team called TEST - Traffic Enforcement Safety Team. Funded with tax dollars from the police department's Field Operations budget, when TEST lays a speed trap, it means they sit one officer in an inconspicuous lawn chair at the end of a straightaway where speeding is common. This officer has a radio and a laser speed measuring device.

They then hide as many as SEVEN squad cars around the corner, completely out of sight. Usually one or two are higher-ranking undercover cars; in Madison, these are usually driven by police sergeants. The lawn chair officer proceeds to laser every car and radios in any going as few as 7-8 miles per hour over the speed limit, where a regular squad pulls out behind that person and pulls them over just around the bend or on a subsequent block so the traffic stop isn't visible to drivers on the straightaway.

This coupled with Madison's artificially low speed limits in many of these places makes for an easy revenue stream, but it can't possibly be a net positive, especially if some of these tickets are fought in court (like the 8mph ones -- hard to argue that 8mph over the already-low limit through a CEMETERY is particularly unsafe.) The court costs, plus officer salaries, plus the fact that while those squads are waiting for speeders the officers and their equipment are not doing productive things like combating the city's growing gang problem can't possibly make the whole thing a useful endeavor. Just one more reason I'm moving elsewhere...

Fox11 News in Milwaukee has a dramatic video of the meteor taken looking slightly north of west in downtown Milwaukee, WI.

Any idea where it actually landed? DID it actually land -- or just burn up in the atmosphere?

Google, I too am interested in your fiber trial. Please consider my house in Wisconsin for fiber service.

Love,

Andy.

In addition, the subpoena was issued on January 23rd, which was indeed after the Obama administration took power, so Obama's acting AG or AG Holder would have had to sign off on it at some point. While perhaps the original case was started by the Bush DOJ, this subpoena was signed off on by an Obama DOJ pick.

I would find it hard to believe that either the Bush or Obama administrations would demand such a subpoena without a pretty bulletproof case, because of the attention paid to it. Even the conservative aggregator Hot Air takes Indymedia's side on this.

Dell's recovery CDs, however, are typically just OEM images of the OS included with the machine. They include all the extra software on another disc -- so if the automated recovery doesn't work on a Dell, just fire up the disc.

Lost your disc? No problem, because Dell will ship you a new one free of charge once per computer.

Contrast this with Sony, who doesn't ship recovery discs AT ALL, sometimes even without the Acer option to burn your own recovery discs -- which few people do anyways. Then, if you want to get recovery discs for their machines, you have to PURCHASE THEM for $20 or so.

I recommend AGAINST Sony's computer equipment under all circumstances -- it's just crap. Get yourself a Dell where the replacement parts are cheap, the in-home service is good, and the recovery CDs are free.

No, there is not anything wrong with spending 2 million dollars on a car. It's YOUR money, so if you can afford to and choose to spend 166 years of minimum wage earnings on it, be my guest. Jealousy will get you nowhere closer to owning one of your own -- or, if you're like me, you can just ogle the Bugatti while you drive off in your '05 Ford Escape which gets acceptable gas mileage, handles great in the snow, and did not add $155,000 to the government balance sheets to support welfare recipients, public schools, the police and so on.

Still, the sales tax alone on it is $155,500 at 5.5% which I'd pay if I bought this thing here in Wisconsin*, unless you're somehow going to smuggle it into the country to not pay sales tax, which would prevent you from properly registering it.. what good is a $2,100,000 car if you can't drive it anywhere?

* Hah -- like a Bugatti dealer would ever set up shop in Wisconsin. :)

I'm awfully tired of this jealous-of-people-with-money attitude. They probably earned it. More than likely they contribute vast sums to charitable causes so they don't have to pay taxes on those sums come death or tax day. If you want the cool stuff they get to have and experiences they get to have, earn it; don't get your jollies off telling THEM what to do with it.

What's the "guilty conscience" wisecrack for? This thing is not only incredibly cool, but if you can afford it, you already pay enough taxes to support a small mid-American city. Get over it.

I couldn't agree more. I'm a bot author (the chat and channel-management type, not the game hosting type), so I have a front row view of how Blizzard has created a market for these third-party programs by keeping Battle.net outdated and stagnant. Chat bots allow you to perform really basic tasks, like keeping someone you don't like permanently OUT of your channel, or disseminating more than one line of information to your guildmates; Battle.net does not support any of this.

In the world of custom game hosting, bots allow for automated hosting from a high-speed Internet line that can better handle the traffic (since Warcraft III games are peer to peer once they start) and detailed stat-tracking that the Battle.net system could provide, but does not. Battle.net is constantly fighting these improvements contributed by members of the community, rather than embracing them, under the guise of preventing cheating, even though even the chat and channel-management bots need a valid (purchased!) CD key in order to perform their duties and have no impact on in-game play.

It is indeed out of date, but I was able to get it working with FF 3 without too much issue... I can't remember exactly what it took, but it works well to this date (and the original "image" doesn't need to be updated when FF releases minor revisions, since I install FF over the top of the FFDeployed installation to finalize all the Windows shortcuts and things like that.)

At UW-Milwaukee's dorms, I used FFDeploy to do just this: create a silent Firefox installer for student and faculty machines with some built-in bookmark buttons for our student service websites, e-mail system and so on.

Doing this saves time and installs FF with a nice student-friendly UI right off the bat -- very useful in converting otherwise IE-centric students who don't care what browser they're using to Firefox.

That's not a gaming PC. Where's the SLI? Where's the upgradeability and massive hard drive space? Where's the modern graphics card -- the 9800 GT is a few generations old already, just imagine where it'll be a year or two down the road.

Stop with the silly "green" crap, seriously. This system is at best a midrange small form-factor PC with an inflated price tag. While it might play current games, it's nowhere near future-proof, and its price tag isn't low enough to justify that fact.

Dammit, I want my Terminator HUD explaining objects to me as I look at them.

That crunching sound? Oh, that's the sound of you crushing MY WILDEST DREAMS.

Well, there goes the remainder of my academic career. For Aiur!!