I wear a mechanical autowinder with a window on the front showing the grasshopper gear working, and a clear back, showing all the autowinder and all the other mechanical beauty. Muy steampunk.

For a more high-tech device, I'd just go with an iPod nano watch, with the clock screensaver. Touch it and it lights up with the time, and run headphones up your sleeve to listen to the music unobtrusively :-)

"didn't not" == "did not" - hate when I catch that kind of thing after hitting "Submit"

And most of those founding fathers were there when the US Navy was established to protect our trade and coasts, and agreed to it. As well as the Marine Corps, our first "expeditionary" capability derived from the Navy.

We had an advantage - we weren't in Europe surrounded by a bunch of historically hostile Powers. We had Canada to the north, with negligible offensive capability, and to the south and west were bordered by natives and weak colonies. A standing army wasn't needed. By 1812, we had one and we'd keep it forever - we realized the limitations of the "well-regulated militia" Teancum refers to.

It wasn't that long ago we had three powers openly espousing their intention to dominate their neighbors, and then the world - Germany, Japan, and the USSR. WWII reduced the open militarism of the first two, and the following decades of Cold War, however expensive and bloody in proxy fights, didn't not result in global domination by the USSR (or, by the USA, which has NEVER espoused a mission to dominate our neighbors, Monroe Doctrine notwhithstanding). We're not that far from military brutalism in the world today - just look at Sudan. The armies of the so-called Western powers exist mostly to defend themselves by deterring others from frontal warfare, and are succeeding, as shown by the fact that terrorism is the weapon of choice by hostile parties, instead of frontal warfare.

Or mooch off the rest of society, or spend your time scheming to increase your own power and influence instead of working your way up in society while having to provide for your own needs and those of your family.

Thanks for playing, troll.

Agreed. I carry my own laptop and the work laptop when I travel. The work laptop is imaged, controlled, and dedicated to work, and I don't do ANYTHING not work-related on it. If I want to video chat with my wife and kids from across the country, I do that on my home laptop.

Do NOT screw around with these machines. If you work for my company and it's discovered you've done something like this, for any reason, you're gone, and they're going to dissect the machine and see if you were careless with company confidential material, or if you used peer-to-peer software, or anything else that would put their data at risk. Porn, gambling, or other similar behavior is an escort-you-from-the-building offense if done on work systems.

It only takes one breach to make companies paranoid, and most have had that breach. Don't be tempted - be responsible.

We've been building a suite of tools using Django that combine near-real-time event processing and offline analytics. It's been very useful and flexible; the data model abstraction is clean, and we can target different databases with a couple of lines of config file change. We're integrating some Javascript and other visualization tools in our UIs, and finding it pretty easy to support in the Django framework. Performance scales with resources fairly linearly, the overhead has been very manageable, and it integrates into almost any security framework. I've seen nothing to convince me we need to look at a different framework.

It's not the usability and ease of use - it's stupid crap like removing the ability to right-click and get a menu of things to do with that menu item, instead of just having it kicked off... it's burying the UI customization where it can't be found easily, and removing the easy tailoring options in favor of the "Unity" standard.

We just rolled back...

One of my first jobs would have been way easier if someone had invented the magsafe connector. The company I worked for had laptops on carts for the nurses to be able to chart meds and other things automagically next to the patient bed. (Scan patient, scan drugs, give patient drugs, record updated with what, how much, and when.) We had ~10-12 instances of electricians being called to remove one prong of the plug from the wall socket because the nurses just walked off with the cart without unplugging the laptop first. This was in the mid-to-late 90s, and replacement plugs from toshiba were expensive. Like $75/ea.

Correct. Falcon 9 was designed to be man-rated, but SpaceX isn't spending the money to jump through NASA's hoops until they have more of a hope of a contract for human launch services. Man rating is a high enough hurdle that LM and Boeing have refrained from man rating the Delta IV or Atlas V on their own nickels.