I'm casting my vote for Claude Shannon whose inventions included a unicycle with an off-center wheel for juggling purposes. Because it's insanely fun inventions like that that allow one to come up with modern information theory.

Hahaha! No I am not, but I do have a similar beard and am at least 10% as interesting as that guy.

I wish I could mod your post "funny as hell."

I am primarily a Linux user and rarely boot into Windows but when I do, I use LiteStep. Well, I used to. I only recently converted my Windows install from Windows XP to Windows 7 and haven't tried it on Windows 7 yet.

http://litestep.info/

It may not be exactly what you're looking for. It gives you an entirely different desktop look and feel. It's modeled after the NeXTSTEP desktop so if you're an AfterStep user in the Unix world, LiteStep would be the Windows equivalent. It does offer multiple desktops which was one of its primary attractions for me. It crashed like mad on Windows 98 but was rock solid for me on Windows 95 and Windows XP. The only current support for Windows 7 is in an experimental build you may want to try out. It looks like the project may have stalled but it might still be worth looking into.

The best upgrade for any computer I've ever done was to add a CMD SuperCPU to my Commodore 64. This took me from an 1MHz 8-bit 6510 processor to a 20MHz 16-bit 65c816 processor. Not only that, but it raised the RAM limit from 64KB to 16MB (I got the 16MB of RAM as well.) Just going from 1MHz to 20MHz increases CPU speed by 20 times without accounting for the 8bit-to-16bit upgrade. The associated 64KB to 16MB RAM increase boosted my memory by 256 times. It also took the RAM's propagation delay down to 50ns so the CPU's data and address buses went from 1MHz to 20MHz as well! It's a phenomenal difference that I can honestly say I have never matched in any other computer upgrade, including building a brand new machine.

To put this into perspective, it would be like upgrading a PC from the year 2001 from a 1.33GHz 32-bit CPU to a 26.67GHz 64-bit CPU. It would also need to increase its physical RAM from 256MB to 64GB while increasing the FSB from 133MHz to 2.66GHz.

San Diego kicks ass in any time zone . . . with or without power.

I think your food processor only counts if it's very small.

I am not a lawyer and as such, do not have the training and experience required to be able to help you. However, I am an American citizen and that makes me responsible for making sure I myself do not break U.S. laws. In our legal system, ignorance of the law is no excuse. While being ignorant of the law can, in some cases, change the punishment you receive, it will not excuse you from breaking the law entirely.

This is why it is so important for us to read at least the aspects of the law that are relevant to what we do. Given the nature of the Internet and computers in general, copyright law is very important to all of us. Despite this, somehow almost no one reads it yet everyone tries to wax intelligent about it.

Many laws are very very cryptic. Luckily, copyright law is not one of them. Go here to obtain a copy of the current U.S. Copyright Law:

http://www.copyright.gov/title17/

Be sure to check back regularly for updates. When reading this document, it is important that you read and understand Chapter 1, Section 101, "Definitions" before reading anything else. If you do not read this and understand it, you *WILL* misunderstand the rest of the document. Once you understand this section, the rest of the document becomes far easier to understand.

Doing this will not prepare you to battle IP lawyers in court, but it will give you a better understanding of copyright in the U.S. and help you avoid copyright issues in the first place. As always, even if you read this law, go hire a real lawyer if you know you are on shaky ground. Attempting to clone someone else' product should immediately make you realize you are on shaky ground, even if you have not read Title 17 of the U.S. Code.

Hint: You don't have to read the entire document. There are sections that do not directly pertain to most modern computing situations. However, it should become very clear very quickly which sections are important to you.

Doing this now will help you to see the infringements you have made in your game. Just one look at the screenshot of your game reveals too many copyright violations to ignore, let alone the text on your web page.

I already have one set aside for soldering PCBs with solder paste anyway, so I use it for crap like this. But they are cheap so it shouldn't be a problem to buy one new. You can pick one up at your local Walmart brand new for about $20 with enough capacity for a video card.

Beelzebud is correct. If not for your own sake, then for the sake of others (especially children) that eat from your kitchen, please do not use the oven where you cook food for this!!

What bothers me are people who don't like it when other people voice their opinions on the internet . . . but have to come in and shit all over someone else's harmless enjoyments.

My dad was a jet engine mechanic in SAC stationed at Ellsworth AFB when Mount St. Helens erupted. For about a year following the eruption, volcanic ash settled into a visible layer on everything which required cleaning on a daily basis. It really kept settling out of the air for that long. While I understand that eruption was an odd case, it does show that we have had some pretty extensive experience with aircraft flying through significant amounts of volcanic ash. Remember that they had Operation Looking Glass at that time so there was no way we didn't have aircraft flying in those conditions.

Of course, it wasn't just the USAF that had to deal with this, commercial airlines had to deal with that fallout as well.

So I find it hard to believe that we don't have some decent amount of data about this. What about the commercial airline data from that time? Where did it go? While the military data from that period might be classified, it may be time to request declassification of some of that data. I'm willing to bet that with a little bit of effort that data can be scrubbed and the safe portions of it released. As for the taxpayer dollars required to accomplish that task, as a taxpayer, I think it would be a worthwhile investment.