Hello? Mr. Kettle? This is Pot. You're black.

Funny you mention that, since razors are the one toiletry that's advertized exactly like tech gadgets: "6 blades is SO last year! Now get the MACH 12 WITH 12 BLADES!" :)

"If I'm buying a Kindle from Amazon that enables me to buy books from Amazon, I'm broadcasting a desire to buy Kindle books. I would welcome some subsidization of the hardware since I'm going to be buying content anyway. No, I really think Amazon priced the Kindle the way they did because they thought they could get away with doing so..."

Why is it only in the tech-gadget industry that people expect manufacturers to sell items for *less than cost*?

For what's it's worth, please note that the original poster's degree was in computer engineering, not computer science. "Computer engineering" means different things at different places, but IMHO the value of a master's in CE is a bit more than in CS.

"... putting it in a separate tray for security."

No need to do that. I just leave the laptop in my bag. Usually the screeners don't notice/care; if they do notice, smile and apologetically say "whoops, sorry, I forgot." They'll then take it out and run it through separately. I've done this probably 10-15 times in the last year or two, and they've only taken it out for a separate scan once.

Exception: if some TSA guy before the x-ray belt asks me directly if I have a laptop, I take it out of my bag. There's no penalty for acting dumb for something you forgot to take out (or every high-school girl with a 6-oz bottle of shampoo would be doing time in federal prison), but I presume there's a significant penalty for lying to a TSA agent.

This seems to be a blanket statement that NYT puts on all their online articles. It might be insane in this case, but from their standpoint I understand why they do it: they put the publishing date there, and the fact that the article was Copyrighted then, and let the user figure out whether the laws in their jurisdiction actually allow the work to be copied. They have no idea what the hell laws Congress might pass (even applying retroactively) in the future, so pass the buck to someone else on determining that a given article is, in fact, not copyrighted.

I also wouldn't be surprised if this is just laziness on the part of some programmer; I can imagine something like this happening:

for (a in articles) { addStandardCopyrightMessage(a.date()); }

(I'm not saying that any of this is *right*; I'm just saying that I can see how this happened, and I'm not at all surprised.)

$4/line per month? Hell, I should try and get some code into this project... if I can get 2000 lines of code adopted, I'll make $96K/year for the rest of my life. Seems I'll be able to retire before 30 after all. :)

I used to use this, but haven't for the last year or two because of sshfs, since sshfs lets you run arbitrary shell commands on the remote files as well.