Even I think a 19th trimester abortion is a bit too late.

If you dance in front of a camera naked, check the "please upload pictures of me to the web" button, don't be surprised when the camera takes naked pictures of you and uploads them to the web.

Durp.

No separation between comments, seriously, wtf.

He has expanded abortion,

Oh bullshit. Abortions aren't being mandated on ANYONE.

IM(NS)HO abortions would be required for children who would be born with severe retardation or another serious birth defects.

But fuck it, you won't see ANY politician advocating that POV.

Shit it is not like Obama mandated killing white babies. (Although that might improve the average IQ of the country by a fair bit!)

Seriously WTF people.

when we aren't burning effigies of Ronald Reagan in front of local churches while praising cthulu.

That does sound like fun.

Hell I think a few of my conservative friends would join in on that!

I love Geek Chic as both a style and a cultural phenomenon. It looks awesome and makes buying nerdy t-shirts easier. In addition it encourages geeks to take pride in who they are and in their hobbies and passions.

If football fans and bikers and body builders and everyone else can take pride in their hobbies and reflect their enjoyments in their style of clothes, why can't geeks?

I used my Tablet PC to take copious notes with OneNote while recording the lecture at the same time. I loved it. OneNote is an awesome app for taking notes in, really well thought out, and my Tablet PC with its long battery life (for the time, ~2004) was awesome.

On any given day about half the class would be playing World of Warcraft in the back though. I can understand how that would be annoying when trying to teach.

Another down side to having a laptop was trying to stay off of the Internet if the lecture got too boring. (Of course trying to stay awake was also an issue...)

Up until last month my power bill was ~$23 a month.

Thanks to aggressive power saving settings, made possible by the damn nearly instant on capabilities of an SSD, I can't really drop my power usage by much more. Granted this machine is a custom build using a lower power version of this particular CPU (AMD Phenom II x4 905e), but that is only a few watts shaved off, and I am sure my 24 inch LCD doesn't help things any.

Heck if I bought a new video card I could probably drop another 30 watts or so off of my PCs power consumption, and if I found out what kept my PC from hibernating now and then (some app or another I am sure) I could drop power usage by another 15% or so.

But at this point I am guessing the combination of the light above my computer, my monitor, speakers, and all the damnable network equipment, taken together consumes more power than the PC, and that switching to a laptop would not be a big win, and certainly not 40% of my power bill in savings.

(As an aside: If you are careful about your PC build, you can get a desktop that has the same power saving features (dropping clock speed down) that you get with a laptop.)

Really laptops use less power for the following reasons:

• Smaller GPU, some laptops have dual GPUs and switch to the lower power consuming one when not playing games.
• Dynamically underclocked CPU, when usage is down CPU voltage + clock is dropped.
• Smaller screen.

Newer desktop GPUs actually are a dramatic reduction in power consumption over ones that are even a generation or two old, ~100 watts or more. They are still pretty damn obscene though.

IIRC You have been able to get the various speedstep variants (dynamic CPU underclocking) on desktops for quite some time now.

Screen size is a personal factor, I love my new 24" 1920x1200 IPS display, only $300!

Of course I also multi-task like a mother-fucker and push hardware to its limits. My last laptop's video card actually got fried (ouch), and in general I need more power than a laptop can provide. E.g. I have 8GB of RAM that I frequently max out, I play games, do development on this box, and stream HD video, often all at the same time. :-D (I frequently watch TV in one window while playing games in another)

Awhile back the Australian courts made an inane ruling that porn stars with "small" breasts encouraged pedophilia.

news article.

Oh re-fucking-lax. The books are entertainment, the movies are a related form of entertainment.

Nine times out of ten, the only thing Hollywood cares about is making a movie that will make them money, as cheaply as possible.

No shit, it is called capitalism. Money pays the bills, no one works for free.

I wonder how many "fans" ( by which i mean fan-boys, or posers, or both ) of LOTR out there haven't even glanced at the books?

Well 99.9% of the nerds who went and saw it did.

If you have read the books, you would find the movies a very nice visual component to what you already know as LOTR, that is all.

And what is wrong with the movies being just that?

To claim these movies as anything more than that is a travesty, and a racial fucking slur against Tolkien's own work.

Shit gets chopped up. People die. Awesome action scenes. I'm good.

And how the fuck is it a racial slur? Seriously WTF?

It is a movie. It had action and good music.

Lower your expectations a bit. Yesh.

They raped Hell Blazer like a Chinese finger trap, calling it "Constintine".

Constantine sucked because it had too much emo whining and not enough action. *yawn*

It was based on another work? Hey guess what? I don't give a shit. I go to the movies to be entertained.

I don't give a fuck about the "artistic merit" of the original work. Hell for that matter I don't care about the artistic merit of the movies I go to see. If I want a good story I read a book. I go to the movie theater to see shit get blown up.

I am actually surprised they DID change it.

While the original Doom did not exactly have a solid story line, the setting (HELL) is a pretty damn good one. It would require a large budget to fully realize, but a bad ass marine vs hell's legion could have made for an awesome action horror film.

All these are things that were taught in my University.

I am arguing with bad math.

That means that 29 times out of 30, when a person is killed with a gun, it's a tragedy.

Well and overuse of the word tragedy. Also the implication that guns are the cause of the "tragedy" and that events would otherwise have turned out differently if a gun had not been around.

At least in my University, there was one DB course and it was kind of meh.

DB isn't often taught, it is more a "by the seat of your pants" thing. :`(

Question: Under what conditions would anyone ever use CHAR instead of VARCHAR? I can see if you have order numbers that are always the same size, or product codes that are always the same length. But even then aren't you buying yourself a little bit of efficiency in return for a potential bite yourself in the ass moment later when you fill up all possible values?