... to act as a deterrent. The Mariposa perps face a maximum of six years under Spanish law. That's small enough to shrug off as the cost of doing business.

A few years ago I experimented with the Kinesis "Advantage" keyboard, trying to alleviate some wrist discomfort I had been experiencing. I never did warm up to that keyboard, but my fingers did travel less than with a standard layout. If you're trying to eke out that extra word or two per minute then it might be worth evaluating. Kinesis keyboards are expensive, but they have a generous 60 day eval policy.

If your workaday typing includes a fair amount of code, then I'd recommend you use a really capable editor - and I'm thinking emacs here. I've yet to master the art of emacs-fu, but I have watched those who have, and it's purely astonishing how much code can appear on a screen so quickly, with so few keystrokes, and no mouse movement. Unobvious and arcane keychords are the name of the game, bolstered by your personal arsenal of editor macros. After your fingers learn the landscape they become buzzsaws.

These kinds of questions are stupid: "I need to do XYZ for a project, how do I do XYZ?"

There's a technical forum that I frequent where it is rather common for someone to ask "How do I do XYZ", and also rather common for the people who don't know how to do XYZ to demand "what are you trying to accomplish" or "why do you want to do XYZ?"

If a responder doesn't know how to answer a question, then he should just move along -- not try to change the question to something he does know the answer to.

For every honor code violation by an individual, the entire class gets to enjoy an additional 5% increase in the value of the final exam.

That's simply wrong. Do they do prof evals at Stanford, tied to salaries and tenure? I suggest that when innocent students get screwed that those evals take the injustice into account. Sauce for the goose, Mr. Saavik.

... glossy, slick, intelligent in the right places, readable from cover to cover. Orson Scott Card's A Thousand Deaths was my first introduction to him, and that story still creeps me out. When Omni's staff inexplicably began to promote those silly UFO and parapsychology pieces, I allowed my subscription to lapse.

"... with mommy and daddy having to work thirty percent more just to provide the same standard of living and real income as a single-breadwinner family in 1962"

As Larry Summers said a few years ago, I'm going to provoke you.

Isn't it possible that two-income families weren't needed until a sizable percentage of families went to two incomes, devaluing the work pool? Sexual politics aside, might we be better off today if each household had a designated breadwinner and a designated homemaker?

If uniforms are being suggested because IT guys currently are dressing inappropriately(gasp)

Yes, this sounds like a passive-aggressive fix employed by a gutless manager.

Frankly, I have no plans to see this movie -- I never had even the slightest interest in it.

That's fair enough; I wasn't looking forward to being beaten by the Pocahontas bludgeon again. But I've got to say that the film is a technological wonder - lots of moving parts, fractals, motion capture, other stuff. Cameron (and ILM, WETA and other folks) set this bar pretty high.

... Microsoft security researcher confirms advantages of open source transparency

I gather you don't have a use for it. Great, don't buy one. But I ride my Segway an average of 200 miles each month, and wouldn't be without it. I live a sane distance from work, and commute back and forth without (a) getting sweaty and (b) adding quite so much to my carbon footprint as I did when I was using the Volvo. So yeah, Segways have their place. This Yike thing probably has a niche, too.

I'd drop ABP in a heartbeat if advertisers simply stopped using animation. I don't object to adwords or quiet banners - someone has to pay the bills after all. But those noisy, CPU-soaking, neurotic pleas for attention drive me to do something about it.

If they want my eyeballs back, they'll have to become more civilized about it.

... to see what might lie beyond 50 years. The technological singularity is going to slam us hard. Try to visualize something other than Flash Gordon serials, or Star Trek, or Ray Kurzweil's fantasies about virtual sex.

I mean, look: you're going to be obsolete in 50 years. You'll be functionally replaced by an intelligence that is jaw-droppingly greater than your own, and which doesn't live in the same meatspace.

That new intelligence may view the greater universe around us as just an endless permutation of the same old shit. Really, how could exploring EPOTSOS at stellar distances, and at glacial speed C possibly be interesting? Here's the real frontier: deep below 11 dimensions of string theory. The answer to who we are is way down there, not way *out* there.

I've said it before. There are probably lots and lots of civilizations out there. They'll all become introspective before you ever find them. The ones that have the means to find you won't be inclined, you poor unremarkable Permutation, and in the relatively near term you'll understand their lack of motivation.

Cheaper than having to re-write all the COBOL that's out there...

Lighting and sound is geeky enough to be interesting, and easy to apprentice if you know little about the subject. There's likely a children's or community theater group in your area that can use a hand. Bog knows it's absorbed all my free time...