Ah, Battle Cattle.

Somewhere around here I have the Steve Jackson card-based version of that game. It's pretty fun when you've got a few people with a warped sense of humor and a bit of free time.

Reading "Of Mice and Men" is more important than reading "Girl with the Dragon Tattoo".

Why? Granted, I haven't read either of them.

I don't get the snobbishness that goes along with certain books/authors. Yeah, I read Gatsby, I thought it was boring as all get out. I much preferred the Táin Bó Cúailnge. Seriously, a bunch of english professors who've never lived in the real world declare some book as "important", and I'm supposed to care? Yes, I've read many of the "great works", but I read them because they interested me, not because they were important. Just as many of them, I've found to be navel-gazing, coma-inducing drivel. YMMV.

IMO, a book is only important if the person reading it got something out of it besides a headache, even if it was just a few hours of escapism.

Not uncommon for pyromaniacs to become firefighters.

In rural areas, a number of arson cases end up being traced back to volunteer firefighters. Most commonly involving abandoned structures or barns.

OK, how exactly were they "sold out by GE"?

The plant wasn't profitable currently, was going to be made obsolete by law in a couple of years, and was not even remotely profitable to refit to producing the CFLs.

So they should just pay people to work for the heck of it?

Agreed, I went through a couple of TI calcs before buying an HP. I've never had an HP break. That's not to say I haven't dropped them. My poor HP 11C is now over 25 years old, and has been dropped too many times to count. It's still my favorite calculator. My 48G has likewise seen some rough handling, it is also still running fine.

TIs are decent from a functionality point of view, but they are unable to take any kind of rough handling.

My wife used TIs in college, and went through a couple of them as well.

The question is, do your cats count you as people?

Not actually true. In it's most basic definition, beer is anything made from fermenting starches. Yes, modern beers use grain for the primary starches, but that wasn't always the truth.

Root beer wasn't always a sickly sweet kid's drink, it once was exactly what the name suggests, beer fermented from roots, primarily sassafras.

Grain became the hands-down favorite because of its relative low cost and high starch content. Which is also why companies like Anheuser-Busch use rice, it's very cheap and high in fermentable starches. They sure don't do it for the quality flavor (rice has none).

The cacao beans themselves are pretty hardy, and once dried and roasted are very transportable. What they're talking about is the pulp that surrounds the seeds, which is supposed to be very good, but has an extremely short usable life. Like just hours from harvest. Likely the only practical way to use it would be to build your brewery on the plantation.

First, get rid of some keys. Many houses have exterior doors with both a lock on the knob and a deadlock. I've replaced all of the knobs with keyless versions. #1, the knob lock is pointless if you use the deadbolt. #2, if the only lock is a deadbolt, you *cannot* lock yourself out.

Second, split to multiple rings. There's no reason for me to carry my motorcycle keys when I'm driving my car. I have separate rings for each vehicle, with a house key on each. The rings are kept in a keybox, and I only take the one I need. I then have a separate ring with miscellaneous keys, but it mostly stays in the keybox.

I mean, seriously, why are you carrying around your *roof* key?

Oh, I seriously want to see them take on Motorola. Taking on HTC was like taking on the scrawny kid in school who isn't part of the "in crowd". He's not that dangerous, and nobody will back him up. Taking on Motorola would be more like a junior high art student taking on a college senior on a martial arts team.

They get away with HTC, because they know HTC's patent portfolio is thin. But all it would take is for Motorola to drop the filing cabinet on them containing their patent portfolio and Apple will crawl away crying for mommy.

It can happen anyway. I let myself get promoted into management, then when someone got a wild hair for a re-org, I got shown the door when the shuffle was over.

When I looked for a new job, I specifically stayed away from management jobs. Yeah, I'm making a little less, but my job is much more stable, and I'm a LOT happier.

Bottom line is, would you be happier doing the management position than the grunt work? If the answer is no, in the long run the money is not going to make up for it.

Meh, I've got a Pentium Pro 200 (1995) beige-box that I'm still using. The only thing changed is the drive, and that's only because I always use a new drive when doing a major OS upgrade (in case I f* it up.)

I've found that properly cared for, most boxes will last a lot longer than most folks assume.

Somewhere around here I've got an old 368SX/25 (199?) notebook with an ancient copy of slackware on it. It still works, though I have no idea what to do with it. The last task it had was as a portable terminal for programming routers/switches. The battery of course is many years dead.

I don't think it will be an iPhone killer. At best, it will slow Apple's growth to a significant degree. However, with it's exchange integration, etc, it could take a measurable chunk from Blackberry.

And, as a long-time Palm user, this will likely be the last nail in the coffin for Palm. I'd decided months ago that the replacement for my 700p was not likely to be another Palm, but nothing was really grabbing me. I was resigned to go to a crackberry. Now though, I may end up an early buyer of the Droid.

My wife will almost certainly get one, since she was on the edge of buying a GPS device.

Gotta love the apologists.

"it can read it, you just gotta use this thing on another device to convert it then transfer it"

By this logic, MS notepad can read PDF files. Just open a PDF in Acrobat, select the text, copy, paste into wordpad, then save as text.

Um, seriously dude? That means it can't read it.