Intel users have only rarely had the chance to substantially upgrade CPU's.

Say what?? LGA775 was around for a loooong time (Pentium 4 through Core 2). I could put a 45nm chip in my LGA775 box; meanwhile my Socket 940 box is maxed out with a pair of 90nm Opteron 290s.

I'm glad AMD set up a better upgrade path for AM2, but they really abandoned 940 users.

I was right on the edge of solving it myself.

Not :-)

My favorite is from AeroCool (I have a previous model) -- includes a fan controller and thermal monitor.

They wanted to be able to say, "No, your Honor, we didn't say we were pretexting, we said we were Pre texting."

I don't even think it was the intent of the legislatures or the voters to criminalize that kind of situation. But the laws were written without careful thought, and now grandstanding prosecutors are abusing them.

There's a lot going on these days that I think violates the Constitutional proscription against cruel and unusual punishment. I wish judges would take that more seriously. This is a fine example. I have no problem with locking up people who have committed real crimes, but when a 19-year-old actually asks the age of the girl he's about to have sex with and she lies to him, you can't tell me there's mens rea there.

Just food for thought... according to current laws, as little as 100 years ago, some 30% of the world industrialized population were pedophiles.

If the definition of a pedophile includes having had sex with a 16- or 17-year-old when one was 18 or 19, I'll bet 30% are pedophiles today -- if not more! Seriously -- I'd bet a good 50% of males have done that.

All we have to do is convince the terrorists to wear electrodes on their heads at all times, and we're golden.

I can believe that Swype might be better (I haven't tried it), but this might be easier to learn. Will be interesting to see which attracts more users.

Interesting comments. I would be more comfortable letting Iran play a larger role if Ahmadinejad were out. But I think you could be right that some arrangement might be possible... on the other hand I don't know how either of us can trust the other at this point.

There may be more al Qaida in other places than Afghanistan now, but I think the fear is that if we leave, they will take over the place, or a substantial part of it. Unfortunately I think that's a real risk.

On the other hand, it's hard to imagine that anything will change if we stay. What a mess.

I do think you should start a blog. Send me the URL and I'll read it.

The unfortunate reality is that *because of the scandal*, and under the current political fallout conditions, it is considered professional suicide to even get involved with it.

This is the true scandal. Yes, Pons and Fleischmann screwed up and announced very much prematurely. But people's careers were destroyed merely for publicly allowing the possibility that they might be on to something.

I don't know any better demonstration of the corruption that pervades Big Science.

I hear the Chinese are working very hard on cold fusion. How sad it will be if they figure it out first.

Thanks for your post. Do you have any opinion on whether we should stay, and if so, how we should conduct the war? Right now, to me, it looks like we're damned if we stay and damned if we leave.

[WikiLeaks] has published private rites of Masons, Mormons and other groups that cultivate confidential relations among their members. Most or all of these groups are defenseless against WikiLeaks’ intrusions. The only weapon they have is public contempt for WikiLeaks’ ruthless violation of their freedom of association [....]

The author of the quoted article seems to be overlooking the fact that WikiLeaks could not have published such material, except that some member of the organization in question decided it should be published. It's not clear to me why WikiLeaks would place their own judgment of the value of publication above that of the insider who leaked it to them. As you also quote:

Assange must confront the paradox of his creation: the thing that he seems to detest most–power without accountability–is encoded in the site’s DNA [...]

I'm not completely sure what I think of WikiLeaks either, but I do note that they have withheld some of this material on the Afghan war at the request of their source. In general, as long as their behavior toward their sources is above reproach, as it seems to be, I'm not sure they should be answerable to anyone else. So I don't agree that they have power without accountability -- but it is to their sources alone that they are accountable.

Some people in management didn't quite get the math and overall picture and wanted me fired. I wasn't meeting all of the metrics that were set and that's what mattered.

What a commentary on management: managers who insist on managing by the numbers but can't do math! Clearly it's average absolute time between calls that matters, not the percentage, as the percentage measurement rewards those who spend more time on calls and penalizes those who spend less -- a perverse result if there ever was one. Whoever decided to use that metric is the one who should be fired.

It stands to reason that you're learning something when playing a game. It's only a question of how useful that something is in the rest of your life.

Obviously, what this proves is the importance of oscilloscopes!!

Just kidding. Great post!