Welcome, Neo. Now, see how far the rabbit hole goes...

HTTP://cryptogon.com
HTTP://spacetimecurves.blogspot.com

Have you EVER tried to exhaust a Black Lab? I mean, your Golden Retriever may be something to talk about.

But the Lab? They're indefatigable!

Heh. One track mind. The butches doing the search sure were happy with her.

Where's the TalkingRain gone to?

7 kinds of Corn Syrup or Aspartame.

These "trained accountants" sign off on MSFT spending 5-8 BILLION a year, since 2001, on research - with ZERO to show for it in ROI.

All Microsoft product advances have come out of imitation/derivation or acquisition for over 10 years. The business is still paid for by two profit centers in Windows desktop and Office. Server just carries its own weight.

That's the new campus - put to compete with Google for college hires. Get out to the other buildings - and the field offices in Bellvue and Silicon Valley.

Total Bullshit, Cynical Move by MS. Really worthy of some spleen and bile.

They stopped giving a damn about "their people" at least 5 years ago. For instance, last month, as the old fiscal year ended, they pulled all the soda cases from every office - replaced with vending machines. That's 1 year after they stopped all the regular food-service and snack items.

Any tech company in California or Western Europe has done the calculation. The expense on these things returns a fantastic benefit in the morale, productivity and retention of their best people. Cutting these "extravagances" ultimately costs them money. Microsoft are joined with Cisco, who practice similar false-economy, in a race to the bottom.

"Are You People Ready?"

They really should change that to:

"The Beatings Will Continue, Until Morale Improves. Oh, Here's Your Shitty Phone."

Remember the 1340's? We were doing a dance called the Catapult.
You always wore brown, the color craze of the decade,
and I was draped in one of those capes that were popular,
the ones with unicorns and pomegranates in needlework.
Everyone would pause for beer and onions in the afternoon,
and at night we would play a game called "Find the Cow."
Everything was hand-lettered then, not like today.

Where has the summer of 1572 gone? Brocade and sonnet
marathons were the rage. We used to dress up in the flags
of rival baronies and conquer one another in cold rooms of stone.
Out on the dance floor we were all doing the Struggle
while your sister practiced the Daphne all alone in her room.
We borrowed the jargon of farriers for our slang.
These days language seems transparent a badly broken code.

The 1790's will never come again. Childhood was big.
People would take walks to the very tops of hills
and write down what they saw in their journals without speaking.
Our collars were high and our hats were extremely soft.
We would surprise each other with alphabets made of twigs.
It was a wonderful time to be alive, or even dead.

I am very fond of the period between 1815 and 1821.
Europe trembled while we sat still for our portraits.
And I would love to return to 1901 if only for a moment,
time enough to wind up a music box and do a few dance steps,
or shoot me back to 1922 or 1941, or at least let me
recapture the serenity of last month when we picked
berries and glided through afternoons in a canoe.

Even this morning would be an improvement over the present.
I was in the garden then, surrounded by the hum of bees
and the Latin names of flowers, watching the early light
flash off the slanted windows of the greenhouse
and silver the limbs on the rows of dark hemlocks.

As usual, I was thinking about the moments of the past,
letting my memory rush over them like water
rushing over the stones on the bottom of a stream.
I was even thinking a little about the future, that place
where people are doing a dance we cannot imagine,
a dance whose name we can only guess.

"Nostalgia" by Billy Collins

The sun may be shining, but I think that the ask slashdot folks must live in the dark... :-)

These are obvious. http://www.visioncarefilters.com/products_3M.html

There are my favourites; the privacy polarized filter. No glare, and the fellow next to you in 12D quits craning his neck to read your Slashdot postings.

If they can regenerate THOSE degenerates, then ANYTHING is possible! :-)

http://www.google.com/images?oe=UTF-8&gfns=1&q=hasselhoff&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=univ&ei=nHdCTJ4lj6SxA8y-lfcM&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ct=title&resnum=1&ved=0CDMQsAQwAA

No Lundgren, either...

B'lanna Torres was the last woman I remember on American TV (I 'aint talkin' Mexico or Italy - or talkin' Turkey!) that I really wanted to take my babies.