This deserves a front-page link but Friday afternoon at 4 isn't conducive to my composing a blurb: sudoku solving using Debian's package dependency resolver.

GMail's displayed ad:

As I read a news alert from Forbes: "Making Money Doing Nothin - TheRichJerk.com - I Cracked the Code to Making Money. Now I'm Rich and You're Not."

As I move on to the table of contents from Nature: "Labmeeting - www.labmeeting.com - A new free tool for scientists that organizes your paper collection."

In the old days kings used to lead their soldiers into battle. In modern times this is impractical and counterproductive.

But you can still have leaders lead the frontline in spirit.

Basically, if leaders are going to send troops on an _offensive_ war/battle (not defensive war) there must be a referendum on the war.

If there are not enough votes for the war, those leaders get put on deathrow.

At a convenient time later, a referendum is held to redeem each leader. Leaders that do not get enough votes get executed. For example if too many people stay at home and don't bother voting - the leaders get executed.

If it turns out later that the war was justified, a fancy ceremony is held, and the executed leaders are awarded a purple heart or equivalent, and you have people say nice things about them, cry and that sort of thing.

If it turns out later that the leaders tricked the voters, a referendum can be held (need to get enough signatories to start such a referendum, just to prevent nutters from wasting everyone elses time).

This proposal has many advantages:
1) Even leaders who don't really care about those "young soldiers on the battlefield" will not consider starting a war lightly.
2) The soldiers will know that the leaders want a war enough to risk their own lives for it.
3) The soldiers will know that X% of the population want the war.
4) Those being attacked will know that X% of the attackers believe in the war - so they want a war, they get a war - for sufficiently high X, collateral damage becomes insignificant. They might even be justified in using WMD and other otherwise dubious tactics. If > 90% of the country attacking you want to kill you and your families, what is so wrong about you using WMD as long as it does not affect neighbouring countries?

badboy_tw2002 on Collimating Semiconductor Lenses.

Anonymous Coward, on liquid metal CPU cooling.

Arcade classic Defender has been reimplemented as DEFENDER of the favicon, a game which plays in the favicon in your browser address bar. Only works in Opera and Firefox (with some garbage collection choking in the latter), unfortunately. Still, beyond awesome.

Just over a minute, you have time to check out this great ad spoof.

zaydana, on Largest Scientific Projects.

Some time ago I asked for virtual machine advice. Having read the comments and other stuff on various blogs and sites I opted to try VMWare, VirtualIron and VirtualBox.

Here we are nearly a year later and I have to say that (IMHO) Bang for the Buck goes to...drum roll VirtualBox!

The basic edition is open source, well supported and just plain works. A small download of less than 30 MB will get you running.

It isn't a bare metal install, but on my testing with Linux as a host OS it screams running XP and OpenSolaris. I have an OpenBSD VM set up but haven't gotten X to work yet. Installing the guest extensions gives you all sorts of cool stuff.

Eleventy thumbs up!

I was intrigued to see the "Road Rage Linked To Automobile Bumper Stickers" article. As I mentioned there, I'd observed that long ago, and giving extra room to heavily-stickered vehicles is one of the cornerstones of safety in my bicycle commuting.

Comment of the day, unfortunately buried under a torrent of projection about how people with Jesus fish are hate-filled bigots who think they're better than other people, is Anne Nonymous.

...once, I and others who pointed out a basic math error in the story all got modded down, but I've never been dinged for insufficient worship of Jimi Hendrix before!

TheRealFixer (and parent), on Web 3.0.

Anonymous Coward on the Amazon outage.

People Listening to This Artist

admspam

(also listening to: Dar Williams)

"This Artist" being King Kobra, of Iron Eagle (Never Say Die) fame.

Apparently there's already a Margaritaville casino under construction in Biloxi, but the Trump Hotel Casino is now being sold to a group that will be turning it into another Buffett-themed casino.

There's a poll topic: Who is the most money-obsessed licenser of his/her name and image?

• Jimmy Buffett
• Rachael Ray
• Peyton Manning
• Krusty the Klown

The OP got hammered from a variety of directions, including by me, but my favorite was leighklotz.