I've had this problem at two distinct times in the past and both times I wrote some simple programs to help:

• I always had trouble keeping track of my home maintenance tasks, so I wrote this little program. It allows you to create hierarchical tasks. Tasks are prioritized by due date. Attachments aren't supported, but you can put arbitrary text in each task, so I suppose you could include links to files/directories on your machine. The program works as a standalone client or in a client/server configuration.
• At work, I typically had several open tasks, so I built a custom application to solve this problem as well. I can't share this one with you, but I will share that developing this program was well worth the effort. The primary benefit to developing the system yourself is that you can integrate it with your revision control system, issue tracking system, time charging system, etc.

I played MTGO and took a strictly "pauper deck" approach. In pauper deck rules, your entire deck must be constructed entirely out of common cards. That means you can build a competitive deck for $5 instead of $100. There are rooms and tournaments for pauper deck players, but I mostly enjoyed playing casually against unrestricted decks. There is a lot of satisfaction in beating a player with an obviously expensive deck.

There seem to be an awfully high number of people who commute from New Hampshire to work in Massachusetts because of the lack of personal income and sales taxes in NH

One minor correction -- people who live in NH and work in MA pay MA income tax. In fact, because property tax is generally higher in NH than in MA, those people you describe end up paying more income and property taxes (proportionally speaking) than people who live and work in MA. The main reason why people live in NH and commute to MA is that homes in NH are cheaper.

You are right about the sales tax, though. I live in MA about 30 minutes away from the NH border and I cross the border to do all my major shopping. Of course, MA requires that I pay "use" tax on all these purchases at the end of the year, but there are (legal) ways to make MA happy and still come out on top.

Hi! I'm your local TimeCox representative and I'm posting to let you know that your MiphTV box is not compatible with TimeCox cable. But don't worry, for a small monthly fee, you can have a TimeCox DVR that can be used to record all your shows. The TimeCox DVR allows you to record any show (except for pay per view, live sporting events, and anything on premium channels, The Disney Channel, or The Food Network) and watch it at a time that is convenient to you (as long as you view the show within 14 days of recording it, and as long as you don't play it back within same week as a live broadcast of the same show, and as long as you don't play it back on the Sabbath). The TimeCox DVR allows you to record up to 40 hours of programming (or 5 hours in HD) and it has a user interface that many customers can tolerate.

So really, I don't know why you would want to fiddle around with your home-made DVR when you can get all these great features with the support you've come to expect from TimeCox.

Trust me, you don't want people in other countries to see old American western films. If they do, they'll all start acting like us, and the world already has enough cowboys. So in this case, I think the region coding is a good thing.

Not necessarily. I could see a scenario in which a cable box (or similar) would happily output an analog signal in 480i, but the HD signal would only be output in digital (with the appropriate copy protection). That way they can at least protect the high-resolution version of the content. I hear that cable companies are starting to ship HD cable boxes without functioning HD component outputs, but the HDMI outputs and analog SD outputs still work just fine. I think content producers/distributors realize that blocking analog SD output is a losing battle because it would anger too many people. But HD is still new enough that they can still fiddle with it to try to protect high quality video streams. And they want to fiddle with HD content now before large numbers of people become accustomed to it working in a specific way.

Riiiight... You can achieve security by having a poorly paid guard keep an eye on the valuable prescription drugs in the prison.

I can run and catch a football

Really? Do you live in St Louis? If so, I know of a good job for you.

"Multitaskers do it simultaneously"

I remember reading about this tech a long time ago and it was suggested that this sort of thing would be useful for pilots. In a modern fighter jet, there are several displays in front of the pilot, each one having lots of information behind menus. The pilot's eyes are already saturated with information, and the audio channel is used up by human-to-human communication and critical warnings. So if we want to get more information into the pilot, we could try to make use of other senses. A "tongue interface" might do the trick, but if the information is processed by the visual cortex, then this interface would just be competing with the existing visual information.

Do you really think retailers would put up with 1 out of 2 people returning the XBOX they bought there?

Retailers only see a very small percentage of the problem. Most issues happen over 6 months after the console is purchased. At that point, it is too late to return it to the store, and you have to ship it to Microsoft for repairs.

My 3rd XBox 360 went bad a couple of months ago, and this is the first one that died outside of warranty. I had the option of paying $100 to have Microsoft "repair" it (presumably making it work again, but leaving the flaws that caused it to slowly die in the first place), or I could spend $200 on a new XBox 360 Arcade (which replaces all the parts that are actually broken) and get a fresh 3 year warranty. I chose to buy a new unit, because when you buy a 360, that warranty is the most valuable part of the package. As I see it, I'm not buying the hardware, I'm paying for a 3 year lease on the hardware. I suppose another benefit of buying a brand new unit is that the newer 360 consoles should have less heat-related problems than the originals. So who knows, maybe this one will last a little longer.

Oddly, the only reason I bought a 360 in the first place was because the DVD drive on my original XBox went bad, and I wanted to get a new console and continue playing my original XBox games. Before that, I only bought a new console when I wanted to upgrade to the latest technology. These days, I only buy a new console to replace a broken one (like the PS2 I bought the first time I had to send my 360 in for service).

I would like to help all the lawmakers out there who would like to pass a law that limits expression (e.g. the ability to sell video games to whoever the all I want). If any of you are reading Slashdot, please read the following helpful instructions.

The rest of us have decided that free expression is important to us, so we explicitly included that right in our Constitution. That means you can't make a law that limits the expression of U.S. citizens. If you would like to make such a law, you need to get the Constitution changed so that the law would be allowed. The people who are able to change the Constitution are members of the U.S. Congress. These people all work in Washington, D.C. but some of them live near you. There are several ways to get in touch with these people, including visiting them at their office or sending them a letter. Some members of congress even have web sites and you can send them e-mail. When you communicate with a congressperson, remember to tell them who you are and how you want the constitution changed. If you decide to visit them in Washington, don't forget to bring a map of the area, so you don't get lost.

There, hopefully that should be all the help you need. Now don't bother us with any more attempted laws until after the Constitution has been changed, okay?

Because "Quick Charging" is, by far, the least significant part of the electric car problem so there is very little practical value in researching it. Even if you could make a car that charges quickly, you would need to spend a large amount of money on charging stations capable of delivering that much power to the vehicle. The more practical solution to this problem is to build a vehicle that allows a technician at a "gas station" to swap out the partially-depleted battery for a fully charged one.

If I was a silicon brain you could just back me up.

But how does it help you if there happens to be some copy of you somewhere? If you were killed and that copy was restored, would it be you? Or would it just be a copy that resembles you? The scary thing about this question is that to all the observers (including the copy), the copy is you, and no harm has been done, even though the original "you" is dead.

I often think about this issue in terms of "Star Trek"-style transportation. That is, a person is converted into energy and then energy is then sent somewhere and reconstructed. But that energy represents information, and you could just as easily scan a person and send that information elsewhere to make a copy while leaving the original person in place. So essentially what would happen with "transporting" is that a person is scanned, destroyed, and then re-constructed somewhere else. The re-constructed person has all the memories of the original person, so to him, he was simply "transported." All observers would also say that the person was transported. However, the original person no longer exists. This sort of transporting could happen over and over and nobody would have any evidence that people are being killed.