The CEO of a company I used to work for claimed the VPN was inconvenient, so he would basically sync our entire file server to his laptop every day - marketing, finance, development projects, the works. His laptops were also constantly being misplaced or stolen, so who know how many copies of everything we had are floating around out there. Every business trip was a major security breach in the making.

The Block 20 of the A/B model was fitted for LANTIRN, but I think those all went to Taiwan. I have no idea if the European Block 20 MLU program included it or not.

(I'll take useless '80's trivia for $600, Alex.)

If wind resistance was an issue, maybe the increased fuel use is from...shall we say, less streamlined...people using on motorcyles instead of staying properly sheltered inside an SUV?

My "Lava Red" Durango has been hit twice from behind, both times while stopped at a red light. It's not the color.

Air-bursting a second nuke on a slight delay will take care of that.

regarding the finger incident:

"A worker from Shanxi Province had his index finger chopped off while operating a hole punch press machine while working on an internet camera. Management did rush him to the hospital for emergency treatment. However, after an investigation, management determined that the worker had disobeyed regulations related to operating the punch press machine, so the worker was fined 200 RMB ($29.26) and fired! The foreman and section chief in that department were also fined. Management then rehired the injured worker as a security guard." (http://www.nlcnet.org/reports?id=0034)

That's almost better than the treatment I received the two times I was injured here in the States. If you get injured here, the companies want you out the door and off their books as fast as they can.

Since most (all?) Hollywood movies lose money, can I just short them all and retire?

Sellers can't leave negative feedback.

30" is where the pixel count increases, and the pixel size shrinks a bit. It's those new 27" screens that really rip people off.

20" 1600x1200
20" 1680x1050
22" 1680x1050
24" 1920x1200
27" 1920x1200
30" 2560x1600

(I've started seeing 1366x768 and 1280x720 LCD screens being pushed as desktop monitors, so I think we're actually going backwards.)

I had a fluffball hamster and a ferret living in the same house. The two met nose to nose once, and the ferret wanted nothing to do with the hamster from then on. When the hamster would escape from its cage or was rolling in the ball, the ferret would hide in the shoe closet until the hamster was caught and imprisoned again.

For our rat problem, we used a dog. Every rat he killed could be traded for hot dogs, so he became quite the hunter. (Mice he would just eat - he was always walking around with a mouse tail hanging out of his mouth...)

At the other extreme, my real name is also a popular nickname. Punching my real name into Google will return hundreds or thousands of results, a minor percentage of which can be linked back to me (and many can be easily denied). I can mix and match nyms and real names on various sites, and wish employers good luck untangling it all. A few companies have tried and given up.

I used to have an old PowerMac 9600 with 12 memory slots using 64MB or 128MB sticks. Since the OS at the time could only use 512MB, any extra RAM could be split off into a bootable ramdisk. With the OS and my applications running off the ramdisk, that clunky 300MHz processor seemed faster than anything I've able to buy since. It seems we've been going backwards in some aspects.

I was the sole IT guy at my last place, a financial institution that went through a large amount of defective and obsolete hard drives. Not wanting to spend the time erasing the drives, I would just take them out back and hit it with a sledge a couple times until the platters exploded.

As a financial institution, we were subject to frequent audits, one of which dealt with our data destruction methods. I described our "process" to an auditor once, he laughed and asked what our real process was. Still not believing me, he brought up the same question to one of our VPs. Her straight-faced answer: "Ive seen him out in the parking lot with a sledgehammer a few time, I always wondered what he was using it on."

The next year, they sent a different auditor.