If you haven't read it, Almost Perfect is a good (free) book about the rise and fall of WordPerfect from the guy that ran the company for quite a while.

In school for a project we needed to use a chip that was only available in QFP packaging. 144 pins, 0.5mm pitch. One of my teammates soldered the chip free hand and checked the connections with a microscope. We had to build two boards and impressively both chips worked perfectly.

Actually this is interesting, the school has clearly established the punishment for doing this. So the easy way to protest this would be get a sizable percentage of the student body to swear on their twitter accounts. What is the school going to do? Expel 30+% of their student body? If they did, it would make national headlines and the people that run that school would become a laughing stock. It would also energize the debate enough where we could finally sort this out. And if they don't expel them, they can't expel this student.

That is kind of what I was thinking. The officers got off very easy, they probably should have been fired. The IAD officers should be disciplined as well for their poor handling of the case. Even if the arresting officer didn't know (which is no excuse) that what Gilk was doing was legal, IAD certainly should have.

There currently are petitions to name the next unnamed planned Ford-class carrier (CVN-80) Enterprise. I personally hope CVN-80 will be named Enterprise.

See: http://ussenterp.epetitions.net/signatures.php?petition_id=1870 and http://www.petitiononline.com/CVN80ENT/petition.html

Except the TSA body scanners... those are very safe. Unlike the food coloring in cola that is cancer in a bottle.

You aren't wrong and I haven't and won't buy their games that have this DRM in it. The problem is they will just blame the low sales on piracy and not on the fact that they are making a bad product people don't want. They just won't get it.

But hey maybe that means they'll get out of the PC games business which maybe wouldn't be a bad thing. They can leave it to people that understand the PC business better.

http://www.despair.com/corruption.html

What is going to happen to the price of electricity when suddenly everyone is charging their cars at home and demand spikes? Gas prices might not be the only thing that will go up in the future. I'm not saying gas is better than electric but all that electricity has to come from some where.

People care more about their money than their freedom.

The controls on the PC in the menus were more sluggish until a few updates ago and they adjusted some of the key bindings to be more in line with typical PC games in terms of navigating the menus. I've also ran into the bug where you can't exit a conversation with someone by pressing tab and have to click on the icon of the tab key in the bottom right of the screen to exit the conversation.

This is one area where Steam is certainly nice since it automatically updates; I just happen to notice the version number keeping going up in the menu and some bugs getting fixed.

While that is true, if a tool continually gets abused by those wielding it maybe it isn't worth having.

Your assuming he tried to assert that right and was denied. The defendant doesn't have to assert that right if they don't want to. For all we know the defense has been getting their ducks in a row and have been using the extra time.

To me the cost per GB of an SSD really makes it tough to justify in a lot of cases especially if you want to store large programs like games where you'll need at least a 100GB SSD. However one area place I have started to use low capacity (8 or 16GB) SSDs are in low noise and/or low power environments. If you team them with an ITX Atom board and the right power supply you can build a small computer with no moving parts whatsoever. And the computer will have a very low power usage for applications like HTPCs or network appliances (like firewalls) where the machine might always be powered on.

The ending showed that the drug/virus spread among humans all over the world, supposedly wiping most of them out. I thought it was kind of silly that they started to play the credits and then showed a scene that hinted at that. It should have been more apart of the last act of the movie, not just an after thought.