And it wasn’t even a Dell or Apple laptop!

This one comes to us directly from Something Awful.

I wonder if HS is going to make these mandatory?

It’s all in that article: http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/452729p-380812c.html

When I first heard of Senator Clinton’s “not germane” amendment, I’ll admit, I thought of some n-th “porkish” rider.
Turns out, Senate Leaders were bothered by the prospect of giving some change money to sick rescue workers.

In the meantime, of course, they’re still giving themselves raises…

Source: Washington Post

Scientists in England have gathered definitive evidence that a kind of cancer in dogs is contagious — a peculiar exception to the age-old medical wisdom that you can’t “catch” cancer.

Although no human cancer is known to spread naturally from person to person, the finding of such a disease in dogs — and emerging evidence that a different contagious cancer is spreading among marsupials in Tasmania — is a reminder, scientists said, that under the rules of evolution, DNA will try anything to perpetuate itself.

Read the WP article for more. Question: how come other cancers do not behave the same way? No-one knows…

ABCNEWS:

“How important are computers in your life? E-mail us!”

IT-wise, school districts are famous for not always employing the brightest minds.

Here is a glaring example.

These people are suing Google because Google’s spiders caught in their net information that had to be out in the open. And said information is names and social security numbers of more than 600 of their students.

Now, to cover for their ineptitude, they decided that attack is the best defense. And boy are they mouthy:

“We have very secure systems here,” Markley said. “There are other private businesses and companies that don’t, so parents should be watching those as well.”

Wow. Balls. Big ones.
I would normally give you guys benefit of a doubt but come on, I’m an engineer so I really cannot do that in this instance.

Excellent music: Danger Mouse + Goodie Mob’s singer (which I didn’t know).
If you have Rhapsody, you can listen directly to this track.
They also have their own website, where you can listen to lower quality streams.

Their latest appearance was at Coachella, but keep an eye on them…

Yup, that’s me. Somewhat.
Roget Ebert posted this list of 102 movies you must see.

As an exercise in futility, here is a -shorter- list of the ones I have seen:

“2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968) Stanley Kubrick
“The 400 Blows” (1959) Francois Truffaut
“8 1/2” (1963) Federico Fellini
“Alien” (1979) Ridley Scott
“Annie Hall” (1977) Woody Allen
“Apocalypse Now” (1979) Francis Ford Coppola*
“The Battleship Potemkin” (1925) Sergei Eisenstein
“The Bicycle Thief” (1949) Vittorio De Sica
“The Big Sleep” (1946) Howard Hawks
“Blade Runner” (1982) Ridley Scott
“Bonnie and Clyde” (1967) Arthur Penn
“Breathless” (1959 Jean-Luc Godard
“Carrie” (1975) Brian DePalma
“Casablanca” (1942) Michael Curtiz
“Children of Paradise” / “Les Enfants du Paradis” (1945) Marcel Carne
“Citizen Kane” (1941) Orson Welles
“A Clockwork Orange” (1971) Stanley Kubrick
“The Day the Earth Stood Still” (1951) Robert Wise
“Dirty Harry” (1971) Don Siegel
“The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” (1972) Luis Bunuel
“Do the Right Thing” (1989) Spike Lee
“La Dolce Vita” (1960) Federico Fellini
“Dr. Strangelove” (1964) Stanley Kubrick
“E.T. — The Extra-Terrestrial” (1982) Steven Spielberg
“Easy Rider” (1969) Dennis Hopper
“The Empire Strikes Back” (1980) Irvin Kershner
“The Exorcist” (1973) William Friedkin
“Fargo” (1995) Joel & Ethan Coen
“Fight Club” (1999) David Fincher
“Frankenstein” (1931) James Whale
“Gone With the Wind” (1939) Victor Fleming
“The Graduate” (1967) Mike Nichols
“Halloween” (1978) John Carpenter
“Jaws” (1975) Steven Spielberg
“Lawrence of Arabia” (1962) David Lean
“M” (1931) Fritz Lang
“Mad Max 2” / “The Road Warrior” (1981) George Miller
“The Maltese Falcon” (1941) John Huston
“The Manchurian Candidate” (1962) John Frankenheimer
“Metropolis” (1926) Fritz Lang
“Modern Times” (1936) Charles Chaplin
“Monty Python and the Holy Grail” (1975) Terry Jones & Terry Gilliam
“Night of the Living Dead” (1968) George Romero
“North by Northwest” (1959) Alfred Hitchcock
“Once Upon a Time in the West” (1968) Sergio Leone
“Pink Flamingos” (1972) John Waters
“Psycho” (1960) Alfred Hitchcock
“Pulp Fiction” (1994) Quentin Tarantino
“Rear Window” (1954) Alfred Hitchcock
“Rebel Without a Cause” (1955) Nicholas Ray
“Schindler’s List” (1993) Steven Spielberg
“The Seven Samurai” (1954) Akira Kurosawa
“Singin’ in the Rain” (1952) Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly
“Some Like It Hot” (1959) Billy Wilder
“A Star Is Born” (1954) George Cukor
“A Streetcar Named Desire” (1951) Elia Kazan
“Taxi Driver” (1976) Martin Scorsese
“Vertigo” (1958) Alfred Hitchcock
“West Side Story” (1961) Jerome Robbins/Robert Wise
“The Wild Bunch” (1969) Sam Peckinpah
“The Wizard of Oz” (1939) Victor Fleming

Well, that’s  61 out of 102. Not so bad.

And the good news is that I can get Netflix, now, I know what to put on my list.

It would be hard to beat this deal: Fry’s, for a limited time, offered this printer for $49 after mail-in rebate.

It’s a dye-sublimation printer, which means that, when it comes to printing photographs, no inkjet comes even close: just like argentic photographs, no pixels are visible. That’s because, technically, there is no space between pixels.

Thus far, I am extremely pleased with the quality of the various prints I’ve made.

It is reasonably fast, about 1 minute/print, and the prints are dry as they come out of the printer. That’s one of these mundane things that it would be foolish to overlook.

Samsung promises that, because of the printing technique used, prints will not fade.

The printer comes with 10 sheets of photo paper and, of course, it doesn’t take more than an hour for the exalted wannabe photograph to go through all of them.

I was happy because I had bought 30 more sheets a few days earlier; I was busy patting myself in the back when I realized that dye sublimation really doesn’t work with inkjet photo paper. I have to buy special paper!

Oh, well, including the ribbon, each photograph costs around c40.

Pros: lab-level quality, photos are immediately dry, good printing speed, the printer is portable, allowing you to organize your own print party wherever you go -as long as there’s an electrical socket available-, bright LCD screen and user-friendly menus, can print from a computer, memory cards, cell phones…
Cons: prints are on the expensive side, printer is more transportable than portable, 2″ LCD screen is a tad smallish

I have gophers.
Well, not myself personally, but my garden does.
Actually, my backyard had gophers. It now has only one left, I believe.
But this one is quite the tough guy. We’ve thrown everything we had at it without results.

Enters The Giant Destroyer. It looks like dynamite but it doesn’t explode. Instead, it releases a gas that is lethal to gophers.

We used to have many gophers. Now, it’s down to that last one, and it’s only a matter of time until I get rid of him too.

So far, TGD has been extremely efficient. It costs about $1 per stick and, in my opinion, you need more than 50 sticks to wage war to gophers on a 10,000 sqft backyard.

So, there: I recommend this product. Of course, do not forget to spray gophers repellent regularly or it will be the same as never having done anything.

That guy is not very bright.
Jerry Taylor, mayor of the city of Tuttle, OK, almost had a heart attack when he saw the CentOS logo on his town’s website.
Now, CentOS is a Linux distro. If the Apache web server is misconfigured, you will see the Apache logo alongside the CentOS logo.
It is OK (no pun intended) not to know that. Not everybody is computer litterate. And it’s still acceptable to make a mistake once.
Buf Jerry did much better than that. He is not computer litterate. He claims to be computer litterate with “22 years of experience”. And he decided that CentOS was “hacking” the city’s web server. A long and angry email exchange between him and CentOS only came to a resolution after a whole day, with Jerry alone accounting for the ‘angry’ part.

It’s quite an amazing story, really. Take a look.