It’s a sad day for personal liberty here in the USA. News.com reports that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled against John Gilmore, who was fighting the secret government regulation that the airlines claim requires US citizens to show photo ID cards in order to board domestic flights.
The court apparently believed that [...]

I’m not sure who wrote this originally, but Rich Ries submitted it to Jack Ganssle’s Embedded Muse newsletter. Apparently there must have been some confusion over it, since it mistakenly appeared in the “Joke of the Week” section.
TOP TEN THINGS ENGINEERING SCHOOL DIDN’T TEACH YOU

There are at least 10 types of capacitors.
Theory tells you [...]

A Slashdot story points to a News.com story which states:

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on Tuesday told students at Georgetown University that a wartime president has the lawful authority to eavesdrop on Americans’ telephone calls and e-mail messages without court approval.

Even if that Gonzales’ statement was true (which it isn’t), the United States is not in [...]

Someone on Usenet asked how many code points are possible in 16-bit code with a Hamming distance of 5. This type of problem is relevant to error detection and correction. I conjecture that for a n-bit code (where n ≥= 4) with a Hamming distance of d (where 1 ≤ d < n/2), that for [...]

Yesterday on BBC World Service (one of the few worthwhile channels on XM satellite radio), there was a brief news item about some organization whose name I don’t recall issuing a report stating that economic growth is not an efficient way to combat poverty, as for each pound of growth only 60p goes to ending [...]

I was staying at a friend’s house.  The bed in the guest bedroom was somehow suspended over a big hole in the floor.  The hole was perhaps eight feed in diameter, and was over a big fan.  One had to be careful when getting in and out of bed to avoid falling into the hole.
When [...]

I’ve long enjoyed board games, such as Settler of Catan and Puerto Rico. On my trip to Oregon this past November, Torsten introduced me to two new games, Ticket to Ride and Transamerica, both of which are train games. They’re both quite fun, though currently I’m somewhat more enthusiastic about Ticket to Ride.
Unfortunately, [...]

Some time back I tried to get a Griffin Technology radioSHARK working in Linux, but ran into USB problems. Now Michael Rolig has gotten it to work. Read on for my experience and suggestions.

Steve gave me a nice set of Balancing Koalas, hand made by Tarata in New Zealand. Tarata also makes Balancing Kiwis, Apes, Penguins, and other animals. One of my coworkers said that she thinks they’d be great gifts for children, to which I replied, “and forty-one year olds”.

That one day, we will all be able to work together free of the tyranny of disgusting coffee spills in the kitchen… Of other people’s messes that they failed to clean up for the their fellow compatriots as we barge ahead together on our common corporate mission.

Let us live together in harmony. Let us realize [...]