Doesn't matter, we already know all we need to know from the writeup, and Taco's hilarious ad-hominem attack in the "dept" line. when-script-kiddies-get-kranky dept
Haha this guys just a dumb script kiddy! He compiles for windoze so he must be teh ghey!
It could mean, however, that I write some awesome super-clustering megapackage, or something else really really BIG.
I GPL the code, but set the licensing for the binary at a million bucks or so. I hope to sell one copy to some big boy like IBM, collect my dough, and then they can do with it as they wish.
Once I sold that copy to IBM, they can easily drive me out of "business".
Seems to me that'd be the only way to make money "selling" GPL sourcecode.
Name one thing Apple innovated and didn't steal from another OS/Company?
Such a retarded litmus test.
MS and Apple sell consumer level products. Companies geared towards mass audiences rarely "innovate" or "invent" in the computer world. You want to see "innovation", look at some of the shit defense or aerospace contractors come up with. Brand new devices to act as solutions to recently discovered problems.
The mass market doesn't want an "innovative" PC, they want a faster one with a bigger HDD and better graphics.
Sure, I saw one today that wanted 10+ years of C# experience.
Luckily I have access to that hyperbolic time chamber. It's hard to code in there though, this pointy headed glowing guy is always throwing energy beams at me.
Sure they do, but they aren't allowed to. They call at work, and on Sundays, etc. They do all sorts of sleazy things they aren't allowed to.
It's the typical boiler-room scenario. The kids at the phones have quotas and are coerced into this behaviour. Of course, in court, the manager just claims the employee acted on their own and that wasn't their policy, blah blah..
Anyhow, there are plenty of non-profits your friend can call who will take care of the offenders. All those free credit counselling services out there. You see them advertised all the time. Creditors won't pick fights with these guys. On the contrary, most creditors have a good relationship with these orginizations, because getting some money is better than getting none at all.
Of course, some are legit non-profits set up to help people like your friend, or other regular folks to fix their credit. Many others are thinly-veiled loan brokers who just want to sell you a debt consolidation loan. Rob Peter to pay Paul. They work on comission selling loans, and could give a fuck if you can repay the loan. They belong on the same level of hell as all the home refinancing spammers.
Archos already has 'em. They connect to the PC as a USB drive too, so there's no proprietary OS-specific BS.
I just wanted to mention this now, because in a year or two when Apple releases their video-iPod, the zealots will come out in droves claiming Apple "invented" it and everything else is a rip-off of Apple's design.
Just like they claim Apple invented the mouse, GUI based OS, portable MP3 player, WiFi, the laser printer, LCD monitor, etc..
I never called him pretentious, and I don't find him to be pretentious. And there is an apostrophe in Hallowe'en, I didn't put it "back", it's how the word is spelled.
I just don't find Smiths movies to be all that good, despite all the hype and worship. I never did.
I don't thing Bennifer Damon is/are that great an actor. He's a barely-believable pretty boy in every film.
I don't think Tarantino is all that wonderful either. I admitted I liked Pulp Fiction, but that was about it. Kill Bill was beyond retarded. Even David Carradine should be ashamed of that shit, he should list it after "Kung Fu: The Legend Continues" on his resume.
I love how this cadre of "Hollywood outsiders" are supposedly above all the celebrity ass-kissing and all about the art, and yet look how people react if you don't drop to your knees worshipping them.
I'll take Joey Jeremiah and the Zit Remedy over Jay and Silent Bob any frickin day of the week.
Snake, Wheels, Joey.. The madcap adventures. Remember when they bought that case of beer? (One case for a party with about 50 people at it). Of course, they got busted and learned a valuable lesson.
Or when Joey sold the fake drugs to that chick who then ran around pretending to be high? "Degrassi Grass". Heh, classic. Yick Yew the disorganized. So many good times, and so many well-deserved naps in "social studies" class when they would show us a repeat of last-nights episode.
No wonder Smith is a fan. The stuff was lightyears ahead of anything he's ever done, and was produced on a budget that made Clerks look like a Hollywood blockbuster.
I agree with the poster, and expand it to include Smith's entire body of work.
I know Comedy Central airs Dogma 7 times a day, and I've yet to be able to sit through more than any 5 minutes at a time.
Usually I'll stop when I see George Carlin on the screen while flipping channels, then continue on as soon as it cuts to Damon and Afleck boring the fuck out of me with one of their "witty" conversations.
I thought Mall Rats, Dogma and Jay and Silent Bob strike back were all "sequels" to Clerks.
Kevin Smith is a one-trick pony whos films get less and less impressive each time out.
Clerks wasn't a great movie, IMO, it just sort of struck one of those cult chords. I know a lot of my friends were going on about it like it was genious or something, myself I thought it was just a cheap indy film with a handful of funny moments.
I'd imagine those who were so in love with it 10 years ago feelings have faded somewhat. Kind of like the Star Wars movies. The fans grew up, got too old to give a shit about SW anymore, and the younger kids couldn't give a shit or get into it at all.
I wouldn't call Rocky Horror Picture Show a great movie either, but it's obviously a cult hit with a lot of legs left in it. But going to the show in drag on Hallowe'en and throwing toast at the bride is one thing. Paying 10 bucks to see the 10-year-delayed (cash grab) sequel is another.
I dunno. Smith, Damon and Affleck, these guys are supposed to be so young and hip and scary talented that they're going to take over Hollywood and change cinema forever. I really don't see where all the talent is, myself. Throw Tarantino on that list too. Pulp Fiction was his only flick I can say I really enjoyed watching.
Yes, but as another poster pointed out, this system calls both numbers then conferences them together. So they'd get the ANI from the central server. Which still wouldn't let the kid activate your credit card.
Even if, however, they used CallerID, this kid would be caught about a half hour after you notice the fraud.
This company obviously keeps records of the real numbers on each end, the kid has to pay somehow (aside, do even they verify credit cards to see if you're calling from an approved ship-to address?).
To avoid serious legal troubles, I'm sure they'd have no problems turning these logs over. At most they'd require a subpoena.
It's much easier to just plug a handset into the demarq spot outside your home. Or dig up a section of cable and spice your own extension into it.
The POTS really isn't uber-secure, I'd figure people would take that as a given by now.
Yeah, it's legal. Depends how you use it, of course.
It's illegal to, for instance, impersonate a government official or law enforcement officer. If you spoofed the local PDs number, then identified yourself as a cop, you're comitting a felony. The service really has nothing to do with it, you could be calling from the payphone in the PD's lobby.
Likewise if you use it to make harassing phone calls, etc.
Of course, anyone who used this to do such things would be a true moron, since this company obviously keeps a log of the actual phone numbers at either end, and those records could be easily subpoenad.
Like P2P or handguns, the device/service isn't illegal, but the way it's used may be.
Nah, I don't see it really screwing with Caller ID for the average Joe.
I pseudo-screen my calls sometimes. The phone rings, and I glance at it. I see it's my buddy Dave so I pick up.
Now, some a-hole, lets call him Phil, could "prank" me with this service, and make me think it's dave. Hee hee. I pick up the phone, it's not Dave, "Ha ha phil you're really funny now fuck off". I hang up.
I could see how it could be used to harass someone, but then so could so many other services. And either way, I don't see how it stops the call from being traced. Quite the opposite, this company would have a log of all the calls, and the actual phone numbers on either end. A judge could subpoena that in a harassment or stalking case with no problem.
Now of course, find payphones that can be "called back" (hard to find these days), and access the service through your cell-browser.. Seems like much more work than the venerable flaming bag of dog-shit, though. A lot of hoops to jump through to make nasty phone calls.
Debt collection agencies cant (in the US) hide who they are. They can't hide the purposes for which they call you. Ie; every call you get starts with "any information collected is for the purpose of collecting a debt..."
They can't call you on Sunday, they can't call you at work or after 6PM (IIRC), without your explicit permission.
There's very little a debt agency can do. They have no power, and they can't make you pay. They can only remind you that you owe. They like to sound official and intimidating, because they want to scare you into paying up, and paying all the ridiculous late fees and stuff they assess.
The only way they can make you do anything is through the courts. Once things get that far, you can cut a deal, like paying off the debt but dropping the late fees etc. Because then they compare the late fees to legal fees. Note that by this point your credit report is already boned so you aren't hurting yourself by not bending over for the thugs.
Prediction: the US will be convulsed over the reliability and fairness of its elections procedures every four years for the forseeable future.
I agree, but it has nothing to do with the technology. There was nothing inherently wrong with Florida's system, for instance. Poke a hole in a card next to the guys name. All the shit about hanging chads and the ballot being misleading (people voting for Nader when they meant Gore) was just handwaving and bullshit to delay the process. The voting process was fine for decades until Dumb(R) and Dumber(D) made a big deal out of it. I may have the R and D backwards.
if you care so little about your vote that you can't be bothered to leave the house to cast it... you don't deserve to vote.
Well, the article is about servicemen out on active duty. IMHO, those kids on the front lines in Iraq deserve to voice their opinions on the war and foreign policy more than anyone else. They've actually been there and seen it, and aren't basing their opinions on sensationalistic press conferences and media coverage.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a man on a motorbike
I don't see why they cant cast paper ballots, it's not like we need to wait for them to be shipped back. Official/volunteers could be shipped overseas and count them in a safe location in Qatar, or something like that.
The American public is so MTV-ised we need our results right this second, and not any later.
Each voter is issued a crypto-token, the private part of a public-private key pair. Of course, this cant be tied to a name to preserve anonymity. They vote electronically and all the votes are emailed at once in a big tarball. A hardcopy is printed of each vote (encrypted) in case you want to recount.
They can then verify the individual votes authenticity with the corresponding public keys.
The speed of the electron is not the speed of the signal. Think of a cardboard tube full of ping pong balls. Stick a ball in one end, it pushes a ball out the opposite end.
10 amps of current in a 1mm copper wire has a drift velocity of about 0.024cm/s. Thats how fast the electrons in the wire are moving. The thermal velocity, however, would be somewhere around 100,000 meters/sec. Thats how fast the signal is moving. And it's really close to c/3 (a third the speed of light).
The bound electron whipping around a hydrogen atom is moving pretty damned close to the speed of light.
Sometimes, electrons can move Even faster than light!
Optical computing may or may not be the future. In theory, quantum teleportation and that kind of crap could propogate even faster than a bunch of photons.
Like I said, I'm not looking for Intel to supply me a cooler desktop CPU. Just like I don't expect nVidia to come out with a cooler high-end graphics card.
AMD/Intel sell to the high performance crowd. They sell supercharged V8s that require a helluva radiator to keep them cool. They even handle overclocking fairly well, which would be like bolting a couple NOS bottles into the trunk.
VIA/Transmeta make little hybrid 4 cylinder engines that are good enough to push around a compact sedan, and you could probably run them for months with a dead radiator, cooling them with just the heater core. (Ie; the cars interior heater on full blast).
They're different things. I'm not shocked when I find out that VIAs stuff isn't in the same performance league as the P4, and I'm not shocked when I find out that Intels stuff is much hotter than VIAs. Just like I'm not surprised to find out that a supercharged V8 in an old muscle car runs hotter and sucks more gas than the 4-banger in my mitsubishi go-kart.
Yeah, you are engaged in CPU tribalism/fanboyism, whether you realize it or not. Both chips are pretty much equally "hot". One should use a different yardstick to compare the two.
BTW, this article has the Itanium sucking 130 watts, which is probably where the misinformation came from.
Actually, from the article, the new techniques make for smaller transistors, that use less juice, leak less energy, and work faster. The heat output per-transistor would be much smaller.
Of course, that's not Intels market. Any heat/space saved will be reallocated for new features (extra CPU cores blah blah).
If you want a cool, slow chip, look to VIA or transmeta. If you really want/need a real Intel, look to the Pentium 4 M's.
They aren't made/sold for anything in particular. Just giant foam pads with fabric glued to the top. I've seen em. You could use them as a mouse pad, sit a printer/cpu or something on it to dampen some vibrations (old mouse pads work better than that expensive dynamat crap from auto stores).
They'd make a good blotter too, if you're the type to write with a quill and ink well.
Slashdot Mirror
How do you propose a geek go about staging a coup de corp?
Attain some social skills, go out and play some golf and buy the boss a beer.
Noone wants to work with arrogant anti-social types, management included.
75% of them come straight out of the authors ass. ...even the best new methods only offer 5-35% increases
Doesn't matter, we already know all we need to know from the writeup, and Taco's hilarious ad-hominem attack in the "dept" line. when-script-kiddies-get-kranky dept
Haha this guys just a dumb script kiddy! He compiles for windoze so he must be teh ghey!
Last thing you need to do is hear his side of it.
It could mean, however, that I write some awesome super-clustering megapackage, or something else really really BIG.
I GPL the code, but set the licensing for the binary at a million bucks or so. I hope to sell one copy to some big boy like IBM, collect my dough, and then they can do with it as they wish.
Once I sold that copy to IBM, they can easily drive me out of "business".
Seems to me that'd be the only way to make money "selling" GPL sourcecode.
It doesn't. He can sell it for 1,000,000 if he wants, but he has to supply the source code to anyone who gets the binary.
And whoever gets the source can redistribute it however they see fit. That's what the GPL says.
So, can I download the source for X-chat, disable the 30 day nag, and recompile and redistribute it? If so, he's in line with the GPL, AFAIK.
Yeah well, the same goes for Apple.
Name one thing Apple innovated and didn't steal from another OS/Company?
Such a retarded litmus test.
MS and Apple sell consumer level products. Companies geared towards mass audiences rarely "innovate" or "invent" in the computer world. You want to see "innovation", look at some of the shit defense or aerospace contractors come up with. Brand new devices to act as solutions to recently discovered problems.
The mass market doesn't want an "innovative" PC, they want a faster one with a bigger HDD and better graphics.
Must have, everyone knows Apple is about to invent the handheld video player in the next few years.
No doubt they paid a bundle to license all that tech Apple hasn't invented yet.
Sure, I saw one today that wanted 10+ years of C# experience.
Luckily I have access to that hyperbolic time chamber. It's hard to code in there though, this pointy headed glowing guy is always throwing energy beams at me.
Sure they do, but they aren't allowed to. They call at work, and on Sundays, etc. They do all sorts of sleazy things they aren't allowed to.
It's the typical boiler-room scenario. The kids at the phones have quotas and are coerced into this behaviour. Of course, in court, the manager just claims the employee acted on their own and that wasn't their policy, blah blah..
Anyhow, there are plenty of non-profits your friend can call who will take care of the offenders. All those free credit counselling services out there. You see them advertised all the time. Creditors won't pick fights with these guys. On the contrary, most creditors have a good relationship with these orginizations, because getting some money is better than getting none at all.
Of course, some are legit non-profits set up to help people like your friend, or other regular folks to fix their credit. Many others are thinly-veiled loan brokers who just want to sell you a debt consolidation loan. Rob Peter to pay Paul. They work on comission selling loans, and could give a fuck if you can repay the loan. They belong on the same level of hell as all the home refinancing spammers.
Archos already has 'em. They connect to the PC as a USB drive too, so there's no proprietary OS-specific BS.
I just wanted to mention this now, because in a year or two when Apple releases their video-iPod, the zealots will come out in droves claiming Apple "invented" it and everything else is a rip-off of Apple's design.
Just like they claim Apple invented the mouse, GUI based OS, portable MP3 player, WiFi, the laser printer, LCD monitor, etc..
I never called him pretentious, and I don't find him to be pretentious. And there is an apostrophe in Hallowe'en, I didn't put it "back", it's how the word is spelled.
I just don't find Smiths movies to be all that good, despite all the hype and worship. I never did.
I don't thing Bennifer Damon is/are that great an actor. He's a barely-believable pretty boy in every film.
I don't think Tarantino is all that wonderful either. I admitted I liked Pulp Fiction, but that was about it. Kill Bill was beyond retarded. Even David Carradine should be ashamed of that shit, he should list it after "Kung Fu: The Legend Continues" on his resume.
I love how this cadre of "Hollywood outsiders" are supposedly above all the celebrity ass-kissing and all about the art, and yet look how people react if you don't drop to your knees worshipping them.
I'll take Joey Jeremiah and the Zit Remedy over Jay and Silent Bob any frickin day of the week.
Snake, Wheels, Joey.. The madcap adventures. Remember when they bought that case of beer? (One case for a party with about 50 people at it). Of course, they got busted and learned a valuable lesson.
Or when Joey sold the fake drugs to that chick who then ran around pretending to be high? "Degrassi Grass". Heh, classic. Yick Yew the disorganized. So many good times, and so many well-deserved naps in "social studies" class when they would show us a repeat of last-nights episode.
No wonder Smith is a fan. The stuff was lightyears ahead of anything he's ever done, and was produced on a budget that made Clerks look like a Hollywood blockbuster.
I agree with the poster, and expand it to include Smith's entire body of work.
I know Comedy Central airs Dogma 7 times a day, and I've yet to be able to sit through more than any 5 minutes at a time.
Usually I'll stop when I see George Carlin on the screen while flipping channels, then continue on as soon as it cuts to Damon and Afleck boring the fuck out of me with one of their "witty" conversations.
I thought Mall Rats, Dogma and Jay and Silent Bob strike back were all "sequels" to Clerks.
Kevin Smith is a one-trick pony whos films get less and less impressive each time out.
Clerks wasn't a great movie, IMO, it just sort of struck one of those cult chords. I know a lot of my friends were going on about it like it was genious or something, myself I thought it was just a cheap indy film with a handful of funny moments.
I'd imagine those who were so in love with it 10 years ago feelings have faded somewhat. Kind of like the Star Wars movies. The fans grew up, got too old to give a shit about SW anymore, and the younger kids couldn't give a shit or get into it at all.
I wouldn't call Rocky Horror Picture Show a great movie either, but it's obviously a cult hit with a lot of legs left in it. But going to the show in drag on Hallowe'en and throwing toast at the bride is one thing. Paying 10 bucks to see the 10-year-delayed (cash grab) sequel is another.
I dunno. Smith, Damon and Affleck, these guys are supposed to be so young and hip and scary talented that they're going to take over Hollywood and change cinema forever. I really don't see where all the talent is, myself. Throw Tarantino on that list too. Pulp Fiction was his only flick I can say I really enjoyed watching.
Yes, but as another poster pointed out, this system calls both numbers then conferences them together. So they'd get the ANI from the central server. Which still wouldn't let the kid activate your credit card.
Even if, however, they used CallerID, this kid would be caught about a half hour after you notice the fraud.
This company obviously keeps records of the real numbers on each end, the kid has to pay somehow (aside, do even they verify credit cards to see if you're calling from an approved ship-to address?).
To avoid serious legal troubles, I'm sure they'd have no problems turning these logs over. At most they'd require a subpoena.
It's much easier to just plug a handset into the demarq spot outside your home. Or dig up a section of cable and spice your own extension into it.
The POTS really isn't uber-secure, I'd figure people would take that as a given by now.
Yeah, it's legal. Depends how you use it, of course.
It's illegal to, for instance, impersonate a government official or law enforcement officer. If you spoofed the local PDs number, then identified yourself as a cop, you're comitting a felony. The service really has nothing to do with it, you could be calling from the payphone in the PD's lobby.
Likewise if you use it to make harassing phone calls, etc.
Of course, anyone who used this to do such things would be a true moron, since this company obviously keeps a log of the actual phone numbers at either end, and those records could be easily subpoenad.
Like P2P or handguns, the device/service isn't illegal, but the way it's used may be.
Nah, I don't see it really screwing with Caller ID for the average Joe.
I pseudo-screen my calls sometimes. The phone rings, and I glance at it. I see it's my buddy Dave so I pick up.
Now, some a-hole, lets call him Phil, could "prank" me with this service, and make me think it's dave. Hee hee. I pick up the phone, it's not Dave, "Ha ha phil you're really funny now fuck off". I hang up.
I could see how it could be used to harass someone, but then so could so many other services. And either way, I don't see how it stops the call from being traced. Quite the opposite, this company would have a log of all the calls, and the actual phone numbers on either end. A judge could subpoena that in a harassment or stalking case with no problem.
Now of course, find payphones that can be "called back" (hard to find these days), and access the service through your cell-browser.. Seems like much more work than the venerable flaming bag of dog-shit, though. A lot of hoops to jump through to make nasty phone calls.
Debt collection agencies cant (in the US) hide who they are. They can't hide the purposes for which they call you. Ie; every call you get starts with "any information collected is for the purpose of collecting a debt..."
They can't call you on Sunday, they can't call you at work or after 6PM (IIRC), without your explicit permission.
There's very little a debt agency can do. They have no power, and they can't make you pay. They can only remind you that you owe. They like to sound official and intimidating, because they want to scare you into paying up, and paying all the ridiculous late fees and stuff they assess.
The only way they can make you do anything is through the courts. Once things get that far, you can cut a deal, like paying off the debt but dropping the late fees etc. Because then they compare the late fees to legal fees. Note that by this point your credit report is already boned so you aren't hurting yourself by not bending over for the thugs.
Recounts are easy and verifiable
... you don't deserve to vote.
Tell that to Florida.
Prediction: the US will be convulsed over the reliability and fairness of its elections procedures every four years for the forseeable future.
I agree, but it has nothing to do with the technology. There was nothing inherently wrong with Florida's system, for instance. Poke a hole in a card next to the guys name. All the shit about hanging chads and the ballot being misleading (people voting for Nader when they meant Gore) was just handwaving and bullshit to delay the process. The voting process was fine for decades until Dumb(R) and Dumber(D) made a big deal out of it. I may have the R and D backwards.
if you care so little about your vote that you can't be bothered to leave the house to cast it
Well, the article is about servicemen out on active duty. IMHO, those kids on the front lines in Iraq deserve to voice their opinions on the war and foreign policy more than anyone else. They've actually been there and seen it, and aren't basing their opinions on sensationalistic press conferences and media coverage.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a man on a motorbike
I don't see why they cant cast paper ballots, it's not like we need to wait for them to be shipped back. Official/volunteers could be shipped overseas and count them in a safe location in Qatar, or something like that.
The American public is so MTV-ised we need our results right this second, and not any later.
Each voter is issued a crypto-token, the private part of a public-private key pair. Of course, this cant be tied to a name to preserve anonymity. They vote electronically and all the votes are emailed at once in a big tarball. A hardcopy is printed of each vote (encrypted) in case you want to recount.
They can then verify the individual votes authenticity with the corresponding public keys.
It could be done.
Electrons move at about 3cm/s
The speed of the electron is not the speed of the signal. Think of a cardboard tube full of ping pong balls. Stick a ball in one end, it pushes a ball out the opposite end.
10 amps of current in a 1mm copper wire has a drift velocity of about 0.024cm/s. Thats how fast the electrons in the wire are moving. The thermal velocity, however, would be somewhere around 100,000 meters/sec. Thats how fast the signal is moving. And it's really close to c/3 (a third the speed of light).
The bound electron whipping around a hydrogen atom is moving pretty damned close to the speed of light.
Sometimes, electrons can move Even faster than light!
Optical computing may or may not be the future. In theory, quantum teleportation and that kind of crap could propogate even faster than a bunch of photons.
Like I said, I'm not looking for Intel to supply me a cooler desktop CPU. Just like I don't expect nVidia to come out with a cooler high-end graphics card.
AMD/Intel sell to the high performance crowd. They sell supercharged V8s that require a helluva radiator to keep them cool. They even handle overclocking fairly well, which would be like bolting a couple NOS bottles into the trunk.
VIA/Transmeta make little hybrid 4 cylinder engines that are good enough to push around a compact sedan, and you could probably run them for months with a dead radiator, cooling them with just the heater core. (Ie; the cars interior heater on full blast).
They're different things. I'm not shocked when I find out that VIAs stuff isn't in the same performance league as the P4, and I'm not shocked when I find out that Intels stuff is much hotter than VIAs. Just like I'm not surprised to find out that a supercharged V8 in an old muscle car runs hotter and sucks more gas than the 4-banger in my mitsubishi go-kart.
The 3.6 gig prescott puts out 115 watts
This article puts the 3.2 and 3.4's at about 103 watts.
This article pegs the Athlon 64 at 116 watts.
Yeah, you are engaged in CPU tribalism/fanboyism, whether you realize it or not. Both chips are pretty much equally "hot". One should use a different yardstick to compare the two.
BTW, this article has the Itanium sucking 130 watts, which is probably where the misinformation came from.
Actually, from the article, the new techniques make for smaller transistors, that use less juice, leak less energy, and work faster. The heat output per-transistor would be much smaller.
Of course, that's not Intels market. Any heat/space saved will be reallocated for new features (extra CPU cores blah blah).
If you want a cool, slow chip, look to VIA or transmeta. If you really want/need a real Intel, look to the Pentium 4 M's.
They aren't made/sold for anything in particular. Just giant foam pads with fabric glued to the top. I've seen em. You could use them as a mouse pad, sit a printer/cpu or something on it to dampen some vibrations (old mouse pads work better than that expensive dynamat crap from auto stores).
They'd make a good blotter too, if you're the type to write with a quill and ink well.