Please, don't fool yourself into thinking this has ANYTHING to do with market forces at all.
Politics and market forces be firmly intertwingled, matey! Always have been. It isn't news, it's the golden rule -- the guy with the gold makes the rules. Or is it the other way around now? I sort of forget.
I think for short hauls compressed air might be better than electricity. Deakin University just won an award for "the Model T for the 21st" or some such (JFGI).
Their car was a three wheeler with no steering gear. Front wheels are fixed, rear wheel a freewheeling caster, steering by pressure differential in hub-mounted turbines. There's no chemical reaction involved in power transfer -- the sucker doesn't even emit ozone.
Given that many folks prefer air over electric for power tools (myself included) the better & cheaper control over power delivery could leap past the electric hybrid altogether. For long drives you'd still need auxiliary power, the difference being you'd replace engine + generator + battery with engine + compressor + air tank. No battery at all -- no lithium, no nickel, no cadmium, no lead.
If we get his with a virus or exploit, we could be looking at shutting key sysyems of for days while we're cleaned out, at best 8-10 hours while we simply roll back key systems. That means basically sending everyone home until its fixed. That loss of productivity in a few days is more than we'd loose to casual over surfing in a year.
Dude!! Move to a virtual server environment. Switch.vmx files and reboot, rollback the work of a couple of minutes. 20:1 or 40:1 server compression as well, some of our power utility customers really like it. Talk to VMWare, Microsoft, Sun, IBM they've all got good stuff for this now. Talk to your storage vendor / DB vendor about tiered storage if you've got heavy OLTP in the mix. But long rollbacks are *so* last millenium.
Your a solution designer. Have you actually READ HIPAA, SOX, STIG, the federal red flag regulations regarding personal information leaks
Mmm yes, mostly, certainly those that apply down under, and many of those regs are adhered to in our context as well although more as a set of regulatory guidelines, not law. I've developed some well-audited secure systems for major banks, so I'm not totally insensitive to the need for controls in context.
It's just that it's widely considered a rude thing for an employer to be that strict where the law doesn't specifically require it, and people generally know the difference. Mostly enforcement is already handled here on the basis of employees (end users, not just the poor sods in the Admins group) being already personally responsible for their actions. We police the people rather than the systems, even though doing so is harder to do (although in comparison it does seem easier here in Australia than abroad) it's a much more useful target for the effort of control. This may or may not work where you are (I'm sure I'm out of touch with the American business scene by now) but we do have at least the vestiges of a culture of personal responsibility. If we treat employees rudely or with insensitivity they'll walk, and from that point you're stuffed as a company no matter what you do -- word gets around fast here and good people are very willing to switch.
Hard controls are for hard regs. If the work isn't in that basket, then lighten up a bit. The junkyard dog approach doesn't fit well with the people people.
You're evidently in the USA, so I guess your mileage may vary. But I think that in about 20 years of IT in the US and another 20 years of it in Australia, what I said holds true across pretty much the entire scene I've covered (also mostly as a contractor). The harsher the regulation of the IT environment, the more of a filtering effect you have on the quality of people you hold, and you don't get to choose your filtering criteria.
What I'd also like to add is that the attitude I'm taking is the result of watching a long evolution of workplace attitudes in IT and to be quite honest, the approach you're espousing is kind of old hat, and I've seen rather a lot of fashions in hats in 40 years.
In fact, the majority of the good hunters I see are often when I do arenas (or maybe I'm just a bad PvP mage...the more likely situation).
It depends on the spec, and what you do. My 70 hunter generally sucks PvP against a mage because I keep forgetting about ae's and using the snake trap against a real person is kind of an oops. Spec'd beasty, which is really the best for solo work imho but a marksman-spec'd hunter has that silencing shot that tends to make mages very squishy. So the answer is really, it depends on who you meet.
Oh, and solo there's a better way to multi-pull. Send your pet in, let the second mob join in, send the pet to the other mob to grab aggro, wait a tick then hit your multi-shots. Works a treat. Otherwise just set a freeze trap and multi, the guy who isn't on your pet will walk right into it.
A word here to non-WoW players -- the above is jargon, and unashamedly so. I'd like to postulate that (a) jargon is fun, (b) games have in general as much jargon loading as technology, and (c) that as a result, there is not a lot of difference between technology and gaming for most of us.
Note to sociologists on the above. You're probably out of your league here without a bit more research. I suggest starting out as a blond, blood elf paladin. You may not enjoy much of an advantage, but at least you'll look good when you're being ganked. People play trickses they do, my precious.
More likely the tomatoes themselves. Tomatoes are from the same Nightshade family as Belladona. The combination of irritants in strong spices plus the acidity and potential latent toxicity of our old friend Lycopersicon could have turned ordinary foodstuffs into something out of nightmare.
One of the criticisms of mathematics is that mathematicians claim truth and rigour, yet in practise their proofs are often quite sloppy. In other words, most proofs are convincing rather than rigorous.
Hear hear! How many proofs have you seen that are some variation of "Given the total body of known mathematical thought; the proof follows by inspection."? QED.
I'm wondering what category of business you're in that requires those sort of controls. In most places I've seen (I'm a solutions architect, so I tend to get around a bit) productivity is kind of self-adjusting; when you're swamped with work, you tend to focus on that because that makes the work day go by quickly. It's when there's not a lot of work that people tend to fill in the time with less structured pursuits, and a "do not bind the mouths of the kine" approach might be better for morale.
If the work is purely clerical, there are measurements based on load handled that work fairly well. The Procrustean controls you describe seem to indicate a race to the bottom approach to HR; the good, creative types would leave and you'd encounter a quality filtering effect on your human resources, unless you have controls on that (such as might be the case in a military environment).
This is not bad in all cases, I suppose, there are some places (the nursing profession comes to mind) where rigid controls on workplace practices are not only required, but a very good idea. But I wouldn't think that's the norm. My guess is that your field might be a logistics-based practice, possibly military, rather than a project-based practice. Warm or cold?
It's more important some places than others. In the engineering oriented SI where I am fortunate to work atm, the network is good, solid and secure enough, and you can install any software on your laptop you're prepared to not have supported, with the caveat that you're an adult and need to behave. NSFW web sites are banned, and there are definite policies related to dealing with the outside world. These are enforced by a strangely prevalent culture and mood of professionalism and a very good network crew.
On the other hand, if you work for a bank it would be more important for your network to be locked down tighter than a drum, green-screen where necessary. Sometimes you're lucky and you have a network you're comfortable with. Sometimes you need to answer to compliance authorities, and can't.
More generally, I'd warn against being too concerned with "bloat" coming from libraries unless you are specifically targeting resource-constrained environments.
You're right about the sort functions, this was just from an example I remember from the dot-boom.
And I do not wish to offend, and I seriously do not want to position myself as a troll, but isn't this the sort of attitude, accumulated, that resulted in Vista?
I'd like to cite the late Bob Long, one of the heroes of the second-generation computing world and an old friend of mine, a true utter geek and the guy who introduced me to computers at SDS back in the late 60's. Bob was a radio/hardware engineer who moved into computers. Among the things that made him famous (rather locally, I think -- we all knew of him in Los Angeles) was (0) the first infinite-precision arithmetic program that ran on a discrete-transistor machine (SDS 930) which ran in base 2 to base 32 without rounding errors, (1) the LGP-30 programmer who discovered you could save an instruction by throwing two digits at the Flexowriter simultaneously because they would add in the mechanical type box, (2) that if you put an AM radio and moved it to "5.4" and put it on top of the M register in a 930 you could hear the progress of your Fortran compile ("ah yes, it's sorting its symbol table now. I could write a better sort than that" (he subsequently did, and patched the compiler)), (3) who calculated - by hand - 9E81 so he could check his arithmetic program, and did it three times to check his calcs, and (4) that the mean distance a 1953 Buick Roadmaster can travel is 2.5 miles, tumbling, when launched off the steam catapult of the USN Carrier "Onslow" into the wind on an up wave. This post is without new line whitespace in his honour. Ok, maybe he wasn't famous. But I'm hoping he is, a little, now -- I'd be hard pressed to fill in all the [citation needed]'s if I tried to post him in Wikipedia.
Gee, I wish the US had politiicans as interested in privacy and personal freedoms, as Australia does.
Yes, I believe you do. Being a native American who migrated to Australia 25 years ago, I can claim a bit of insight. The thing is, Australian politicians are mostly Australians. This means they mostly understand that being too nosy without cause will result in a cluster of friends explaining all about drop bears when you regain consciousness.
What I do is this: First, I write pseudocode. I indent it properly. Next, I turn the pseudocode into comments. Finally, under each pseudocode-generated comment, I will write the actual code to support it. You might also consider these as a good place to break out a function/method from the main programming logic.
Oh baby, talk to me dirty some more -- the secret is finally out.
Every Australian I've ever talked to seemed to completely hate their ISP.
Not this Australian. I've been with Optus since there was an Optus, and a cable internet customer since they first offered it (I think it was in 1995, because their techs could only handle Windows95 at the time ("never mind, just plug it in I'll look after that bit")). I think I've had maybe an hour's downtime since then, total, maybe one or two outages in that length of time. Basic plan, and we never run out of download cap except when WoW starts a major update P2P patch.
Hmm... back on topic. Is Hollywood behind the NN thing as a way to bollix P2P? Not because of movie downloads so much as to attempt to stuff the computer games industry. Blizzard has 10 million or so active subscribers at (is it $30/mo here? I forget) which works out to over 3 billion dollars per year. 3.6 billion or so of entertainment dollars that don't go toward buying Hollywood "spectaculars"... And Blizzard distributes WoW updates via P2P...
No, it was long before that. Apologies for the long post, but I think it's worth it...
At a now-defunct Silicon Valley firm called "Logisticon" at 2am over a loooong day supporting idiot sysadmins (my attitude has improved since then) and after a few beers at Dennys, the pager started spinning. Several hours later -- and after a near infinite supply of Denny's coffee (yep, a 2am regular there) and after telling the fry-cook computer operator across the country how to read register values from the front panel (Turn the key to the horizontal position -- yes, if you're laying on the floor, you're horizontal, make it look that way) and a long sequence of instructions at that level, we determined that the problem wasn't in the software at all (this was on a brain-dead GA16/440, JumboGA.
But the customer dragged their feet when we said we'd have an engineer on site the next day, even though we insisted it was all under warranty. "You can't land. There's a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico and Miami airport is closed. In fact there's two feet of water in the computer room right now.".
I passed the phone back to the support manager and went home.
Remember at all times that "Listening" isn't the same as "waiting for your chance to speak". You'll get better mileage by laughing at the customer's jokes than telling your own.
Keep your reading up, and buy those books.
Keep a register of absolutely everything anyone asks you to do. Number and date each item. If you don't have access to a help desk-style problem registry then build your own. Make it quick to use. Notepad works. Spreadsheets a little better. BMC Remedy or HP/Mercury Interactive if you're spending someone else's money. Besides being good organisation, it's a serious cover-your-tail survival bonus.
Make your code clear. You want it to be so easy to read and understand that you can debug it over the phone in a new year's eve party if you have to. (Yes, I've had to.)
Comments first -- if you can't explain it in English, you probably don't have a handle on the problem yet. If you're chasing your tail and can't get that loop to work right, throw the code out and re-write it in English. Then try coding it again. Remember that English, your natal firmware, has been debugged over the course of your entire life and is still the highest bandwidth channel to your brain. (If you can write correct English, of course. If you don't, treat it like an essential coding discipline you have to learn.)
Be careful with your code libraries, and avoid bloat. If you're sorting a customer's web shopping basket, consider writing the sort yourself rather than including 200k worth of otherwise unused code. Even the lowly and properly-maligned bubble sort is better than that.
Conversely, never write your own little calendar applet if you can grab the code off the web. Plenty of work out there without requiring everything to be crafted with your own unique style.
Never, ever code when you're tired, you will break something. Caffiene is for the smiley boost during the work shift, doesn't cure the 10th hour stupids.
Disclaimer -- I've been a programmer for nearly 40 years, so I'm probably a stupid old person now. You're allowed to ignore the above (heh heh).
Well that or he finds some new form of entertainment to blame all of society's problems on. As long as someone is listening. Before video games it was rap music. Who knows what's next? Personally I'm hoping it's interpretive dance or community theater.
That's a terrible thing to wish on interpretive dance and community theatre, both legitimate expressions of grass roots arts unencumbered by the RIAA.
Now, if you were talking about piano-accordion street buskers, that would be an entirely different thing...
GMail is brilliant, it's my mail client of choice. On the other hand, it isn't necessarily an acceptable electronic messaging medium in certain broad domains due to serious disclosure and non-repudiation rules laid down by compliance oversight in the financial and government arenas. On the gripping hand, it's possible that the media could take hold of certain public persons whose security nous is... um, rather calculable... causing serious wide spread effect, and it may be better to keep that detail resident inside your firewall.
Slashdot Mirror
Please, don't fool yourself into thinking this has ANYTHING to do with market forces at all.
Politics and market forces be firmly intertwingled, matey! Always have been. It isn't news, it's the golden rule -- the guy with the gold makes the rules. Or is it the other way around now? I sort of forget.
I think for short hauls compressed air might be better than electricity. Deakin University just won an award for "the Model T for the 21st" or some such (JFGI).
Their car was a three wheeler with no steering gear. Front wheels are fixed, rear wheel a freewheeling caster, steering by pressure differential in hub-mounted turbines. There's no chemical reaction involved in power transfer -- the sucker doesn't even emit ozone.
Given that many folks prefer air over electric for power tools (myself included) the better & cheaper control over power delivery could leap past the electric hybrid altogether. For long drives you'd still need auxiliary power, the difference being you'd replace engine + generator + battery with engine + compressor + air tank. No battery at all -- no lithium, no nickel, no cadmium, no lead.
True, but these puppies could conceivably be as disruptive.
If we get his with a virus or exploit, we could be looking at shutting key sysyems of for days while we're cleaned out, at best 8-10 hours while we simply roll back key systems. That means basically sending everyone home until its fixed. That loss of productivity in a few days is more than we'd loose to casual over surfing in a year.
Dude!! Move to a virtual server environment. Switch .vmx files and reboot, rollback the work of a couple of minutes. 20:1 or 40:1 server compression as well, some of our power utility customers really like it. Talk to VMWare, Microsoft, Sun, IBM they've all got good stuff for this now. Talk to your storage vendor / DB vendor about tiered storage if you've got heavy OLTP in the mix. But long rollbacks are *so* last millenium.
Your a solution designer. Have you actually READ HIPAA, SOX, STIG, the federal red flag regulations regarding personal information leaks
Mmm yes, mostly, certainly those that apply down under, and many of those regs are adhered to in our context as well although more as a set of regulatory guidelines, not law. I've developed some well-audited secure systems for major banks, so I'm not totally insensitive to the need for controls in context.
It's just that it's widely considered a rude thing for an employer to be that strict where the law doesn't specifically require it, and people generally know the difference. Mostly enforcement is already handled here on the basis of employees (end users, not just the poor sods in the Admins group) being already personally responsible for their actions. We police the people rather than the systems, even though doing so is harder to do (although in comparison it does seem easier here in Australia than abroad) it's a much more useful target for the effort of control. This may or may not work where you are (I'm sure I'm out of touch with the American business scene by now) but we do have at least the vestiges of a culture of personal responsibility. If we treat employees rudely or with insensitivity they'll walk, and from that point you're stuffed as a company no matter what you do -- word gets around fast here and good people are very willing to switch.
Hard controls are for hard regs. If the work isn't in that basket, then lighten up a bit. The junkyard dog approach doesn't fit well with the people people.
You're evidently in the USA, so I guess your mileage may vary. But I think that in about 20 years of IT in the US and another 20 years of it in Australia, what I said holds true across pretty much the entire scene I've covered (also mostly as a contractor). The harsher the regulation of the IT environment, the more of a filtering effect you have on the quality of people you hold, and you don't get to choose your filtering criteria.
What I'd also like to add is that the attitude I'm taking is the result of watching a long evolution of workplace attitudes in IT and to be quite honest, the approach you're espousing is kind of old hat, and I've seen rather a lot of fashions in hats in 40 years.
I respectfully suggest we should call this a "Shipstone" (obligatory Heinlein reference ("Friday")).
In fact, the majority of the good hunters I see are often when I do arenas (or maybe I'm just a bad PvP mage...the more likely situation).
It depends on the spec, and what you do. My 70 hunter generally sucks PvP against a mage because I keep forgetting about ae's and using the snake trap against a real person is kind of an oops. Spec'd beasty, which is really the best for solo work imho but a marksman-spec'd hunter has that silencing shot that tends to make mages very squishy. So the answer is really, it depends on who you meet.
Oh, and solo there's a better way to multi-pull. Send your pet in, let the second mob join in, send the pet to the other mob to grab aggro, wait a tick then hit your multi-shots. Works a treat. Otherwise just set a freeze trap and multi, the guy who isn't on your pet will walk right into it.
A word here to non-WoW players -- the above is jargon, and unashamedly so. I'd like to postulate that (a) jargon is fun, (b) games have in general as much jargon loading as technology, and (c) that as a result, there is not a lot of difference between technology and gaming for most of us.
Note to sociologists on the above. You're probably out of your league here without a bit more research. I suggest starting out as a blond, blood elf paladin. You may not enjoy much of an advantage, but at least you'll look good when you're being ganked. People play trickses they do, my precious.
This all reminds me of Progress Quest. I think that had to be about the most brilliant parody of RPGs I've ever seen, mocking the tedious filler
I worked hard to level my Demicanadian Battle-Felon up to 50, you insensitive clod!
More likely the tomatoes themselves. Tomatoes are from the same Nightshade family as Belladona. The combination of irritants in strong spices plus the acidity and potential latent toxicity of our old friend Lycopersicon could have turned ordinary foodstuffs into something out of nightmare.
One of the criticisms of mathematics is that mathematicians claim truth and rigour, yet in practise their proofs are often quite sloppy. In other words, most proofs are convincing rather than rigorous.
Hear hear! How many proofs have you seen that are some variation of "Given the total body of known mathematical thought; the proof follows by inspection."? QED.
If the work is purely clerical, there are measurements based on load handled that work fairly well. The Procrustean controls you describe seem to indicate a race to the bottom approach to HR; the good, creative types would leave and you'd encounter a quality filtering effect on your human resources, unless you have controls on that (such as might be the case in a military environment).
This is not bad in all cases, I suppose, there are some places (the nursing profession comes to mind) where rigid controls on workplace practices are not only required, but a very good idea. But I wouldn't think that's the norm. My guess is that your field might be a logistics-based practice, possibly military, rather than a project-based practice. Warm or cold?
On the other hand, if you work for a bank it would be more important for your network to be locked down tighter than a drum, green-screen where necessary. Sometimes you're lucky and you have a network you're comfortable with. Sometimes you need to answer to compliance authorities, and can't.
More generally, I'd warn against being too concerned with "bloat" coming from libraries unless you are specifically targeting resource-constrained environments.
You're right about the sort functions, this was just from an example I remember from the dot-boom.
And I do not wish to offend, and I seriously do not want to position myself as a troll, but isn't this the sort of attitude, accumulated, that resulted in Vista?
It's an example of "wrought irony", which is just like regular irony except it's twisted a bit. But it's not anything like "goldy" or "brassy" at all.
I'd like to cite the late Bob Long, one of the heroes of the second-generation computing world and an old friend of mine, a true utter geek and the guy who introduced me to computers at SDS back in the late 60's. Bob was a radio/hardware engineer who moved into computers. Among the things that made him famous (rather locally, I think -- we all knew of him in Los Angeles) was (0) the first infinite-precision arithmetic program that ran on a discrete-transistor machine (SDS 930) which ran in base 2 to base 32 without rounding errors, (1) the LGP-30 programmer who discovered you could save an instruction by throwing two digits at the Flexowriter simultaneously because they would add in the mechanical type box, (2) that if you put an AM radio and moved it to "5.4" and put it on top of the M register in a 930 you could hear the progress of your Fortran compile ("ah yes, it's sorting its symbol table now. I could write a better sort than that" (he subsequently did, and patched the compiler)), (3) who calculated - by hand - 9E81 so he could check his arithmetic program, and did it three times to check his calcs, and (4) that the mean distance a 1953 Buick Roadmaster can travel is 2.5 miles, tumbling, when launched off the steam catapult of the USN Carrier "Onslow" into the wind on an up wave. This post is without new line whitespace in his honour. Ok, maybe he wasn't famous. But I'm hoping he is, a little, now -- I'd be hard pressed to fill in all the [citation needed]'s if I tried to post him in Wikipedia.
Gee, I wish the US had politiicans as interested in privacy and personal freedoms, as Australia does.
Yes, I believe you do. Being a native American who migrated to Australia 25 years ago, I can claim a bit of insight. The thing is, Australian politicians are mostly Australians. This means they mostly understand that being too nosy without cause will result in a cluster of friends explaining all about drop bears when you regain consciousness.
Our EZ passes are called "eTAGs"
What I do is this: First, I write pseudocode. I indent it properly. Next, I turn the pseudocode into comments. Finally, under each pseudocode-generated comment, I will write the actual code to support it. You might also consider these as a good place to break out a function/method from the main programming logic.
Oh baby, talk to me dirty some more -- the secret is finally out.
That is some seriously good advice, go with it.
The most effective expletives always start with a hard consonant. Think about it.
Every Australian I've ever talked to seemed to completely hate their ISP.
Not this Australian. I've been with Optus since there was an Optus, and a cable internet customer since they first offered it (I think it was in 1995, because their techs could only handle Windows95 at the time ("never mind, just plug it in I'll look after that bit")). I think I've had maybe an hour's downtime since then, total, maybe one or two outages in that length of time. Basic plan, and we never run out of download cap except when WoW starts a major update P2P patch.
Hmm... back on topic. Is Hollywood behind the NN thing as a way to bollix P2P? Not because of movie downloads so much as to attempt to stuff the computer games industry. Blizzard has 10 million or so active subscribers at (is it $30/mo here? I forget) which works out to over 3 billion dollars per year. 3.6 billion or so of entertainment dollars that don't go toward buying Hollywood "spectaculars"... And Blizzard distributes WoW updates via P2P...
Interesting, no?
Wouldn't have been the Millennium would it? :-)
No, it was long before that. Apologies for the long post, but I think it's worth it...
At a now-defunct Silicon Valley firm called "Logisticon" at 2am over a loooong day supporting idiot sysadmins (my attitude has improved since then) and after a few beers at Dennys, the pager started spinning. Several hours later -- and after a near infinite supply of Denny's coffee (yep, a 2am regular there) and after telling the fry-cook computer operator across the country how to read register values from the front panel (Turn the key to the horizontal position -- yes, if you're laying on the floor, you're horizontal, make it look that way) and a long sequence of instructions at that level, we determined that the problem wasn't in the software at all (this was on a brain-dead GA16/440, JumboGA.
But the customer dragged their feet when we said we'd have an engineer on site the next day, even though we insisted it was all under warranty. "You can't land. There's a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico and Miami airport is closed. In fact there's two feet of water in the computer room right now.".
I passed the phone back to the support manager and went home.
I was under the impression that gotos are actually the best way to express certain types of computation
I would think that code that executes the pyro charge of an ejection seat would be a good target for a goto.
Provided the "jettison canopy" code was executed first, of course...
Keep your reading up, and buy those books.
Keep a register of absolutely everything anyone asks you to do. Number and date each item. If you don't have access to a help desk-style problem registry then build your own. Make it quick to use. Notepad works. Spreadsheets a little better. BMC Remedy or HP/Mercury Interactive if you're spending someone else's money. Besides being good organisation, it's a serious cover-your-tail survival bonus.
Make your code clear. You want it to be so easy to read and understand that you can debug it over the phone in a new year's eve party if you have to. (Yes, I've had to.)
Comments first -- if you can't explain it in English, you probably don't have a handle on the problem yet. If you're chasing your tail and can't get that loop to work right, throw the code out and re-write it in English. Then try coding it again. Remember that English, your natal firmware, has been debugged over the course of your entire life and is still the highest bandwidth channel to your brain. (If you can write correct English, of course. If you don't, treat it like an essential coding discipline you have to learn.)
Be careful with your code libraries, and avoid bloat. If you're sorting a customer's web shopping basket, consider writing the sort yourself rather than including 200k worth of otherwise unused code. Even the lowly and properly-maligned bubble sort is better than that.
Conversely, never write your own little calendar applet if you can grab the code off the web. Plenty of work out there without requiring everything to be crafted with your own unique style.
Never, ever code when you're tired, you will break something. Caffiene is for the smiley boost during the work shift, doesn't cure the 10th hour stupids.
Disclaimer -- I've been a programmer for nearly 40 years, so I'm probably a stupid old person now. You're allowed to ignore the above (heh heh).
Well that or he finds some new form of entertainment to blame all of society's problems on. As long as someone is listening. Before video games it was rap music. Who knows what's next? Personally I'm hoping it's interpretive dance or community theater.
That's a terrible thing to wish on interpretive dance and community theatre, both legitimate expressions of grass roots arts unencumbered by the RIAA.
Now, if you were talking about piano-accordion street buskers, that would be an entirely different thing...
Why they have to cool it down again and then wait another X weeks to warm it back again to room temperature. WTF
Um, because matter tends to change dimension with temperature, and thermal shock can break things? Dunno, I could be wrong here.
GMail is brilliant, it's my mail client of choice. On the other hand, it isn't necessarily an acceptable electronic messaging medium in certain broad domains due to serious disclosure and non-repudiation rules laid down by compliance oversight in the financial and government arenas. On the gripping hand, it's possible that the media could take hold of certain public persons whose security nous is ... um, rather calculable... causing serious wide spread effect, and it may be better to keep that detail resident inside your firewall.