Antinous,

Sorry, I guess I misused the term without fully thinking about the meaning of "tip pooling."

I was looking for a short way of saying that an employer keeping tips, or any portion thereof, for itself is illegal in California.

http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=lab&group=00001-01000&file=350-356

Tip pooling, which this sounds suspiciously like, is illegal in California.

http://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/faq_tipsandgratutities.htm

"The Legislature expressly declares that the purpose of this
article is to prevent fraud upon the public in connection with the
practice of tipping and declares that this article is passed for a
public reason and can not be contravened by a private agreement."

From Fight Club:
_______________

Narrator: A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.

Business woman on plane: Are there a lot of these kinds of accidents?

Narrator: You wouldn't believe.

Business woman on plane: Which car company do you work for?

Narrator: A major one.

A tiny illusion file I made years ago.
Works best when a browser resizes it, but here it is native.

http://216.92.151.22/images/weblog/inline/TinyIllusion.png

Next will be flowers.

After watching his interview, I couldn't help but wonder what ever happened to Lenny Ross? Sadly, the answer is cliché.

The Early Death of a Bedeviled Genius

Well done Earth Man, well done.

The Passport Application Form doesn't seem to have much on it that wouldn't be easily knowable through other means.

Fields that might be of significance are SSN, travel plans, email address & full name. I wonder if the over-reaction to this story is driven by the whole middle-name fiasco that keeps popping up.

Still reachable here:

http://88.80.13.160/wiki/Wikileaks

Similar to , but quite a bit smaller in operation than Bill Swanberg aka Franklin Duffy, the nefarious Lego Bandit!

(Two of my blog posts on the original Lego Bandit.)

From YSAP#6 - What can brown do for you, man?

Next, candy.

And Monster Cable.

I have a Fenix L2D CE that I bought from fenix-store.com early last year. It is not as bright as the P3D, but it has the benefit of using plain 'ole AA batteries, while the P3D takes lithium 123A photo batteries.

Fenix-Store wants $67.50 (shipping apparently included) for the P3D Premium Q5 with a green anodized finish.

#5 - You're on to something there, but not just about getting their money.

The best source of converts and proponents for every new cause is to raid the "True Believers" of another, preferably failing, organization.

(See: http://www.erichoffer.net/)

A little Oscar Wilde seems appropriate:

"A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing."

Not exactly the same, but somewhat parallel, I can remember hearing "Hawaiian" being used in this sense when I was going to university then law school in Central NY.

I suppose using Canadian there wouldn't work due to confusion with actual Canadians, who were not a rare sight in the Finger Lakes.

I wonder when this practice of having the police suggest legislation to create new crimes began?

If the police get to suggest & craft legislation, does that mean there is a police state?

Maybe we should consider a ban on spending any public monies to have law enforcement officers work on coming up with new laws.

Does ink show up on an MRI?

Does it have the real, original Freeplay mechanical spring energy storage?

Lesser current competitors use a cheesy plastic geared dynamo to directly make electricity for charging. The old Freeplay system had the user crank a spring taught, which then drove a generator based on need, a much tougher system.

I fear this is yet another dynamo radio, a fear that is not countered by the press release.

My bad, there are links on the .gov webpage (linked to from Flickr) that offer HUGE .TIF scans.

Read twice, post once.

I'm a little bummed that the scan resolution is so low.

The photos were primarily shot on 4 x 5 film and likely have hundreds of times more resolution that the Flickr version shows.

Things are looking up over at the Schrute farm.

Having read Halting State, I assume this is a feature and not a bug.

@#24

Not so surprising, really, given what Sam Adams did to wind up on the no fly list.

* Vocally, actively and publicly supported open rebellion against the government.

* Had prominent role in destruction of private property as part of a anti-taxation protest.

* Fringe believer of "Natural Rights".

Following up on having seen this last week.

It works, and it is a sticky way to disrupt popular culture.

I was walking through my local big box discount mass merchandiser last night and saw a poster of this same basic HSM2 ad.

I immediately flashed on the decapitated version, and had a chuckle at how effective a method this was to change the spooks in our heads.

I don't know if they died, or if they simply gone on to being high end home theater enthusiasts.

Thankfully, so far as I know, there is not yet any catchy equivalent to the word "Audiophile" for home theater sound enthusiasts.

Perfect if you want to look like a proto-Cyberman.

The tallest elevator test tower in the U.S. is the Otis' test tower Bristol, CT, though it is only 29 stories/117 meters tall.

I don't have much more to add other than that the Otis tower looks out of place in otherwise fairly flat Bristol.

Daniel Price's Slick: A Novel is a gives a wonderful, albeit fictional peek behind the curtain of VNR's.

From Fight Club:

The things you own end up owning you.

When are they gonna get to the fireworks factory?

Maybe he's thinking of the Taco Bell Canon, as sung by the Michigan Amazin' Blue.

The most bizarre example I ran into of this was in the casino in Halifax, which was at the time in a Sheraton, I think.

In the lobby, just outside the entrance to the casino (you know, the kind with table games & slot machines) you could get a free token for one pull on the arm of a comically over sized slot machine just inside the casino.

Before handing over the special token, however, the chipper desk clerk asked me "What's one plus one?"

Laughing at first, then realizing she was serious, I volunteered the correct answer and was then given a free token to try my hand at the slot machine.

In the casino.

Twenty feet away from where she wasn't allowed to give me a gambling token without it being a "skill contest."

Bizarre.

Forget pedal power, how about a car powered by an engine with a carburetor and an honest-to-goodness distributor?

A device like this become common place, expect truck bombers to simply switch to old technology.

And, for the record, Murilee Martin is a nom de plume of a decidedly non-female Jalopnik author.

My local library didn't have it, but I got a copy to read through inter-library loan.

It was worth the paperwork to get a chance to read the book as a long-ago rabid Blackbird fan, but I think that anyone spending a dollop of dough on this book without having had a chance to see/read it first would likely regret the purchase.

If you're watching so much TV that you need to wear protective clothing then it is time to get off the couch.

Methods relying on always having the last two digits land on a certain number only protect you from fraud not attempted in whole dollar amounts.

DOGGO: I did try to use a <font color="FFFFFF"> to hide the spoiler, but I guess the allowed "HTML tags for style" don't include font color.

I'll put you down as glass-half-full.

Halting State spoiler below

Maybe the thief is really a greedy agent of the Red Team who is simply trying to make a quick euro on the side.

DBAN - Derek's Boot & Nuke is free and it offers all sorts of schemes & multi-pass options.

I used it before parting out and selling off my old laptop.

Eerily remniscent to Rudy Giuliani's comment on freedom:

Freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do.

Wohho

Many water jet cutting systems do in fact suspend an abrasive in the high pressure water stream to improve performance and increase material removal rates.

Many plasma cutters benefit from the use of bottled gas and do not merely use compressed air.

No need for your head to "asplode," though it might benefit from some knowledge expansion.