Reminds me of the Henry Ford Museum & Greenfield Village in Michigan. I remember going there on a school trip, and a lot of the light bulbs were originals.. including some of the first ones edison made. They rebuilt Menlo Park there.

http://www.hfmgv.org/

@13 -- beat me to it. Or worse yet, when you look up in a tree and see them there, waiting to jump down on you. Or fall off and reflexively sting you. Whatever it is they do. Friend of mine had that happen while walking to her mailbox. ouch.

one of my friends bought two of these off the clearance shelf at OfficeMax a month or two ago... she keeps her laptop mouse and all the laptop cords in it when she's traveling -- one for her work laptop, one for her personal.

Not sure if she used the mouepad function much though, it's a bluetooth laser mouse, so it doesn't exactly need a mousepad.

Susan Cooper's Dark is Rising series, John Christopher's tripod trilogy, Lloyd Alexander's Prydain series, and John Fitzgerald's Great Brain books... 4 more great reasons to visit the young adult section. At least once. Preferably while shopping for gifts, so paranoid people don't look at you funny for being a man alone in the children's section.

I think I'll stick with Lucid. Price is about the same, it's made by a source respected for fine wines and spirits, and it has a much, much cooler bottle.

www.drinklucid.com

@2 -- Ever see the movie "The Road to Wellville"?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111001/

"Another of the main characters, Will Lightbody, unwittingly becomes addicted to Sears's White Star Liquor Cure. He has a chronically upset stomach, and the tonic his physician prescribes has alcohol as the main ingredient. Will's wife, in a desperate attempt to cure his alcoholism, surreptitiously slips "the cure" into his evening coffee--the active ingredient being opium."

That's love.

@1 -- Lisa, I'd like to buy your rock.

@26 -- from the same country that thinks people die all the time by sleeping in rooms with the fan on. (damn, someone beat me to it)

I can see a better use for plastic bags of water hanging from trees in dry/hot climates... but it'd have to be the kind with super-small holes in it... sort of a basic evaporative cooler. And there are probably better ways to do that than plastic bags.

I can see it keeping birds away though. But the best bet is #61 -- "Goldfish Lynching"

Sell the freakin airport on ebay, get a linksys or senao,use the profit to buy a good directional antenna and a good omni

Kibble -- not in WoW, they're not!

I love people who complain about people who drink bottled water.

Not everyone lives in a city with nicely purified water that has a totally neutral taste. A very large number of people drink water from wells, and they do not have sophisticated filtration equipment. My last home, the water was fine for washing, and even to some degree for cooking, but it had an awful taste when it was cold, from some trace minerals or something. We tried a brita filter, but it didn't help much... so we bought gallons of water for drinking, at something like 30 cents a gallon.

Now, I love my tap water at home, but the stuff at works tastes like it came out of a garden hose, so now and then I buy a bottle of water from the gas station. But most of the time I just drink tea or diet soda. Or bring a litre of water from home.

But if I'm out, and I buy a bottle of water for a buck... so what? I'm paying a premium for cold and convenient. Would these people who complain about bottled water complain identically if I'd bought, say, a bottle of iced tea or lemonade?

The only real violence in WoW is what one is tempted to do to ones guildmates when they're being uncharacteristically incompetent and wasting hours of your time.

WoW can be a very intense experience, certainly, and one followed by satisfaction or frustration (which could lead to one feeling calm or just plain tired).

As for Tetsuo's "casual WoW player usually spends around 10 hours everyday online" comment -- that's absolutely ridiculous. A casual WoW player spends no more than 10-15 hours a *week* playing WoW.

Before the last expansion, I personally ran an endgame raid guild, about as far from casual as you can get. It took a *lot* of time, and even then, I was only playing 6-7 hours a day during the week and maybe 10 hours a day on weekends. Now I'm taking it easy and letting it be a game, not a second job, and I probably average 20-30 hours a week, depending on what I'm doing outside the game and if I end up in extended conversations with people in-game. 10-15 raiding, 2-3 making money while chatting to buddies, and maybe the odd instance now and then.. mostly just chatting with buddies though, using WoW as the chat client. All in all, not too much different than when I used to spend comparable hours in chat rooms and IM conversations, except instead of surfing the web or writing web applications while chatting, I'm running around in circles in Ironforge, or doing daily quests or battlegrounds.

@Adamrice -- Probably syncs with an atomic clock so you can set the watch accurately before you put it on the winder.

And god, I feel like a redneck typing that... hay, bobby-jo, look out the winder, billy-bob's lookin for ya

I studied hypnosis back when i was in college... as mentioned above, that just ain't happening.

Now, if he'd known them all previously and prepared them properly, they might have dropped back in at a cue or something, I never really did anything with that but I know it can be done (I saw a fair number of references to it regarding the use of hypnosis for dental work IIRC).

It's pretty widely accepted that you can't make someone do something they wouldn't do normally, but it's often conveniently left out that that leaves a heck of a lot of wiggle room. One of the more famous cases was when one of the military branches was researching to see if they could make someone shoot a friend... they wouldn't when just told to do so... but after a few days of reinforcement that their friend had been kidnapped by the soviets and this person on base was really a lookalike mole, the trigger was pulled.

I didn't watch to see if she gave him the money or just didn't pay attention, but either one would be a pretty obvious loophole... people get distracted normally, and cashiers hand out money all day... he'd just have to have convinced her that he'd given her a very large bill in need of change, or that he was taking the money over to another till, something that fit in with normal routine, aside from his presence.

And at risk of being wholly off-topic... if you ever run across a copy of the book "Hypnotic Poetry" (extended title -- Hypnotic Poetry: A Study of Trance-Inducing Technique in Certain Poems and Its Literary Significance) by Edward Snyder... read it! It's out of print, fairly rare, but a really fascinating book that gets to the guts, in a way, of how and why some poetry effects people so profoundly, as well as how poetry can be used to induce a hypnotic state in individuals, particularly those who are otherwise less receptive/susceptible.

yeesh. If you could do it with hair, I might just go for it... I look nothing whatsoever like the rest of my family and have always vaguely assumed either a 'switched at birth' or that Dad wasn't exactly "Dad"... it would be good to know the truth even if just for medical reasons. But actually telling my parents that I need a cheek swab to do a DNA test??? perish the thought. They do also have a sibling test, but it's considerably more expensive. Ah well. :)

Yeah Beep, because invasive, unreversable* surgery is *clearly* directly on par with taking a freakin' pill.

Give ME a pill. I'll take the pill. I won't forget the pill. I'll love the pill forever. Or better yet, give me a male version of Norplant, which I don't think has been mentioned yet.

Condoms are great when you're changing partners. After being with someone for a couple of years, you should be able to go without the raincoat... without having to worry about fatherhood.

Poor men my arse.

*yes, there is a 'vasectomy reversal' operation, but it's only 50-70% effective and is extremely expensive, and almost never covered by insurance of any kind.

#27 -- what *would* you do with your mechanical henchmen, then?

It's a smaller world, after all.

My favorite ever... "Your greatest virtue is your modesty"

I have it posted on my office wall as a warning to visitors that I'm utterly lacking in virtue. :)

S - ny pprtnty t xprss slf-rghts ndgntn t th 'vl crprtns' rprssng ppl mst b xrcsd t ts fllst, b t ccrt r n. Fct chckng s lss mprtnt thn gnrtng rspnss. Wt, whn dd strt rdng FxFxNwsNws?

They could fire the whole staff and replace them with ring tailed lemurs and I'd still shop at Circuit City before Best Buy. I've never once gone into a best buy without standing in line for at least 15 minutes because they won't let you check out anywhere except the front, it's constantly understaffed and the people there are busy trying to sell unnecessary extra warranties to schmucks to actually check people out.

Circuit city I can usually just flag down some rep and he'll check me out at the nearest counter, or if they're busy they'll send me to the front of the store where I might have to wait in line 3 or 4 minutes.

Of course, 90% of the time I shop at zipzoomfly/geeks/directron/newegg/cablewholesale, but sometimes you need it *now*

Young Abraham's chief toys are of wood -- a round wooden stake, some two and a half or three inches thick and about three feet long. One end of it is hardened by charring in the fire, and sharpened to a fine point. With this stake he holds a heavy hammer, such as in households is used in the coal cellar for breaking the lumps. To me, a child's preparations for play of any kind are stimulating and bracing, but the effect of these things on both Cory and Xeni was to cause them a sort of consternation. They both, however, kept their courage, and remained silent and quiet.

My apartment complex originally had our connection open for the whole neighborhood, but we got tired of people taking it down using p2p irresponsibly,and unfortunately because of the way the system was set up, blocking them by MAC didn't work.

We finally locked it down and required all the residents who wished to use it to change their network IDs to match their apartment addresses. Anyone not named properly gets IP blocked, and anyone caught using P2P (which only happens if it slows the network down enough that the owner or I notice) gets blocked at least til the owner talks to them and they promise to stop.

Oh, and we use QOS and so on, but that doesn't stop the excessive wireless traffic from taking the router out (though at least with the latest firmware patch it reboots itself instead of just hanging til someone power cycles it).

@#3 -- it's possible if you're willing to group with other people who do your killing for you -- the chap in the OP isn't, except in battlegrounds I suppose, and he doesn't get XP there except by completing the daily quest.

I laughed. I can totally see some friends doing that as a joke to put out on the web.

Adobe's CS3 installer was absolute fail. It took me hours and hours and hours to install the suite, after taking hours and hours to uninstall the 30 day trials.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straight_razor

A mug of suds and a leather strop,
an apron, a towel, a pail and a mop.

RealCatholicMen:

If you're in the US, your bank is working on it. All banks have to implement multifactor authentication, and almost all of those solutions provide mutual identification as well. We just launched ours this week. It was supposed to go live back in July but it had some performance problems in our environment so we had to wait on fixes.

Personally, I like Chase the best. They send a text message to my cel phone with a PIN I have to type in to log in to their site. (they can also email or telephone). To the number I registered with them when I signed up. Which no fake website is going to have.

You left out the bugs :(

You can buy live insects on amazon. 1500 ladybugs for $9.99, nematodes, praying mantis eggs...

I think I'll stick with common sense. Input and output. Consume more than you excrete and your mass increases. Consume less than you excrete and your mass decreases.

I'm sure boingboing has posted about the hacker's diet before.
http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/

Maybe not, Teresa, but this is BoingBoing! A little hypocritical to do that to comments, given the occasional vehemence Cory has displayed about things like that happening elsewhere.

The painting in the post doesn't do much for me overall, but I love the flower growing between the toes, that's a nice touch.

And to #1 - This is nothing compared to the guy who makes clocks out of random stuff.

Cpt. Tim (#4), I'd totally buy one. Someone should send it in to shirt.woot.com :)

Does anyone else find the level of obsession with Harry Potter some people display just a trifle creepy?

If they'd let me trade in my useless Sleeptracker and pay the difference, or even the difference plus something reasonable, I'd give it a shot.. but I'm not dropping another $180 on a company that sold me a $150 watch alarm that never once woke me up.

You can get their site to load? All I get is a maintenance page.

A steampunk unicorn, obviously.

Dr. Who was the best. Only thing I'd bother turning the TV on for.

I used rubber laces on my track shoes back in 1990, and they were an old product then.

I have the original sleep tracker. It's useless... the 'alarm' is so quiet you can barely hear it when you're wide awake, it doesn't vibrate or anything. Maybe they've improved it since then, but that was $150 for a really ugly watch that doesn't do anything for me... and they didn't have the satisfaction guarantee back then.

I'm with Krisjohn. Twain's plan seems perfectly reasonable. It wouldn't prevent the expiration of copyright on the original work, simply make it potentially less desirable.

Translated to the modern world, as soon as the book was off copyright you could download it off the 'net, record audio books of it, etc, printers could print new editions of it if they wished, but the "author's preferred edition" would still probably sell plenty, keeping money flowing to the author.

one $20 Jawbone on the way. Thanks Apple. :)