As Houston grows ever larger, the small cities that were far-flung white-flight 'burbs end up getting surrounded by Houston but remain autonomous. They remain the specks of light in an encroaching ghetto. (Houston has pockets of bohemians and the affluent moving back into the city, especially downtown lofts and near the Texas Medical Center, but those are definitely the exception in my experience.)

Working link?

@34:

No, I'm not implying that rape victims are whiners, but using it to demonize someone for the rest of their born days (as well as anyone else they may live with/be around/associate with, due to narrow-minded guilt by association) or as a crutch to explain all of a victim's failings in life decades after the fact is a little off the deep end for me.

@5: Now, now, we can't have that. That's the humane, non-reactionary way to look at the situation.

What I hate is that the number of crimes listed as sex offenses is growing, and almost all of them have some perpetual, mandatory punishment like registration in a public database as a sex offender. I fully expect that in time that all people convicted, or perhaps even suspected, of crimes will be registered publicly, because surely your debt to society can never be repaid, can it?

(To those who would say that "the victim has to live with what happened the rest of their lives," well... wah. That's life, deal with the hand you're dealt rather than expecting everything in your life to go perfectly.

My puppy had to be put down, daddy didn't love me and they didn't have the color Acura I wanted. I got over all of those, including instances when I was a victim of crime. Roll with it, learn from it and stop living in victim mentality.)

@3: In my experience, it's more like the twenty extra seconds to load a web page. You definitely pay for anonymity with speed and convenience.

Earlier today we discussed using this on folks' machines at my office for haz... er, tortu... er, humor purposes. We decided that since we're in IT one of the first things they'd check was for the presence of something plugged in.

Of course, I figured if we could find a board that had just a single internal USB port then we could always use that. That'd leave them scratching their heads for a while. (We could use a USB header, but I don't know if Dell Optiplexes have connectors on the motherboards for those or not.)

At least the knees of the figures aren't jointed.

How is $110 for that hard drive a good deal? Newegg has Western Digital's WD5000AAJS 500 gig SATA 7200 RPM what have you for $99.99. Even with shipping that's less than $110.

This is good to know. Now when I see someone practicing this trick or the one Zikman mentioned in an attempt to subvert my free will, I'll exercise it instead by leaving an awful tip along with a note why.