Fairly daring move on the part of the security guy. Getting your fingers in an RC helicopter's moving main blade is a quick trip to a dozen stitches. Those things are sharp and spin fast.

As a compositional tool, you'd do much better with a midi sequencer with a "random" function. Vastly faster, and about equal geek cred.

As a practice tool... well why not just do your scales chromatically or on the circle of fifths? At least that way you know you got to them all. Eb is a hard key for me, and I'm liable to luck out and never roll it, and so never practice it.

I'm pretty sure it's a reflection of a fellow fisherman. I put an analysis of it up on my blog that demonstrates that.

http://www.danray.net/2008/04/10/whats-in-dicks-glasses

Oh, that's SO great! I started reading Elfquest back in fifth grade, back when it only went through "Kings of the Broken Wheel". Just a couple weeks ago I was wondering if I could get my hands on more, and discovered ALL the series that have come out since I quit paying attention.

I just read through Issue #1, and I swear to God I'm 10 again.

My car and I were once a buzzard vending machine.

I was driving down a back road, when I saw a buzzard dive from high overhead into the tall grass at the side of the road a few yards ahead of my car. A squirrel streaked out from the grass and ran at top speed into the street, where, with no time to react, I dispatched it under my left front tire. In my rear view mirror, I watched the buzzard hop to the middle of the street and chow down on the handily acquired meal.

I felt so used...

It sounds to me like that agreement is intended to curtail screen-scraping software.

My wife is into genealogy (she recently traced one branch of her father's family back to the year 6 AD!) and one of the most prominent sites offering genealogical data is familysearch.com. Each page of family data might contain twenty or so people, and has a link to download the data on those twenty or so people in a format common to desktop genealogy programs. Problem is, in getting back to 6 AD, and exploring the myriad other family branches, she was going to have to download literally tens of thousands of these little files.

Well I opened me up a text editor and wrote a little program--about 40 lines--that does a width-first recursive walk across these pages, downloading that data and accumulating it into one big import file. She can now pull down a couple thousand of these files all in one whack.

Thing is, it's pretty hard on their server. I'm making several hundred requests for pages every second this thing runs. I was a little surprised they didn't have some automated something in place to throttle my connections or cut me off. But they don't. It's entirely possible their traffic is big enough that my hammering is a drop in the bucket, but for a smaller site, several users doing this could crush them.

A site with lots of, say, nutritional data would be easy pray to a screen-scraping program. And it's not just the potential DoS attack that they'd be concerned about. I could very easily open a competing site with data I culled from their pages. And if it's proprietary data that they're licensing, they could be liable if I did that. So, I don't think this license actually solves anything, but I think that's what they were concerned about when they wrote it.

Re enforceability--it would be simple for me to write an Apache module in mod_perl or even a simple PHP script that limits a particular remote host to a certain number of pages per day or month. Piece of cake.

Congrats, Cory--she looks just like you!

I'm trying to imagine what her teenage rebellion will look like. "No, Dad, I WILL buy DRM'ed music files, and you can't stop me! I reject your free culture ideals!"

While the ad is obviously dissection-worthy, I'm not crazy about the "made-up illness quote-marks" around the phrase Restless Leg Syndrome. It's very real. My wife has had it for ten years--she chases bunnies all night long--and it's been at times a very serious disruption in both of our sleep patterns. We own a king-size bed so she can sleep WAY over there and I can sleep WAY over here. Even so, I've been in the guest room more nights than I can count.

That said, we're clear that Requip's side-effects put it out of the running for us. We've found that keeping her iron up with supplements very much cuts down on it, as there's been shown to be a causal link there. By the way, did you know that habitually crunching ice is another common symptom of iron deficiency?

Even if the glass-and-stick arrangement could humanely confine a mouse, they say that you have to release the mouse THREE MILES from your home to prevent it from coming back.

Of course, in my urban environment, I'd probably be safe just releasing it on my neighbor's back porch...

This reminds me... I had a high school English teacher who once noted that the defining characteristic of the Middle Class is good taste.