Not terribly surprising. Haier is already building refrigerators in South Carolina. China could be the best thing to happen to the southeast in a long time--that's a scary thought.

Companies from other countries have been doing this for decades, too. If you want an American-made car, buy a Toyota--the cars are built in 13 different locations in North America, and the "Japanese" parts are likely to come from, well, there's an Aisin plant just a few miles from here (yes, there are employers other than retail and the Federal penitentary in Marion, Illinois.) My dad has worked for a factory that is a joint venture between Yokohama and Continental Tire.

There are manufacturing jobs here; sadly, what manufacturing is here is to get cheap outsourcing and to cut shipping costs.

Various places I've seen claim that if we were to stop consuming OPEC oil, the American economy would go to the toilet because OPEC members would pull their money out of American banks.

Whether or not that would really happen, I don't know; something, somewhere has to give, though.

Looking forward to my future electric car! Provided we can afford anything other than Burros in America, though. Heh.

You couldn't be more right, Cory. HDCP is such a crock. The notion that only the digital out can do high-def, and that the digital out has to be encrypted, is such a lame attempt to put the genie back in the bottle. People who pirate movies will find a way. I get annoyed at DVDs that have the noskip flags on FBI, Interpol, etc. warnings. Only those who don't use piracy tools (honest customers) have to watch the legal warnings.

This is one of the reasons Blu-Ray will be a hard-sell for a while, too, though afaik early players don't have the anal. hole plugged yet. People who pirate won't care overly much whether or not the video is high-def. People who have decent TVs without an HDMI port, though, might care...

Yeah, the lack of automatic compacting and the use of mbox instead of something sensible are the two main reasons why I don't use TB anymore. I was using mutt for a while and keep meaning to try a ruby client I was reading about (don't remember the name, but it uses filters and a search engine to organize) but mainly I use a local client just to keep a gmail backup.

I'd love for an open-source multi-platform maildir capable program to come about. and as far as keeping messages indexed goes, c'mon, apple already provides a good example of a good use of sqlite.

It's a controlled substance in Illinois. Tell you the truth when that law passed it was the first I'd heard of the plant...oh what a sheltered life I lead. :-(

hawt.

Those are great stuff. Sad that they had to go on to do Saturday Night Fever.

Inconsolata is full of win. If Inconsolata, Courier New, and DejaVu Sans Mono had a fight, Inconsolata would feast upon the entrails of the other two.

Yes, it's designed for print, but at about 14pt it's full of win. Inconsolata and the Vibrant Ink vim colorscheme are my current faves.