Next time you want to try switching UPC codes in order to get something at a lower price, try being less obvious, dumbass. No checkout clerk in the world is going to let you buy a $500 TV for $3. If you had instead applied the UPC of a less-expensive TV, or something, you might have gotten away with it. But the price has to be plausible, moron.
On the other hand, stupidity seems to be a selecting factor for criminal behavior, which is just as well.
The Difference Engine comes to life. Babbage's work with mechanical computation machines is ripe for exploitation by science fiction writers. Gibson wrote a lousy novel (The Difference Engine) which was more of a bodice-ripper than science fiction; Charles Sheffield wrote the short story "Georgia On My Mind" which was much better. For all of this, no incarnation of Babbage's "Difference Engine 2" was ever operated before the late 20th century.
Blacks can't be bigots. This story is therefore impossible.
...yeah, right.
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I won't explain how I found it, but I clicked on a link on Jalopnik which led me to another site which took me here, where I got to see topless beach photos of Bille Piper (AKA "Rose Tyler" in the first season of the new Doctor Who series).
Boy, the fanboys of today don't know how good they've got it with this fancy Interweb thing.
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Speaking of Jalopnik, their Engine of the day entry for the Citroen "Type A" engine gave me a thought: that engine would make for a wicked go-kart engine, especially in its latter-day 33 horsepower edition.
Then again, I keep thinking that the complete Escort drivetrain I've got in the garage would also make for some superior go-kartage if I were so inclined. (At that point, though, you've really left "go-kart" territory and are pretty well into the "dune buggy/sand rail" zone.)
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The projected high temp for today is 20 degrees cooler than yesterday's. This may have something to do with the line of thunderstorms which came through last night.
While I was trying to watch Doctor Who.
First the power failed for several seconds--due, I'd wager, to lightning hitting a substation or tranmission line tower or something--and then the satellite box lost signal due to atmospherics. Several times.
Satellite--we have DirecTV--is great...except for those few times per year when the atmosphere is so roiled up that the receiver can't distinguish the 1's from the 0's and you get to look at a text box saying, "Searching for satellite signal..." for several minutes at a time.
As annoying as that was, at least the histrionics were over by the time Battlestar Galactica came on.
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Today I saw, in Pooch Cafe, the most awesome line I've seen in the funny pages for a long time:
"I'm going home to sandblast myself with weapons-grade iodine."