urgh ... morningness

No sleep at all last night.  I just couldn't seem to find a comfortable position without something or other hurting.

Stupid California tricks:

blackcoat observes that the California state assembly has passed a bill requiring ammunition microstamping, in blissful ignorance — or perhaps denial is a better word — of all the expert testimony stating why it won't work and how trivially easily it can be defeated.  The bill has yet to pass the Senate or be signed by the Governor.  Advocates insist it's a crime control bill, not a gun control bill.  After all, al those other gun er, crime control bills passed in California have clearly worked SO well...

Well, I suppose there's this way to look at it.  Maryland has been the test case to prove conclusively beyond any shadow of doubt that ballistic fingerprinting is an utterly worthless waste of money that hasn't solved a single crime.  Now, California can be the test case to prove conclusively beyond any shadow of doubt that microstamping is an utterly worthless waste of money that won't solve a single crime.

Stupid Microsoft tricks:

This has been niggling at me for a while now.  It's minor, but points out the lack of thought.

The large computer monitors that have become widespread consume significant amounts of power.  (LCD monitors, granted, rather less so.)  For this reason, modern monitors have energy-saving features built in, the most significant of which is screen blanking — when the signal to the monitor hasn't changed in a certain period of time, the monitor shuts off its display to save power, and "wakes up" again as soon as the screen changes.  (This period is typically from five to fifteen minutes.  Sometimes it's configurable, but usually not.)

When you log out of a Windows box, the login screen switches after ten minutes or so to a screen saver that displays a Microsoft splash logo and keeps it constantly moving around the screen every few seconds, just to make sure you can't possibly forget that Microsoft Windows is running on the machine.

. . . Thus, of course, completely defeating the monitor's energy-saving mode.

Update:  Several people pointed out that I neglected to clearly distinguish between the hardware/firmware display timeout (which can sometimes but not always be adjusted) and the software display timeout (which can be configured through the Windows "Power Options" control panel).  Nevertheless, that panel, in my experience, defaults — for desktop machines — to disabling monitor power saving, which is a bad choice of default in probably 99% of cases.  (About the only cases I can think of offhand in which you'd want the monitor to never go into powersaving are security stations, nursing stations, and airport flight-information screens.)

PSA: Don't use this number

Because if you were to make illegal use of the number 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2, that would be, well, illegal, purportedly.  Because it's purportedly illegal to break AACS HD-DVD encryption.