Month: May 2006

Laws Don’t Apply to Bush, According to Bush

Ashley Bischoff3 Comments

The Boston Globe is reporting that Bush has chosen that several hundred laws don’t apply to him, including elements of the USA PATRIOT Act, immigration regulations, and others:

President Bush has quietly claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office, asserting that he has the power to set aside any statute passed by Congress when it conflicts with his interpretation of the Constitution.

Among the laws Bush said he can ignore are military rules and regulations, affirmative-action provisions, requirements that Congress be told about immigration services problems, “whistle-blower” protections for nuclear regulatory officials, and safeguards against political interference in federally funded research.

[…]

Former administration officials contend that just because Bush reserves the right to disobey a law does not mean he is not enforcing it: In many cases, he is simply asserting his belief that a certain requirement encroaches on presidential power. […]

Well, with that out of the way, I’ve come to realize that speed limits are encroaching on my transportation throughput and shouldn’t apply to me. Oh, and FICA taxes are encroaching on my ability to frivolously purchase Take 5 bars for the periodic afternoon snack. Whew — who knew the law was so flexible?

Memorex’s Useless FlashDisc USB Drives

Ashley Bischoff2 Comments

I was reading through EverythingUSB when I came across a news item on the introduction of the FlashDisc from Memorex. Flash drives can be handy little devices, but these FlashDiscs come in capacities of 16 MB or up to 32 MB. The non-usefulness of of a flash drive that small was well summarized by the blurb on EverythingUSB:

If you are not excited by the prospect of a flash based USB drive sporting 32 MB of data storage, then you are like me and actually expect a flash drive to hold some data. 32 MB?! That's like spending $3 to buy the winning lotto ticket and then finding out the jackpot was only $5. […]

I've been pondering buying a flash drive — I’d probably buy a Lexar JumpDrive Mercury if they were selling them yet — but I’m not sure what good a 32 MB drive would be. (At that size, the files would be small enough to transfer quickly of ftp, eh?)

Thermal Grease May Help Toasty MacBook Pros

Ashley Bischoff1 Comment

Lucky enough to have a MacBook Pro, but it’s running hot for you? ZDNet reports on a thread from the Awful forums conjecturing that a poor application of thermal grease may be the culprit.

A post by Interrupting Moss on the Something Awful forums mentions that “it just takes a slight misapplication of thermal grease on a MacBook Pro to make the temperatures skyrocket.”

The amazing part is that if true, Apple techs are assembling MacBook Pros with too much thermal paste because the MBP service manual tells them to! According to MacBook Pro service manual “0.2-0.3cc” of thermal grease should be applied to all three chip mating surfaces. Interrupting Moss however, states that reapplying thermal grease "properly" dropped the running temperature of his MBP by 14 degrees Celsius. […]

At times I’m sad that I only have a PowerBook/G4, but nuggets like this make me feel a little better about waiting for the MacBook Pro “rev 2”.