This is very cool. I looked for this when I bought my MBP, but I didn't find the option. A quick google trip and I found that you do it from the Energy Saver preference pane.

Thanks for the tip.

On a tengential note: Is it possible to turn on the screen backlight programmatically?

Since OS X 10.6.3, the backlight remains off when waking up from hibernation (this is documented in [1]). The proposed solution is to delete the related plist, which resets the hibernate mode to the default settings that are useless for me. My current solution is to close back the lid for a split second in order to trigger the hibernation process, then to fiddle with the arrow keys to abort it. I'd prefer something more elegant.

1. https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2384628?start=90&ts...