What makes them more attractive is that they don't cost $30 a pop. Having no DRM is a bonus, for sure, but really it comes down to HD movies being a horrible value. Most people outside the slashdot crew don't know what DRM is. Hell, most of them don't even know what a browser is. The bottom line is most people don't want to spend that kind of money on a Blu-ray when you can get two or three DVD's for the same price or just download them for free.

To be fair, every computer I had before my Pentium II box did not come equipped with a hard drive. And actually I only had one compy before that: A Laser 128/ZX. (Apple II clone) Come to think of it, I'm still using the computer desk I had got with the Laser for my current computer setup, sans the upper parts so I can fit current monitors. But I digress; I have older hard disks than my 8GB, but they were from salvaging older computers gifted to me because "you're into computers, right? I'm not using it anymore so..." Still, I think the smallest I have is the 2.1GB in my Thinkpad 380ed.

I only keep them around if they aren't failed or failing. Pretty sure I still have the 8GB from my Pentium II compy somewhere.

It's like an underground revolutionary movement, except selling male enhancement products.

Offtopic for a bad joke, huh. Sucks to be me, I guess.

the PlayStation Network went down?

Number Munchers was awesome. Also, when I learned BASIC and such I created a fake command prompt that gave nothing but syntax errors back to the user, as well as not allowing program breaks. Great for frustrating the hell out of the teacher, but I also implemented it as a kind of password system for some of my disks, as people would steal my work a lot. Of course those people weren't smart enough to bypass it by loading another disk with DOS on it and then swapping mine in to access my files, but if they were they would've done the work themselves anyway.

I think I still have an Apple II clone in storage at my parents' house... though since it's in the basement there's a good chance of water damage, unfortunately.

We were warned it would be this way... soon you will be a SINless mercenary making a living by being Mr. Johnson's bitch.

As far as I'm concerned, gender is not a factor in determining what kind of person you are or what you can or can't do. The only difference between a geek guy and a geek girl is that I would be willing to date a geek girl. Girls are not just for dating, but they are the only type of geek I will date and I'm not going to sit here and feel guilty because I'm attracted to women who are intelligent and share my interests. All I was saying is that it doesn't matter if you're a girl or a guy on the Internet; the only reason gender would even come into play is if there were a possibility of forming an actual relationship IRL. I personally believe is highly unlikely due to factors such as distance (the fact that I live in the middle of nowhere doesn't help in that regard) which is why I feel a person's gender is irrelevant on an Internet forum, for geeks or otherwise.

It's my fault really, I had commented too hastily and failed to properly communicate my thoughts on the subject, making myself look like an ass. My apologies.

Geeky girls may exist on Slashdot or even the rest of the Internet, but it doesn't matter if they're girls because they're almost all too far away IRL to date. Well, they are when you live in Northern Minnesota, anyway.

Minnesotans will vehemently disagree and tell you Canadians speak like that, then Canadians will turn around and cuss you out in French. Really though, nobody talks like that except old folks of Scandinavian descent and no one else in Minnesota does unless you are an asshole tourist looking to get your ass kicked. As a matter of fact, the actual "accent" or "dialect" we possess, or rather the lack of an accent or dialect, is often emulated by television and movie actors because the quality of our spoken English is the most clear and easily understood in the United States.

If you really want to make fun of Minnesotan speech, try slurring like a drunk. The town I grew up in, population not exceeding 2,000, has about a dozen bars. The town I live in now has about twenty, with over a dozen of those on main street, as well as three liquor stores on main as well, with a population of about 8,500 people. Drinking and driving isn't an issue around here, it's a competitive sport. So basically if you talk like you've had about a case of beer in one sitting, you'll sound like a Minnesotan, or rather, an Iron Ranger. Beyond that, we really don't have any obvious speech deficiencies, permanent effects of prolonged alcohol abuse notwithstanding.

Either way, I'm not so much proud of where I live (I'm really not) as much as I can't stand the ridiculous idea that everyone in Minnesota "speak like dat stupid woman from dat Fargo movie, oh ya doncha know. Uff da!"

You're in a JohnnyCab!

Check out VirtualBox. It's free to download and use, and available for Linux and Mac OS X.

Here's a short list of those that don't have a decent Linux counterpart. These are just from my personal experience.

Exact Audio Copy. Nothing Linux has comes close. Enough said.

iTunes. Rhythmbox has the look and feel, but still won't playback mp3's gaplessly when the necessary metadata is present. It can do gapless with vorbis, but I'm not re-encoding my entire library from scratch to do something iTunes already does, not to mention having files that won't play on common music players. Amarok might have worked out, except when it locks up every time you import your music library, a known limitation the writers have acknowledged but refuse to fix, simply saying their player wasn't meant to handle that many tracks. (it's not a bug, it's a feature!) MPD sounds fantastic, but the limitations of the available frontends and the configuration hassle leave something to be desired.

Dozens of games. Stupid Microsoft and their DirectX... and don't tell me about virtualization and wine, it's either native or GTFO. Games crash enough and lag enough running on Windows without having another layer of configuration and fail to screw it up. I'm more of a console gamer anyway but still...

Abobe Flash Player. It works... sort of... almost... until you fullscreen and it makes Firefox just up and quit. Fail. I'm pretty sure that's Adobe's fault, though.

UPnP/DLNA Server software. There's plenty of software to do this, including mediatomb, mythtv, ushare, and so on. I have yet to find one solution that doesn't cost money that works with my Xbox 360, despite spending days trying every technique I can find to make them work. If I'm going to buy a "binary blob" just to get a service working without having to spend ridiculous amounts of time in the command line and actually have it not work then I'll buy a copy of Windows and get a freeware program that's easy to use and configure. I'm sure I could get it to work under Linux, but why should I have to spend all that time figuring it out when I could be spending it watching stuff on my 360.

I love my Linux Box; it's stable, secure, and fast. There's absolutely nothing wrong with Linux on the desktop, but when Windows can do multimedia without all the bullshit required to make Linux do the same thing and then in some cases have Windows do it better, it's no wonder the only success Linux has seen is on servers and netbooks. Long story short, games and multimedia suck on Linux.

Currently running Ubuntu 9.04, if you wanted to know.

No, it isn't ok. It's total bullshit. In this country, we don't need health care reform or tax reform or patent reform, we need government reform. Nothing less than a well-written amendment to our constitution could ever fix the problem, either. In this country, you should have the right to do anything you damn well please, so long as what you do does not directly harm another or infringe another's right to do whatever the hell they want to do. And it should never be the government's place to decide what you're allowed to do with or put into your body. Furthermore, these rights should never be restricted based on whether or not anyone finds any action taken by anyone offensive or inappropriate, unless said action is meant to directly affect another in a negative or hurtful manner, such as harassment or slander or assault.

My emphasis on the word "directly" here is important; people seem to think that because they don't like something, there ought to be a law to stop it or impede it. That's a load of bullshit, too. If two people of the same sex get married, it has absolutely no effect on you other than if you think it's weird or wrong. If a person uses drugs and fucks up their life, it was their life to fuck up; as for the people they hurt because of their drug abuse, yes, that's something they can be held accountable for and the law should reflect that, just like it does with drinking alcohol and driving. If a person wants to ask you if you found Jesus, that's their right, just like it's your right to tell them to fuck off. And banning and taxing food products or even drugs over health concerns? So long as the consumer knows the risks, it should be their choice. None of these these things directly affect anyone except those who choose to do them, and they only reason there should ever be a law for anything is to ensure no real harm comes to an individual because of another individual's direct action against them.

This country has a lot of issues it needs to resolve and this would by no means fix them all, but it would be a good step in the right direction. Instead of relying on laws to stop something people don't like even if it doesn't affect them, they can just deal with it; it's a free country, or at least it's supposed to be.