Uh... from a scan downloaded from the internet, printed on one of the many large-format color laserjets scattered around the cube farm? Seriously, who's going to actually buy this thing? The pics are going to be all over the internet within minutes of the issue hitting the stand. Good luck to Playboy in getting enough C&D letters to go around. Those things should be mailed, you know.

And if you'd want to hang it up, it'd be enough to get you escorted to the door by security.

Sorry, but I won't apologize. I tried 64-bit Vista, and it was a disaster for me, but all I use Windows for is gaming. (At the time, I was mainly playing Fallout 3, and it just wouldn't work right.) So I run good, ol' 32-bit XP, SP3. I have two 768 MB video cards, so I know this is really hurting me, but I'm kind of stuck. At least I take advantage of my 8GB of RAM when I'm in Linux, using things like VirtualBox and KVM.

I may try the Win 7 RC to see how it fares with gaming on my machine, just before it expires.

I'm half-tempted to try this hack, but I just know -- without even reading the article -- that it will just lead to a reinstall.

The problem is, the money the employers are paying on the employees behalf will be less than what the employee would pay for health insurance if they got it themselves. Group rates, bargaining power, and all that.

Not if everyone stops doing it at once, and forces the insurance companies to group their rates against the WHOLE POPULATION, and NOT JUST THE COMPANY'S EMPLOYEES. I say that this will REDUCE the total amount paid in premiums.

So the government should just take out (yet another) big loan to foot the bills until the taxes arrive (or not) at the end of the year? And what about all the idiots who can't even plan two weeks ahead with their finances? How are they going to deal with a big fat bill once per year?

Why should our government get away with accounting practices that would land any of its citizens in the poor house? Who said that it gets special treatment? Why can't they run OUR finances like a responsible entity, and save and spend like any of the rest of us?

And, yeah, getting MOST people to pay their entire tax bill all at once is EXACTLY what I'm going for here, because then maybe some people would stop and say, "I'm paying HOW much... for WHO to benefit?" And then maybe we'd get away from such a hand-out mentality in this country that is indisputably going to bankrupt us. Of course, this relies on people paying a FAIR SHARE of income tax, and, as we all should know, 50% of the population DOESN'T PAY IT, which is why I want the payers to see the whole thing, just like anyone who is self-employed or owns their own company does. We'd get a "fair tax" or "flat tax" or "use tax" TOMORROW.

Has anyone heard a SINGLE THING about Social Security lately? I'll wager that's a big, fat NO! We already know that the whole thing is going to be insolvent by 2012. (I guess if the doom-and-gloom enviro's can make arguments based on shifty numbers that get parroted in the press as solid fact, so can I.) And, in the face of this, we've passed TRILLIONS in "stimulus" and "bailout" plans, and now we're even THINKING of federalizing health care? Has the entire government gone mad?!

Uh, wait, I already know the answer to that one.

This, right here, is where your plan falls apart, because unless you're perfectly healthy, you will not be able to get insurance as an individual.

And this is where you missed the point. If people were left to go get insurance, they would shop for quotes from insurance companies who amalgamated their liabilities into different groups EXACTLY like they do with life insurance, car insurance, home (vs. renters) insurance, etc. If you're healthy, you would get a better rate. If you're old and infirm you'd pay more. It's that simple. Note that this is JUST like how young males pay much, MUCH more for car insurance than seniors. I don't hear anyone complaining that we need to "fix" that "problem."

Now, maybe you're right about getting dropped with a problem of some sort, but that's a problem with insurance in general. I'd much rather the government pass a law about not dropping people from health (or car) insurance than see them federalize the whole system.

The answer here is extremely simple, and, thus, will NEVER happen. The only law they should pass is to make it a crime for an employer to offer health care as a benefit. They should force employers to give you the money they were paying on your behalf for health insurance premiums as part of your compensation, and let you go get the insurance you want. Everything will fall out of that. After things settle down, the broken pinkie in the grandparent post will cost the same $200 as a dog's broken leg.

This puts people back in the driver's seat with respect to costs, and they will manage it. Brutally. Health care would be forced to go the "Wal-Mart" route -- big and numerous -- to get people to buy, because, apparently, the ONLY thing that most Americans differentiate on when it comes to buying ANYTHING is price.

The only other thing I see factoring in here is tort reform. When it costs local doctors in my small town $250,000 PER YEAR for malpractice insurance, well, that's driving up the costs pretty badly for everyone. You can bet that vets don't have to deal with this.

While I'm at it, you'd get instant tax reform and governmental accountability if you'd also force employers to give you the money that they are paying the government for your social security, medicare, and other associated taxes, and make you pay your tax bill once at the end of the tax year.

These three things combined with senatorial term limits (boy howdy, I digress!) -- after some time -- would eventually "fix" most of what's wrong in the USA.

Seriously? You're going to compare the level of crazy of someone (allegedly) making a (credible) threat on someone else's life -- perhaps many people's -- and that of someone who spends "too much" time playing a video game? Seriously?

Seems to me that the Mechanical Turk system pre-selects those sharp enough to be in a position to use a computer with internet access. It's not truly random. This tilts the responses in a particular direction. I'm not sure what it means, but to get back to any sort of generalized result, you'd have to now come up with a way to gauge these responders versus the general population, wouldn't you?

Seconded. I used VMware for years and years, but switched over to VirtualBox about a year ago. I, personally, don't see much difference. However, at our small company, we've setup all of our infrastructure on KVM VM's. We have about a dozen. Now, these are all running Gentoo Linux ON Gentoo Linux, but I've played with Windows-based VM's, and it seems to run just as well. Anyway, the point I wanted to add was: try libvirt for managing these VM's. I have found it to be pretty slick.

I've been beta testing it for months. I was having a pretty good time with it. A couple weeks ago, they re-leveled all the classes, and it stopped being any fun for me.

Up until that point, I was getting annoyed at how unavoidable getting killed by snipers was. Now, they have a policy that there should be no one-shot-one-kills in the game, but it seemed like half the time you got sniped, you couldn't get to cover fast enough to avoid the second shot and death. Now that they changed the classes, you WON'T get to cover in time. After you get to middling level (say, 12 - 15), you're going to be playing on servers that have snipers who have several points in "piercing shot," and who have bought the "quick" sniper rifle, and you're going to die in two shots as quick as you can say "bang bang."

I went to the forums to complain about the issue, and the thread got to be several pages long, but I never saw a response to any of the gameplay changes from the devs. If they would have just published their compiled stats, it may have made some sense. But without that, I can't understand it. It seemed that half the people playing Nationals already WERE commandos. They didn't need any more incentive for that.

In the process of actually IMPROVING the sniper, they made the soldier's "grenade spam" almost useless. Yes, I played a soldier almost exclusively, but that didn't bother me as much as the sniper issue. The forums were LIT UP about the GS issue.

Other issues, as have already been brought up: SLOW. You really have to take your time to get used to how slow the game moves. PACKS. You MUST work as a group to really succeed, and it happens JUST as rarely as in other Battlefield games. :-(

Tanks take, like 3 or 4 GOOD shots to kill someone (more like 5 or 6), but can be blown up with just 2 TNT packs. Heck they even take about 4 shots to kill another tank! Person-to-person, you can be killed in about a second, so tanks wind up being... strange.

Planes are almost useless. I hate BF2's planes, because someone who's really good with them can rule the whole server, and there's nothing you can do about it. Don't worry about that in BFH! They're just a big, fat target for small arms fire, which can bring them down in seconds.

One issue no one talks about, but I know everyone is annoyed by: SPAWN POINTS. You can't choose where you spawn. I realize that this is intentional, and I understand this mechanic to keep the action hot at "the line." But when you're working on an award, sometimes you need to spawn at certain points. Maybe that's home base, to get a tank; maybe that's near the center, to capture a flag. The way the game runs (SLOW!), you could spend HALF the time in the level running back to home base to get a vehicle.

Finally, cheaters. Because of the speed and size of the levels in this game, cheaters are even more annoying in BFH than other online games. You just can't get away from them. Maybe PunkBuster is fixing this, but I doubt it. It doesn't keep cheaters out of any other game I play with it! And I see post after post about problems with it. (I know it's been hassling me since I gave up on BFH and tried to play BF2. I keep getting kicked out with some sort of "file corruption" problem. Thanks, guys!) When I get on a server (in any game I play) that has an obvious hacker, I just go somewhere else. There's plenty of options. Well, in BFH, you can't choose your server, and I've gotten dumped back into the same server after leaving. That's doubly annoying.

I've been using Linux on the desktop since early '95. Full time since about '97. For years and years and years, I waited -- sometimes impatiently -- for things like automatic mounting of CD's and USB sticks, and non-crashing (and non-duplicating) sync'ing of my various Palm devices. When they worked; they were great, and you're right. When they weren't working, there was a lot of fooling around with drivers and modules and init scripts and config files. But now all of that stuff works great. (At least for me, but I know I'm pretty hard on OS's, expecting them to be able to 14 things at once while I'm not looking.)

So, yeah, another front end for something like emerge or dpkg or rpm is something that will have problems, but that's how the problems get worked out in open source. I'm all for it. If enough people buy into it, there could be a version that goes on EVERY Linux distro, and figures out how to install the software for that particular platform. Even if all it did was handle that part and provide a slick way to zero in on the best-working applications for the task at hand, it would immediately cause Linux usage to skyrocket.

Look at it this way: when a user first loads up Linux, he asks himself, "Now what do I do?" He doesn't know that "xchat" is an IRC application, nor does he realize that there are DOZENS of alternatives. What about Firefox, Galeon, Epiphany, Opera, Seamonkey, Konqueror, links or lynx? NONE of them even say "browser" in their name. But seeing them in a category of "web browsers," and knowing that Firefox and (say) Konqueror were, by far, the most popular choices would give a newbie a huge leg up in deciding what to use. (Yes these would probably be installed by default. I'm just using this as an obvious example.)

So, please, bring it on, warts and all.

He misread the uptime guarantee. It actually said that they provide 9 5's of service. And they're doing FANTASTIC at maintaining it, too!

Yeah, I just installed the current Ubuntu on some old PIII's I had in my garage. My intention was to sell them as "Facebook machines" for all of $25 in the big, yearly neighborhood garage sale. Unfortunately, it ran as well as I imagine Vista would on those machines, and I gave up hope of selling them. (And I sure wasn't going to put Win98 or 2000 on them!) Now they can just rest as backups for my "servers" that run Gentoo -- with no GUI.

Drat. Came here to say that.

I miss Calvin and Hobbes... (sniff)

I appreciate that. Being as EVERY browser I've tried (including a binary download of Firefox and Opera) is just as flaky as the next, I would think that it was, indeed, something like that. However, Flash is sort of part-and-parcel to the web these days -- along with JavaScript -- like it or not. Removing either is really a non-answer. It needs to work. I can run for months without a crash on either of my Gentoo workstations, so I know that the technology is sound on Linux in general. I'm just frustrated with Ubuntu.