That's exactly what I was thinking. If they're lower power, couldn't they have have tons of smaller ones that don't look so ugly, mounted on a telephone poll?

Of course then you have to deal with installing and maintaining them all. Plus if a mini tower goes out, it might not affect that many people, and would probably take them forever to fix it.

If I were you and a bachelor I'd probably move, waiting for the fiber to actually become available first. Wouldn't be the first time internet speed was a deciding factor on where I lived. :)

Heh, I stopped slamming my mouse when it stopped working--when mice started having optical sensors and not some rubber roller ball.

I also own 2. But they're relatively cheap--Logitech mx518. They go for around $30 now. I probably end up buying a new one every other year or so, but I use it a lot as I work from home and do some gaming. Either one of the mouse buttons go, or the cord connection gets loose and it'll drop out connection from time to time. Sometimes I contact Logitech and get it replaced, but I'm horrible at keeping sales receipts. Or at least terrible at being able to find them.

And holy crap the G5's are expensive now. Who actually pays $150 for a mouse that's no longer made? I take it the mx518's are still made since they're so cheap.

Well saving it in a lossless format is always going to be a way around any re-compressing artifacts. No "Print Screen" needed. Just load up the jpg in photoshop, do editing and then save as png.

Image sites that wish to deter fake images could force jpeg encoding, or make a jpeg available, maybe going as far as using something like tineye.com does to help find the original and flag the picture if they differ too much.

Nice try at getting fast karma from a first post, but that's not going to work. The screen shot will already be of the compressed image, and will still show signs of re-compressing it.

On the first point, just put up aluminum siding, which seems to work pretty well at blocking signal for most residential homes.

I word of warning, this crashed Chrome 9.0 beta, and killed off my keyboard and mouse. Ctrl-alt-del still worked and the mouse worked only when I was in this screen, so I was able to shut down cleanly.

I've heard of experiments quite a while back where they had people wear specials glasses that flip everything upside down, after a period of time, people got used to it and essentially started seeing everything right side up again. That is until he had the people take the glasses off when everyone started seeing things upside down without the glasses, so it took them a while to get used to normal vision before they started seeing everything right side up again.

Not really any relevance here, but it's very interesting to me. :)

As someone else stated. VNC works just as well even better. If there's a network disruption, you don't want to have to start up the Oracle install from scratch again do you?

I've used Linux for 10 years or more, and tunneling X for me has never been anything more than a novelty. The performance of the program is never going to up to par with running it locally, especially over the internet.

I don't doubt that some people really use X's network transparency. But I'd imagine 99% of the people won't need it, and those that do, won't be running Ubuntu. Ubuntu isn't trying to satisfy everyone, they're just trying to make a solid, easy to use Linux distribution aimed at the majority.

I picked up a 5770 a while ago, nice card and pretty quiet. My first ATI^H^H&^HAMD card actually. I mostly had to upgrade so I could drive this bigger monitor. The deciding factor in my case was what card would work with my current PSU... All NVIDIA cards were power hungry, so it kind of made it a no brainer.

Although there is one rather annoying bug, which admittedly hasn't showed up in quite a while. Every once in a while the mouse cursor would get all corrupted when shown on my secondary display--making it rather difficult to tell where the arrow is supposed to be pointing. Disabling and Re-enabling the the secondary display fixes it, or rebooting does as well.

At any rate, AMD cards definitely give more bang for the buck at the moment. And I'm a sucker for lower power/quieter cards.

In Ohio, it's registered voters. I've been called up 3 times now and I'm only 35. My father in law has never been called up and surprise surprise, he's not registered to vote.

Randomly generated L4D maps would be awesome. The problem with the coop in that game is even with randomly spawning zombies, it still gets pretty predictable as the level format doesn't change, you know where all the hiding spots are, where ammo or guns are likely to be, etc.

The Pirate Bay shut down the trackers awhile ago. From Wikipedia:

On 17 November 2009, The Pirate Bay shut off its tracker service permanently, stating that centralized trackers are no longer needed, since distributed hash tables (DHT), peer exchange (PEX), and magnet links allow peers to find each other and content in a decentralized way.