By 'lent once', does Amazon mean that you can lend a book to one other person at a time, or that you can lend it to one other person, once, for each purchase? If the latter, it's not exactly that useful; if the former, I look forward to the websites letting people legally trade ebooks with one another.

You make RSS sound like it's some incredibly complicated enterprise. I use a decent web browser; in the address bar, it displays a little RSS icon if the site I'm visiting has an RSS feed. I click the icon and it subscribes to the feed and tells me, unobtrusively, when new stuff is posted to it. I don't know how I'm supposed to "maintain" it, but I'm pretty sure I've never done it.

If I wanted to use RSS as a way to get general news, it would probably be inadequate. I use RSS to keep track of cool projects or blogs. If they are updated infrequently and if their posts are not immediately spread through the whole of Web 2.0, RSS is a great way of keeping track.

So with this new silent update process, half the time when I start Firefox it'll have to update before I can use it? And this is something that just happens? Mozilla, you should stop worrying about browser cold start time and start worrying about update time. I just want to be able to open a web browser and use the internet; I don't need any more progress bars before I can do so.

Considering that even 1080P HD is 200 lines less than the lower of the old CRT PC gaming resolutions (1600x1200 up to 2043x1536) I would say yes, the LCD was a step backwards in every area except carrying-convenience.

Parts of that story also turn up in "Bare Faced Messiah", the unauthorised biography of L. Ron Hubbard. Scientology tried to ban it, failed miserably, and now you can download it.

Fascinating stuff. Cult leaders are very interesting people.

Exactly. While OpenGL is compatible with 99% of the PC gaming market, it is compatible with 0% of the console market. D3D is compatible with 99% of the PC gaming market, and 30% (very rough estimate) of the console market. Linux and Mac aren't even a blip on the gaming market radar, so why would anybody bother with OpenGL in a marketing sense?

The few that do bother to do it in OpenGL get burned when they want to port it to the console, because instead of a simple re-package job, they have to do 10 times as much work to move to a console. It may not be a massive amount of work, no, but it is more work than necessary. That cuts into your profits. Besides, there will always be less to screw up going D3D to D3D.

Oh, they just released those. They have a 2U box with 4 servers sharing two PSUs now.

PowerEdge C6100 I think. But you're right, I remember looking at HP and the others and they did have them but they weren't the right price for us, as we didn't need density.

Well, I'd be lying if I said I never wondered what it might be like to violate a Scientologist.

... my VCR spit out the tape about 5 minutes in, thus saving me from ever seeing any substantial part of the movie and wanting to claw my own eyes out. That VCR no longer works at all, but I keep him around, just to stop by and say "Thanks" every once in a while.

The Vermont legislators aren't "rushing to this idea of shutting down the power plant." They're voting not to extend the license, thus stopping the plant's operation at the end of its designed lifespan. Entergy wants to run it for another 20 years past that.

I know who isn't getting my next $50.

The US murder rate is awfully hard to break down. It includes areas like the communistic Washington D.C, where pistols have been completely illegal for decades. It also includes Texas and other states, where everyone owns a weapon. Those who are really interested in statistics might want to compare Washington D.C, New York City, Boston, or Maryland to a more gun friendly, western city.

Those of you in Europe who want to lump US crime statistics all together might want to remember that the US is almost as large as Europe. Do you lump crime statistics for Copenhagen together with those for Danzig, or Rome?

http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0210e.asp

Vermont has the least restrictive gun-control law. It recognizes the right of any Vermonter who has not otherwise been prohibited from owning a firearm to carry concealed weapons without a permit or license. Yet Vermont has one of the lowest crime rates in America, ranking 49 out of 50 in all crimes and 47th in murders.

The proponents of gun control do not publish these sort of facts. They cherry pick very select statistics that seem to say what they mean for them to say. The published statistics never go into any meaningful history of the laws, or follow up on them.

*sigh*

Human nature rules here. Even scumbags have some degree of self preservation interest. They are FAR MORE likely to rape, rob, and/or kill a woman they KNOW is unarmed, rather than risk tangling with a woman who MIGHT have a Baretta in her purse. Think about it. The next time you're at a shopping center, try to imagine walking around slapping adults. Target your victims. Do you pick them based on their apparent ability and willingness to fight back?

Criminals do the same.