When I moved in to my house four years ago I replaced all of the lights with spiral CFL's. I have yet to have one fail on me. If you purchased a Sylvania or GE most of those bulbs have 3 - 5 year warranties on them. When I had one of those fail I called the company and they sent me a coupon for $20 which was good to buy a new 4 pack of bulbs.

I have talked to several people that own or have owned netbooks. Most of the people don't like them. One person in general got a netbook from there husband. He got it since it was the cheapest thing he could buy. She hates it with a passion, but it does sorta what she wants just slowly. If I had to guess this type of story could be repeated over and over again. It was the cheapest thing so it was purchased even though the person that actually has to use it doesn't like it.

I have a fast metabolism and have trouble keeping weight on. I was way too skinny most of my life, never could gain weight. When I was on Paxil I gained 40 pounds and was actually a few pounds too heavy, but in the three or fours years since I've been off of them I've lost 20 pounds while trying to keep it on.

NASA should be spending most - if not all - of its budget preparing for the Sun's inevitable expansion into a Red Giant.

Everything else is moot if we let that happen.

mmkay, bit of a stretch as an example-- but it seems extremely shortsighted for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to be solely focused on potentially dangerous bodies. We wouldn't have the capability of deflecting asteroids and comets if it wasn't for the technologies we've developed for exploration.

I'm not an Apple fan boy (run Linux on my laptop - even installed Ubuntu on my daughter's laptop), but unless you've used an iphone, you have no idea how useful it is. I gave my wife one last year - but didn't get one for myself because I couldn't stand the idea of forking over another $30/month to AT&T - after all, my wife and I spend most of our time together, so I figured that if I ever feel the need, I could use hers. But during this year, the iphone has become so indispensible, I caved in this July and got a 3GS. You speak of how the iphone doen't have this and that technology of other phones. I had a RAZR and a SE W350 (a music phone) before the iphone. Both had a bunch of features - that I never used because I couldn't be bothered to find them in the endless menu system; they had a browser too - but I couldn't stand the tiny screen and clumsy, unintuitive navigation (I briefly considered the Nokie E71 - even ordered it on Amazon - but when I tried its browser, after having used my wife's iphone for a year, I cringed...cancelled my order and got the iphone). Anyway, the point of the iphone is not the technological features - the point is how easily accessible the features it does have become to use. For instance, show me *any* cell phone that lets me click ONCE to bring up an app that lets me search for anyone in the white pages, type the search criteria (without using some gawd-awful numeric pad), click ONCE on the list entry you want, and click ONCE more to add the name, phone number, street address to your phone's contact list. Show me a phone that then lets you, with a single click, bring that same contact up on a map and with a second click get directions from the current location. The iphone is not a gadget - it's a device that integrates a few core functions better than any other phone (in terms of efficiency of operation) and is made more useful with every application that's added to their app store. Having extolled the iphone's virtues, I must say that I'm really disappointed in the 3.1 update. I just downloaded it last week and, ever since, I've been having more trouble surfing over 3G. Don't know where the trouble lies - seems it might be Safari as I can still effortlessly browse the app store when I'm timing out in Safari. Anyway, the most frustrating part is that there seems to be no easy way to complain to Apple when one of its updates causes these problems. Don't wanna run to some friggin "genius" bar (where, in the past, I've been simply told to "reset the phone" :-(

I have the same card, the 512mb x1800XT, and currently all the games I want to play this card does fine on. I can't justify a newer faster more efficient card until there is a game I want to play it can't max out cause it still does a great job. Maybe SCII will be that game.

Welcome to real life software development. All complex software performs unexpectedly.

Emulation is difficult because hardware specs are often not available and when available do not perfectly describe the actual hardware.

Honestly, I don't recommend "upgrade" installs at all - ever.

Seems to me that something always goes wrong.

I do believer there are utilities out there to help you migrate your stuff over to a Win7 install though... I don't recall - does it create a little partition for your files & settings when it does a clean install? I know Vista did that...

But WHY oh WHY is it not losing them the phone market? I fear a generation gap... Someone failed to teach the value of freedom to their children and they might not lose the market this time.

Well, a phone aka "telephone" may be thought of as a Ventrilo connection with only one other person in the channel with you. The connection quality is generally better than with Ventrilo or Teamspeak as it is accomplished through dedicated hardware that has been designed for maximum reliability within a 64kbps bandwidth.

Of course, being a dedicated hardware solution does limit its flexibility somewhat. For example, the hardware handles analog - digital and digital - analog conversions automatically which limits you to your normal speaking rate for data transfer. There is no limit on how long you can continue o yap.

ebook readers are neat and all but i don't really see the point. they are all seeming to come out with more and more features that make them more appealing (speakers, color screens, wifi)... at that point why not just get a tablet pc and be done with it? at any rate i don't have the time to sit down and read no matter if it was on paper e-reader or standard ebook on pc. for this reason, to me, audio books are king. I get to listen to just about anything i've ever wanted to read every day while i work out at the gym and to and from my daily commute. long live audio books!

There is good article on howstuffworks.com on turbo chargers. The basic principle is to take the exhaust run it through a fan which is then used to push more air into the motor for more power.

http://www.howstuffworks.com/turbo.htm

Ok it's just dumb in today's world to have to display the ticket on your window to show that you paid for your parking. With technology today why not use the license plate of the vehicle. You park, walk up to the box, pay for your car using your license plate. The transaction gets entered into a secure database that the meter police can access. All they need is a small camera to read the license plate, which are already available, and then the system would query the database to verify that the car still has time left on it. If it doesn't then they would get a ticket. Of course if the system screwed up the person that parked there car could take there receipt to the place where the fines are paid and show proof that they paid.