Actually I would disagree, I live in the UK and our TV sucks compared to American telly.

America produces a lot of television and most of it is rubbish, but the best stuff is head and shoulders above anything else produced in the rest of world. In america they spend much more on their top shows, spend more on writing, production and talent.

House, Sopranos, Dexter, The daily show, 30 Rock, these may just be my personal favorite shows but we have nothing that compares to them here. British telly is probably more dominated by reality tv than in America, even the stuff that gets lauded like the BBC's reinvention of Doctor Who means very little to me.

The only thing the British are still good at (and basically always have been) is documentaries, we have a lot of good factual programming.
 

everything is relative, your talented employee is somebody else's sociopathic sleaze bag.

I would hire him, its a dog eat dog world out there.

tl;dr

I always thought the new doctor who shows were lame, and I loved doctor who when I was little. They have actually managed to dumb it down, an achievement because it was never that highbrow to begin with.

Bravo

Of course in this case my brother did have the windows install cd, so the easiest thing was just to do a clean install.

I don't enjoy being tech support, whether its for complete strangers or friend and fmaily, I wouldn't install ubuntu for my brother because I know that I am the one he would call when he can't do something.

Apart from the above your completely spot on though.

A billing program I maintain failed to run today, I won't figure out why until tomorrow when I go back to work. Its no big deal but probably not a coinky-dink that it failed on new years day.

I know this is a joke but I will bite anyway.

I wished I had brought a ubuntu cd with me so that I could have used the live cd to get net access and figure out how to fix the windows install.

Your turn.

Yep, got called round to my brothers house to fix his computer cos it had this stuff on it.

I don't know exactly what it was supposed to be doing, the computer would boot up into winxp and then just freeze. Safe mode worked but safe mode with networking did not, so I guess it was calling home somewhere (thinking about it now I should have just unplugged the network cable to see if that stopped the computer freezing).

Anyways I didn't have any stuff with me and without net access I decided the path of least resistance was to reinstall windows (my brother did not have anything he wanted to keep).

I should have brought round a ubuntu live cd with me.

I don't have a credit card, actually I feel pretty good about that.

hmmm, why not have a small fat32 partition on the drive with the drivers necessary to install the relevant filesystem drivers for various OS's, you could have it autorun where the OS supports it.
 

But think about how often Nvidia update their drivers, you would have to flash the rom chip everytime.

this perhaps...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna

I doubt its $2700 in the US, even though recently the pound has been strong (not right now tho) the dollar has always had more buying power (google for "rip off britain").

And I spent about £800 on my desktop a couple of years ago and it still plays the latest games, it was more of a comment of technology depreciation than anything to do specifically with mac books (other than you can get a really powerful one if you want to).

once again macs seem to be innovating, the dual gpu thing where you have a low power one for run of the mill 2d stuff and high power one for the apps that need it are a good example (i believe this is appearing in pc laptops as well).

my friend just got a shiny new £1800 mac book pro, its faster and has more ram than my main desktop machine, makes me feel sick (that windows xp 32 bit can only address 3.25 GB of ram doesn't help either).