In some cases, it's the challenge. In other cases, it's a need - you want to have a mac, but don't have the money to spend on one. Some cases it's a way of sticking it to Apple for not selling hardware that we want to buy (a mid-range tower.) There are a lot of reasons. I wanted to give my wife a unique gift, so I put an intel miniITX into a G4 Cube case... I still wanted her to have a mac so I went that direction. In any case, the point is to have and be able to use OS X. It's almost never about choosing "the best" OS. If that really were the case, we all (Hackintoshers) would have sucked it up and gone out and bought Apple hardware and saved ourselves the trouble.

Not an open one... not really anyway. Smart phone fill this need already. If someone would design an open-platform for Android, I think that would be a winner. Unfortunately, I don't think that's going to happen. There's little incentive for someone to create a handset that is open-hardware

I was going to make the same suggestion. Arduino is an excellent electronics tool to dive in with Students will eat it up.

Thanks, but we don't need any more socialism. Don't get me wrong, I love Doctor Who as much as the next guy, but compulsory payment for a service/product you may or may not use is absurd.

I guess I expected it to look a little less like a High-school textbook drawing of the bonds. The only thing that would make it moreso is if little Cs were set next to each atom.

I have to agree. I bought WCIII hoping it would be Starcraft. It wasn't. It wasn't close. It was dumb. I didn't enjoy playing it... ever. Tragic, isn't it? RPS was a mistake. I think we're largely seeing Blizzard reverse on that decision, otherwise we'd see Starcraft shaping up to be more like WC3 than the original SC.

I feel like I must be in the minority here. I've never had to wait to use one, I've never had problems with one reading my card, or getting what I wanted. FWIW, I don't park a lot in Portland. The meter systems we have seem to work just fine for me. I don't live downtown, or work downtown, so I'm not there real often, but the few times I've had to use the system has been pretty simple. I think the most inconvenient thing was waiting for the printout.

We're re-writing a lot of our comments from last week, aren't we... http://idle.slashdot.org/story/09/07/30/0341206/iPhone-App-Tracks-Sex-Offenders

While whatever you've read may focus on Sports, common roles, etc, I recommend you take the advice to heart. Recognize that basically, you are still the male, and your wife is still the female. Regardless of how much you try to downplay those roles, I have no doubt that at some point you will see them. My wife is very independent, but occasionally she falls into the stereotypical roles that we eschew so much. Likewise, I sometimes fall into the stereotypical male roles that I generally try to avoid. That's because we're human beings and we have natural instincts.

At any rate, while you may not be interested in sports, it doesn't mean that you're immune to neglecting your companion, and that's the important part. Likewise, there are some ways she might neglect you. Make efforts to talk to each other, understand the needs of each other, and make sure you're doing what you can to care for her.

I wish you the best of luck and success in your marriage. Congratulations!

I've been waiting for a serious announcement from a major automaker for a long long time. Where do I sign up?

Owners of Alternative fuel vehicles usually have to pay a fee to the state when they register their vehicles. This is because they don't pay gasoline tax when they fill up. At first I was outraged by this because it felt like AF users were being singled out, generally though, these kinds of fees are a balance.

I recognize and accept that technologies change and become obsolete. There are millions of 8-track cassettes floating around doing nothing. Eventually the same thing with happen to tapes, CDs, and DVDs. That's natural. What I don't find acceptable, is that this sort of argument (if passed into rule or law) would give the RIAA precendent to essentially flip the switch when they found a situation to be not in their favor. If the music won't work forever, how long will it work? Do we get any kind of assurance that if we buy a song we'll be able to listen to it once it's finished transferring?

I disagree. It's not the practice of a free market that leads towards a monopoly. Market forces tend to push the other direction. If something is offered from one person, it's more likely that another person will attempt to compete with the first. Open and honest market produces a better product. If at the end of that there's only one person standing, they're still providing the better product or service, and will continue to do so until someone else takes their place (And that's built-in, if a product is unacceptable, it's inevitable someone will produce a better one to replace it.) We see this everywhere.

Bad monopolies (or simply bad economics) occur when force or deception is used to the advantage of one over the other. The Mortgage troubles, bank failings, and credit difficulties are fueled by poor decisions, ignorance, and in some cases outright lies. The market only fails when the exchange is dishonest or coerced.

Apple holds a significant portion of market of online music sales. They hold this position because they offered the product in a way that the market found acceptable. If the market didn't like it, Apple would have failed or done just as poorly as any of the previous companies that attempted to do the same thing. EA stuck unacceptable DRM on Spore, making it significantly less attractive to a group of buyers. So the game doesn't do as well. That's how markets function. The market chooses to accept or reject a product or service to the consequence of the provider.

The Microsoft doom scenario is misleading. Yes, Microsoft could do something like that, but we also have to keep in mind that MS wants publishers to make games for it's platform. The publisher wants to make games for Xbox. Because there's a mutual point of interest, MS has an incentive to provide a better situation for the game companies, not a more restricted one. If MS was the only console in town, the Monopoly would sooner or later start to be broken down by a competitor because it's a natural consequence of unacceptable market conditions. The original Playstation is a good example. Nintendo ruled the game industry for a long time, but the difficulties in Nintendo approval and frustration among publishers led to companies (such as Square) to abandon Nintendo for the greener pastures of the Playstation.

I remember standing in line behind a woman at the library who was being told by the librarian that she couldn't check out any more books. She had checked out (and still had) at least 100 items from the library. This is pretty awesome though. A few years back I realized that I was not reading enough and I promised myself that I would utilize my public library more. I've gotten out of the habit since I moved back to Oregon. Need to get back into the habit.

Yes, but the fundamental point is that the people (or a person) cannot freely speak regarding a religion (unless presumably, they speak well of it). It's a denial of freedom being done in the name of religion, even if no specific religion is named.