Minnesotans will vehemently disagree and tell you Canadians speak like that, then Canadians will turn around and cuss you out in French. Really though, nobody talks like that except old folks of Scandinavian descent and no one else in Minnesota does unless you are an asshole tourist looking to get your ass kicked. As a matter of fact, the actual "accent" or "dialect" we possess, or rather the lack of an accent or dialect, is often emulated by television and movie actors because the quality of our spoken English is the most clear and easily understood in the United States.

If you really want to make fun of Minnesotan speech, try slurring like a drunk. The town I grew up in, population not exceeding 2,000, has about a dozen bars. The town I live in now has about twenty, with over a dozen of those on main street, as well as three liquor stores on main as well, with a population of about 8,500 people. Drinking and driving isn't an issue around here, it's a competitive sport. So basically if you talk like you've had about a case of beer in one sitting, you'll sound like a Minnesotan, or rather, an Iron Ranger. Beyond that, we really don't have any obvious speech deficiencies, permanent effects of prolonged alcohol abuse notwithstanding.

Either way, I'm not so much proud of where I live (I'm really not) as much as I can't stand the ridiculous idea that everyone in Minnesota "speak like dat stupid woman from dat Fargo movie, oh ya doncha know. Uff da!"

You're in a JohnnyCab!

Check out VirtualBox. It's free to download and use, and available for Linux and Mac OS X.

Here's a short list of those that don't have a decent Linux counterpart. These are just from my personal experience.

Exact Audio Copy. Nothing Linux has comes close. Enough said.

iTunes. Rhythmbox has the look and feel, but still won't playback mp3's gaplessly when the necessary metadata is present. It can do gapless with vorbis, but I'm not re-encoding my entire library from scratch to do something iTunes already does, not to mention having files that won't play on common music players. Amarok might have worked out, except when it locks up every time you import your music library, a known limitation the writers have acknowledged but refuse to fix, simply saying their player wasn't meant to handle that many tracks. (it's not a bug, it's a feature!) MPD sounds fantastic, but the limitations of the available frontends and the configuration hassle leave something to be desired.

Dozens of games. Stupid Microsoft and their DirectX... and don't tell me about virtualization and wine, it's either native or GTFO. Games crash enough and lag enough running on Windows without having another layer of configuration and fail to screw it up. I'm more of a console gamer anyway but still...

Abobe Flash Player. It works... sort of... almost... until you fullscreen and it makes Firefox just up and quit. Fail. I'm pretty sure that's Adobe's fault, though.

UPnP/DLNA Server software. There's plenty of software to do this, including mediatomb, mythtv, ushare, and so on. I have yet to find one solution that doesn't cost money that works with my Xbox 360, despite spending days trying every technique I can find to make them work. If I'm going to buy a "binary blob" just to get a service working without having to spend ridiculous amounts of time in the command line and actually have it not work then I'll buy a copy of Windows and get a freeware program that's easy to use and configure. I'm sure I could get it to work under Linux, but why should I have to spend all that time figuring it out when I could be spending it watching stuff on my 360.

I love my Linux Box; it's stable, secure, and fast. There's absolutely nothing wrong with Linux on the desktop, but when Windows can do multimedia without all the bullshit required to make Linux do the same thing and then in some cases have Windows do it better, it's no wonder the only success Linux has seen is on servers and netbooks. Long story short, games and multimedia suck on Linux.

Currently running Ubuntu 9.04, if you wanted to know.

No, it isn't ok. It's total bullshit. In this country, we don't need health care reform or tax reform or patent reform, we need government reform. Nothing less than a well-written amendment to our constitution could ever fix the problem, either. In this country, you should have the right to do anything you damn well please, so long as what you do does not directly harm another or infringe another's right to do whatever the hell they want to do. And it should never be the government's place to decide what you're allowed to do with or put into your body. Furthermore, these rights should never be restricted based on whether or not anyone finds any action taken by anyone offensive or inappropriate, unless said action is meant to directly affect another in a negative or hurtful manner, such as harassment or slander or assault.

My emphasis on the word "directly" here is important; people seem to think that because they don't like something, there ought to be a law to stop it or impede it. That's a load of bullshit, too. If two people of the same sex get married, it has absolutely no effect on you other than if you think it's weird or wrong. If a person uses drugs and fucks up their life, it was their life to fuck up; as for the people they hurt because of their drug abuse, yes, that's something they can be held accountable for and the law should reflect that, just like it does with drinking alcohol and driving. If a person wants to ask you if you found Jesus, that's their right, just like it's your right to tell them to fuck off. And banning and taxing food products or even drugs over health concerns? So long as the consumer knows the risks, it should be their choice. None of these these things directly affect anyone except those who choose to do them, and they only reason there should ever be a law for anything is to ensure no real harm comes to an individual because of another individual's direct action against them.

This country has a lot of issues it needs to resolve and this would by no means fix them all, but it would be a good step in the right direction. Instead of relying on laws to stop something people don't like even if it doesn't affect them, they can just deal with it; it's a free country, or at least it's supposed to be.

Rifles and pistols use cartridges, which consist of a bullet, casing, powder, and a primer.

Guess I won't upgrade if this is what they want to do, or perhaps this would be a good time for a fork... either way, I don't particularly care for the way all this new software keeps getting stripped of conventional features or hides them for the sake of new, flashy interfaces that merely serve as a way to slow everything the hell down. iTunes and Cover Flow, while pretty, are annoying as hell, and Apple's Safari browser got that nasty crap added to it not too long ago, too. And it's all sorts of a pain to disable it. All I know is I hope Firefox doesn't go down the same route.

If that's the case one might argue that you don't need a web browser to tell you where to find a Starbucks. You should be able to see one.

If I had mod points, I'd mod this informative just because I didn't know that. Considering I've subjected myself to the right click menu for that function for well over a year, this information is quite helpful!

Didn't I see something like this on Dragonball Z?

Oh crap, here come the mods with that really big stick again...*ducks for cover*

Contra is unplayable without the Konami Code because it was originally an arcade game designed to eat all of your quarters by being difficult as hell. There's no way to stick more quarters in an NES to get more tries, so the code is the only way to go if you don't have m4d 1337 ski11z.

Funny as this is, I do like my buttons. As far as running and jumping in a video game goes, I'd rather hold down the B button and press the A button as necessary. How would this be accomplished on Natal? My first guess involves the Power Pad for the NES. No thanks, I looked stupid enough doing that when I was eight.

Don't get me wrong, I like motion control; I find the Wii remote to be intuitive and easy to learn and control, but at least it has buttons and triggers. It looks to me as though using Natal would be like shooting a gun without a trigger, or typing on a keyboard without buttons. How can you know for sure you pressed anything without tactile feedback? Without buttons to press, control in a lot of games would become sloppy or unmanageable. Fighting games like Street Fighter are right out, Same for FPS games like Halo, as well. And forget about any type of platformer or action title.

Obviously Natal has the potential to bring a new class of motion control games to the market, but it's not a replacement for a controller for traditional gaming, no matter how impressive it's capabilities are. Nintendo has a better balance in it's control scheme, IMHO, as it has the best of both worlds. It can do a game like Mario or Zelda or Call of Duty where the Natal system would prove more difficult to use, yet also allows for intuitive motion gaming experiences like Wii Sports' and Wii Play's various games.

Of course, I can't see Microsoft actually implementing a control scheme that doesn't involve users spending $40 or more to add additional player capability to their console, not to mention optional rechargeable battery packs and charge cables. Last I checked, Microsoft likes money.

Two words: Character Sheets.

My only maxim in life is to question everything. Do you really think Apple would go out of business by selling their OS to everyone? Is Apple dependent on Mac sales like they were when they first licensed clones? Do you think what was true back when Apple first tried licensing clones is true now? What has changed since then? Does everybody saying the same thing make it true or untrue? Or are those people merely sharing an opinion?

You ask for proof to a hypothesis that hasn't been tested, and assume you have proof to the contrary even though the control conditions are different than before. Jobs himself cited Apple's dependency on computer sales as the undoing of the clone program, and now, courtesy of the iPod, the iPhone, and the iTunes store, that dependency no longer exists. Those facts you cited don't apply to the current scenario; it was Jobs' opinion that it was not possible to succeed in licensing Mac OS, but times have changed and I feel that it would be worth their while to try again. I can't prove whether it would work or not but it looks really good on paper. If you want proof, I guess the only way we'll know for sure is if Apple gives it another shot, so it's really up to them to find out.

At any rate, I'm willing to agree to disagree here. I questioned everything I could, looked into every angle presented, and came to my own conclusion based on reason, logic, and google.com; as I said, I've heard all these arguments before, over the last two years, and it seems no one can offer anything fresh to make me question my opinion on the matter. I think Apple stands to make more money overall licensing Mac OS X for PCs than not and I think not offering Mac OS X for PCs is their way of forcing hardware sales on consumers who want to run Mac OS X instead of Windows, even though Mac OS X sold by itself has a higher profit margin even if offered at an OEM discount, due to the inherent nature of how any software's profit margin increases for each copy sold, and volume sales to PC users and vendors over time would net enough profit to more than make up for any possible loss, if any, incurred in hardware sales as well as increasing their customer base dramatically, creating further sales potential and strengthening the Apple brand as a whole; take it with a grain of salt if you must, but that's just my opinion. You are entitled to have your own.