My mother had to get a new machine this past weekend, all they had in stock came with Win8. I was dreading it the entire way back from the store, and while I was removing her old box and connecting up the new box, due to my experiences with the Win8 preview. Looked and acted pretty much like the preview did to me, but surprisingly, my mother liked it. I heard a lot more "oh wow"s than I did "oh no"s.

If Mechwarrior Online is anything to go by (it uses the Crysis 3 engine), the min-specs aren't going to play the game very well. Dual-core machines end up having both cores hammered, and FPS drops into the singles when up close and personal with more than one other Mech. My machine is about midway between the min-specs and the recommended for MWO, which looks like they took the min-specs straight from Crysis 3, and it plays alright, but not great. It could be due to some of the code the MWO team has bolted on, but I'd say it's a pretty good indicator that the min-specs are more wishful thinking.

I used to work at a competitor to Snapfish, writing the software to manage and send jobs to the production floor and machines, so I'm familiar with the business. Using any of the web-based or brick-n-mortar stores with an actual photo-development machine is going to be a much better option than printing them out yourself. It takes longer to get your prints, but it will be cheaper and the quality is much better than anything you can do yourself. Unless you happen to have a Fuji Frontier, or other industrial photo-developer, in your basement. A true photo-development machine, like a Frontier, is going to produce better colors (if it's calibrated correctly) and longer lasting prints than either dye sublimation or ink jet printers.

Dye sublimation or ink jet printers are nice if you want a quick print, but for bulk prints or prints that you want to last, order online or drive to the drug store.

Also, a quick note, we used to compare our quality of prints to other competitors. Snapfish was alright and their quality was usually consistent. But that was over seven years ago, and everyone's quality would drift a bit over time. I'd order some test prints from a few places before placing a large bulk order.

"Don't fight it son. Confess quickly! If you hold out too long you could jeopardize your credit rating."
- Guard, from the movie Brazil

I've worked for an ISP and recall the FBI asking for information, logs, and any records we had on one customer. I did not see the request or any legal documents presented by the FBI, so I don't know if they contain information about the reason for the request. However, it was only minutes between when the request was fulfilled to when everyone knew why the FBI made the request. So, if the FBI didn't explicitly state why they were making the request, it doesn't take long for a sysadmin to see a pattern in the information being handed to the FBI.

I can see how it would appear that way, given how lopsided the official numbers (from both sides) are.

Can't argue against that, George Lucas changes things around quite a bit. However, when you consider the age of the SW Universe (within the universe, not how long it's been around), the numbers do make a bit more sense. The Jedi were the guardians of the republic for either a thousand years or a thousand generations (George not keeping his units straight), and the galactic society being older than that. Contrast that with Trek, and you have a Federation that was in it's infancy in TOS and not much older by TNG, and no active space faring civilizations having more than a few hundred years in space. But all of that really isn't the point, because...

Almost. SW is the young hero's journey fable turned into a melodramatic redemption of a fallen hero, while ST is a mix of actual science fiction and social commentary. Both are wrapped up in science fiction setting, but that's really the only commonality. Comparing SW to ST in term of which ship can beat up which ship misses the deeper meaning of both (not that there's much deeper meaning in the prequels). Thus, the meaning of my last sentence in my original comment; it's better to compare the two on writing and story telling.

Take a look at http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Essays/FiveMinutes.html and you'll realize that Slave-1, a bounty hunter's ship, could have made short work of the Enterprise-D. There really is no comparison between the two universes when it comes to ship to ship combat. The Federation wouldn't stand a chance against the Empire.

Comparing quality of writing and story telling, however, is a different argument. There's a lot more good Trek than there is good Star Wars.

I thought we were autonomous collective.

Which is a good tip, if you're lonely.

"Distance, in multiples of my height"

That clearly states that the unit of measurement is your height.

The unit of measurement you use for both height and distance is irrelevant, as long as they are the same. The final result will be in multiples of your height, which will effectively make your height the unit of measurement. For instance, I live about 40,000,000 inches from my birthplace and I'm 68 inches tall, which is roughly 588,235 multiples of my height from my birthplace - or 588,235 "my heights" from my birthplace.

And just to beat a dead horse; unless you live really close to your birthplace, the options don't give a very wide range.

At a guess, no - the information is not relevant as no infringement has been legally demonstrated, and thus an out of court settlement involving no admission of guilt or liability has no bearing on other cases.

Yeah, I did notice that. The page isn’t re-rendered, but the Flash objects are restarted. Minor annoyance, though.