I did Linux Mint and MS Office using Crossover as it meant that she could keep using the MS apps, but had a safer stable base to work from.

And - so my littlest sister couldn't keep installing her toolbar / chat app of the week on it - those caused more problems than anything else.

I'd prefer a Chalmers to a Cherry. Best damn model they ever put out.

"Note for Americans and other aliens: Milton Keynes is a new city approximately halfway between London and Birmingham. It was built to be modern, efficient, healthy, and, all in all, a pleasant place to live. Many Britons find this amusing." -- T. Pratchett and N. Gaiman, Good Omens

We used to go bowling there when I was little as it was the only place within an hour's drive with a bowling alley... I mostly remember parts being very empty and then almost never-ending lines of roundabouts (although at least they were in straight lines unlike Swindon)...

Yay! Haven't see this one posted for a long time ;->

Is a magical accident and the luck to leave the human race before death...

When dealing with certain pieces of equipment, the cost of service contracts often gets renegotiated after each expires and if the vendor doesn't want to support it anymore they just jack up the price of the contract to a non-viable level. So then you just wait until the machine stops working before you upgrade. We had this happen with a Leica confocal microscope - the contract expired, and then the proprietary board that connected the scope to the computer died. Since no more boards existed world-wide the scope was useless as a confocal and so was eventually repurposed as a standard epi-fluorescence scope.

His shit wasn't fucked up - it was retarded...

And that's fine because plenty of tards can live kick-ass lives!

Brought to you by Carl's Jr.

I regularly read on my Kindle in the bath. I just double-bag with regular ziploc bags, and I've never had any issues.

There are plenty of countries where teachers are actually respected, paid decent wages and supported by their schools - my little brother ended up in Australia, and even though he's not currently in a particularly nice school (inner city...) he still says it's a massive leap above most schools in the US/UK...

...brain the size of a planet and they ask me to answer this poll...

Call this job satisfaction? 'Cos I don't.

The linked article is a good start - my personal preference would be a panasonic GX1 at the moment - it offers enough control so that you can grow with it and the panasonic G series cameras have generally been of fairly high quality for the field.

If I didn't have a DSLR, I would probably get one of these as in most situations (especially when size is an issue when travelling) these cameras can produce images as good as a similar level DSLR.

There was an Iron Man storyline (Stark Resilient) not too long ago that had a game app being released that pretended that real missions were actually part of the game, with the players controlling UAVs...

The UK Data Protection Act can force them to delete any data they have on you even if they won't reveal exactly what it is (as long as they're not the government or someone you owe money to)...

We get deliveries of the main city newspaper at the university we work at for the undergraduates (no deliveries during the holidays) so I read it then, and take it home for lighting the evening wood fire.

There's also a little free local paper that gets dropped in mailboxes even if you have a 'no junk mail' sign.

Macs get names from cowboys in Western movies (eg. Jake)
Linux boxen get names from star constellations (eg. Cassiopeia)
Windows gets names from horror story characters (eg. Igor)

External hard drives for my main machine get names from The Abyss (eg. Pseudopodia, Deep Core, DeepSuit)