Obviously the organizers of the the con were insufficiently generous in their "donation" to the "Providence Firefighter's Widow's Support Fund".

The only reason Providence city government exists is as an engine of graft.

How did I miss this halcyon era when Internet ads were "fun and informative"?

What is this vacation of which you speak?

In the immortal words of Calvin, "verbing weirds language".

I used Drudge as the example because he was the first to publicly cry "foul" at Feinstein. I don't read Drudge and I'm not a member of any political party, Republican or otherwise.

Obviously you have no argument against what I posted, or else you'd reply with something other than an ad hominem attack.

This is exactly the outcome that Diane Feinstein and others of her ilk would visit upon the U.S., given her way.

A porcelain dutch oven *is* cast iron - cast iron that has been coated with porcelain. It's not the sort of thing you'd want to shove into a campfire, but they are fantastic for cooking on or in the stove with no need for seasoning.

Come on! You know it was fun! I'm just glad that my friend and I were doing the same process at the same time, just slightly out of sync so that neither of our machines was broken in quite the same way at the same time so we could use each other's box to get to the files we needed to fix ours. It all worked in the end and was amazing training for Gentoo later on.

I'd forgotten about Caldera. I had a copy of the original 1.0 Caldera Network Desktop that Lyle Ball gave me at a conference. I still have the t-shirt somewhere, not sure about the box & software. I never used it much beyond a test install, but I remember thinking it was cool that it came with a legit WP, even though I really didn't have any use for it.

Counting only my primary desktop distro and skipping personal/work servers or experimental installs my history is like this:

Slackware -> RedHat -> SuSE -> Debian -> Gentoo -> Ubuntu -> Mint

I, like many in the thread, started with Slack back in the "box full of floppies" era. We generally would have install parties at the offices of
the ISP my buddies owned so real internet could be used instead of interminable disk swapping or (even worse) dial-up. Fun times were had.

Upgrading that system, by hand, from a.out to ELF without completely hosing it was a great adventure!

Currently I'm running Mint 12 on my desktop, Mint 13 on my laptop, and Debian Squeeze on my home file/DHCP/etc. server.

Linix Mint 12 has a new DE they're developing called Cinnamon that is making rapid progress and creates an environment similar to Gnome 2 but built on Gnome 3.
I installed it and am very happy with it so far. More information can be had at http://cinnamon.linuxmint.com/

Shenanigans like this are only among the worst, but hardly unique. Because of these types of schemes, I no longer buy PC games.
I have pirated games in the past, but I don't even bother with that any more since most PC games are just bad Xbox ports any more. The upside is that giving up PC games has liberated me of the one reason I have kept (my paid for - licensed and legit copy of) Windows on my PC, now I can run Linux on my desktop 100% of the time instead of dual-booting.

So, from my perspective the game companies aren't just slitting their own throats, but Microsoft's as well. Well done.