I can vouch for this. I had an appendicitis and had my appendix removed (thankfully I still have an index). Since then I have developed diverticulitis and have IBS.

Exactly. We were made to be susceptible to cancer and gosh darn it if you get cancer, or an infection or a cold then that's the way it is. No fair cheating with science and medicine.

Bought an HP all-in-one touchscreen about a year ago. Use it daily for reading news, music, recipes, etc. Very useful. Came with remote keyboard\mouse (have not yet had to change the batteries). We NEVER use the touch screen feature. it was cute to scroll with your finger like the iphone for the first few days but the screen gets so dirty it looks disgusting. Keyboard\mouse work fine and I think everyone has forgotten it has touch screen capabilities. I bought the good one with the multi-touch. I Could have saved a couple hundred if I had known we wouldn't use it.

I doubt your wife could use the phone but you can try registering at their website. When I tried to buy her a phone directly from straight talk they wanted to sell me a at&t model. at&t coverage sucks where we live so I bought the used verizon model (lg 290c).

You can definitely port your existing numbers. The website is all set up. My wife had a traditional verizon phone and when I filled out the info on straight talk's website it said 24 - 72 hours to port. it took 3 hours.

Seriously? No one has mentioned this yet? Straighttalk is from Tracfone\Walmart\Verizon\AT&T so all kinds of evil but the $31.68 (includes taxes) get 1000 minutes, 1000 texts and 1000MB of data. A refurbed phone can be purchased online for $35 which include the first month (phone costs $5, yes it is more for fancier phones). We went with the Verizon Models (for straightalk phones ending with a 'c' mean Verizon ie: 290C) and my wife couldn't be happier. It is prepay with no contract. I'm lucky that work pays for my phone but I will NEVER have another contract.

I gotta ask, has any other /.er actually run NAV in the past year? I installed N360 v3 on my father-in-law's computer. Install took 1 minute (no reboot) about 8 months ago and he has not gotten a single virus, malware, spyware, anything since. Prior while running Mcaffee I had to clean up some event at least once per month.

I am not saying NAV is perfect (or even the best) but please stop basing your opinion on a product from 5 years ago. As for a free product from Microsoft? To me that's asking the fox to guard your hen house.

The value of encryption for public communication is limited. Unless all parties involved are 100% diligent there will always be an unencrypted copy available somewhere. Instead of adding overhead and procedures for dealing with encryption I find it best to avoid putting sensitive information into email just as I avoid doing so in other public places.

Permit Cookies is very useful (need to disable extension checking and it works with FF5) in limiting tracking while still providing a usable web experience. It turns all cookies into session cookies that are gone when you close the browser and has a shortcut to override for sites that you do want to allow permanent cookies to be set. When I restart my browser I am a new person. For complete protection I also use NoScript, Ghostery and Better Privacy.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/permit-cookies/

To disable the annoying extension compatibility check:=

create a new boolean called "extensions.checkCompatibility.5.0" then set it false

Credit: http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/questions/837443

Ouch, thanks for the reminder. I read that tibit a while back but I haven't been on Steam in a long time as HL2TFC bored me. Figured I was aiming to rejoin with D3 but no more. I totally agree with you. No problem banning cheaters in MP games but if I want to cheat in SP that my business and my alone.

Sorry Bliz that two fewer sales for you.

OK:

As someone who spends the day reading tremendously boring but necessary technical content any kind of visual breaks is welcome. I would love to see all information broken down into factoids. As an old fart I will probably double-space to my dying day. I do agree this is an almost pointless discussion. :)

Better:

- Reads tech content daily
- Visual Breaks are good

- Information factoids
- Double space always

- Pointless discussion

**********************

So which was easier to read? Both presented the same information. I suppose the reverse is true when I'm reading for pleasure otherwise every book would look like the cliff notes.

-Joe

Where MS really failed is in the delay between XP & Vista. XP became an infrastructure piece just like cabling or water pipes. Infrastructure can fail but you generally don't replace it, you fix it. Win 7 represents a totally new infrastructure and most companies don't see the ROI. Imagine if the IEEE came out tomorrow and said we should all replace our CAT 5 cables with CAT 7 as soon as possible? Everyone would ignore them. Real value would have to present to force the change. Win 7 does not represent real value over Win XP.

-Joe

Apologies if this has been mentioned (I did look through the comments)

But can anyone explain how it was really 30 seconds? The GPS ping isn't a stop watch and has no clue what the vehicle is doing. it just does a check in every 30 seconds. So if the 1st ping hit say 5 seconds before he left then he was moving for only 25 seconds instead of 30 thereby increasing his rate of travel. The odds are 1 in 30 that he left within 1 second of the first ping.

I setup a home server (print, file, ftp, smtp, on-demand packet sniffing, etc) on a 2GB MSI Wind Nettop. This is a barebones PC and uses only 35Watts peak. With HDD, RAM, etc total cost was $350.00

The coolest part is the "server" spends most of its time asleep (S3). When someone in the house needs to print, access files, etc they have an icon that sends a magic packet to wake the server. The server will then stay on as long as needed (based on CPU Util + 10 minutes) and then go back to sleep. Be doing this for 2+ years (old higher watt computer previously) and this solution works great for us.

-Joe

Exactly, Microsoft is pulling all the marketing stops out (same thing they did with Vista). What's the point? What's the real RTO on Win 7? If I have a computer that performs all of the features I need it to do why would I upgrade?

11 Years ago my father bought a $6,000 top of the line Gateway with Windows 98 and it was a blazing fast. 4 years later it was a paperweight but will the same be said of today's average machines? I still have 4 - 5 year old PCs in production use with no problems. They're fast enough and when they die I'll replace them with $300 models. Intel lost, the CPU has outclassed every app that most businesses/users need and now it's MS's turn. They are trying to justify this new OS for which very few people have any real need. XP looks dated? Who cares? Show me one truly useful thing Vista/Win 7 can do they cannot be done with XP.

-Joe