It’s not nice to refer to American teenagers as bloated whales, and I think putting holes in them is a bit drastic.

Oh, off topic. Never mind.

Netcraft confirms they aren’t dying fast enough?

Yes, but since that knowledge requires watching movie #5 it's pretty much a secret.

A chemical imbalance in the atmosphere suggests a planet with bipolar disorder.

Oh well, I tried...

Yes and no.. ..the Monty Python writing style was already visible in At Last The 1948 Show (1967-69), especially in the sketches that were reused, but the way the show was cut owed a lot to Q (69-82). Either way Spike was a major influence, so you say potato.. ..

Though they were in turn inspired by the absurdism of the Goon Show.

http://www.thegoonshow.net/dow...

http://contrailscience.com/

Pfft! In the old days when someone posted the text of the article to the comments it was called karma whoring...

Pope Opportunist is quite satisfactory, if a little generic.

The difference is "price fixing” (a specific legal term) only applies when multiple vendors collude to set a price and effectively stifle competition. In the case of a sole vendor there is no competition, so they can legally set whatever price they want; this isn’t “price fixing”.

You obviously have axes to grind...

Two suggestions: run the 10.6.8 combo update (that should overwrite the existing App Store installation), or do a clean install on an external hard drive, download the Mavericks installer from the App Store while booted from that, then copy the “Install OS X Mavericks” application from the Applications folder to your internal hard drive before it installs (I did this with a supported Mac to grab the installer to hack onto an unsupported MacPro 1,1). Of course, the latter option takes as long as reinstalling the OS and requires an external hard drive, so you might as well just spend the hour and a bit and reinstall the OS...it’s not difficult, and it leaves all your installed software intact (and if that doesn’t solve the problem you can be pretty sure it’s misconfigured third party software, such as Little Snitch).

While I’m not a fan of the App Store and would prefer the option of a direct download, it works well for the vast majority of users, and it does a better job of keeping them up to date than the previous Software Update mechanism. It’s a pest in corner cases, though.

More secure than texting BS...