1. Perhaps "NSA" was supposed to be "NFA" - National Firearms Act? Which classifies certain types of weapons as "destructive" and regulates their use/possession. 2. I've been to the Knob Creek Machinegun Shoot twice, and on each occasion, a fellow there brought a Civil War cannon, a rather large muzzleloader he fired about once every 20 - 45 minutes or so.

The fall of this satellite into the ocean might wake up the Cloverfield monster... again...

>saying that the amount of time people are playing >games is on the rise, in part due to their low >cost-to-time ratio. Or the inreasingly high "time to job ratio"

One Layoff Per Worker? Perhaps they should extend the "two for one" and just close the company...

Sometimes I wonder about some of the other folks that post replies on here. The attitude toward low-level retail and service industry people is almost staggeringly contemptuous. Here are some gems I pulled from other posts: "Salesdroid" in reference to a CC employee not knowing about IDE ---> SATA adapters "a crappy burger spanked together by surly wage slaves" in a parallel drawn by the reply-poster, who used a food analogy to compare a premium and a generic retail experience. Another one I recall reading (but can't find again) made a scornful reference to the folks that spend hours standing by a busy road, holding up liquidation signs announcing an ongoing store liquidation. OK, so... other than a frisson of "ha, I am smarter and make far more money than these people" what exactly is this accomplishing for you?

I come across some systems that are mildly infected - I can clean them up using manual removal methods, and several different legitimately free apps like ad-aware, spybot, etc. When they are simply just over-clogged, or unstable after malware removal, I do reach for the reinstall. Sorry, but I have up to eight client stops in a day... and if I spend that sort of time, potentially many hours, on one machine, I won't make anything. Why? Because I simply won't charge for every single hour I spend on such a situation. I hear all of the time of techs charging far more than I do, and having no compunction about charging far more than the cost of a new PC for the work! I'd rather recognize when a machine is simply overwhelmed, cut my time losses, back up all of the data, reinstall Windows, repopulate data. The client gets a clean machine, free of malware and "winrot" and I get to stay on schedule, as well as charging a middle ground price that is fair to both the client and myself.