Ok I'll admit it. That comment made me shoot coffee out my nose (which is as painful as it sounds). Damn you!

>>Maybe we'll find out Bill Cosby did a stint for Apple. That would wrap it all up nicely.

He didn't do anything for Apple, but he did pimp the Texas Instruments TI-99. Close enough?

Sounds more like Barbie: I can be a Manager. Looks like Barbie finally managed to break the glass ceiling. Yay equality?

Actually I think ET gets a bad rap. The game itself is decidedly average, but it's fun in short spurts and has some amazing graphics (for the 2600 anyway). The problem is that it's also buggy as hell due to its rushed development cycle (6 weeks from start to finish when most games took 3-5 months) to meet the Christmas buying season. The biggest issue is that the collision detection with the pits is wonky and it's too difficult to tell what parts of ET can touch the pit without falling in and what parts can't. Add to this a nasty bug that makes falling back into pits after you levitate out a very common occurrence (you need to move down after levitating not left or right which would make sense) and you've got a very frustrating game.

If you've got a 2600 handy or an emulator, I suggest giving ET a chance. If you look here ( http://www.neocomputer.org/pro...) you can find an explanation of all the bugs in the game and download a bug free version of the game which makes it much more enjoyable (although it's still an average game).

A good source of info on this comes from Marty Goldberg and Curt Vendel. They've been researching all Atari history including the 'ET Dig' by talking to the actual employees and reviewing internal documents. Their book contains a details on what was sent to the dump, and even though the book came out before the dig it turns out they were 100% correct: http://www.amazon.com/dp/09855...

Just to clarify things, the cartridges dumped at Alamogordo were returns from retail stores not excess inventory from Atari. Many of them still have store stickers on them. There were never millions of ET cartridges dumped at Alamogordo, they were a mix of titles (2600 and 5200) and not in the millions.

Really? I guess I never compared Ubuntu to XP, but it boots soooo much faster than Windows 7 that when I'm forced to boot back into Win 7 for something I can't believe I used it for so long. It's unbearably slow these days, even with the stripped down version I'm running.

Oddly enough, I prefer Ubuntu over Mint simply because it DOESN'T look like Windows. I like the Unity interface,it reminds me of OS X in a way. I know I can use various dock programs in Mint to do the same thing, but Ubuntu works out of the box for what I need. I'm a very novice level Linux user, but I've completely replaced Windows with Linux and I'm learning more every day. Eventually I think I'll move onto something like Arch and try my hand at customizing things at a low level.

>>I look forward to the War on Henotheism. Make up your minds, there's either one god or there's multiple! If you don't pick between the existence of one god or multiple, then the Henotheists win!

I read that as the war on Hedonism. I was almost upset there for a moment.

My wife and I joined a local meat CSA for the same reason. Not only does the meat taste better (grass fed is way better than corn/grain fed) but it's antibiotic free. We also like to support local farmers and local agriculture. Best decision we ever made.

Is there any evidence that his accusations have merit? I'm not sure I trust the word of a guy who is disturbed enough to do this sort of thing for over ten years. I don't think the article said anything about it.

How do you prove that someone started creating accounts in your name or signing up your e-mail address to all kinds of nasty groups? Most sites won't disclose the IP address of the person who signed you up without some sort of legal order and I don't think "A guy left our forum in a huff and the next day I started getting signed up for stuff" is sufficient grounds to obtain one.

However in my case the guy also signed me up for magazines and some record clubs (back when those were still a thing) and that's how he finally got caught. He was dumb enough to mail one of the registration cards out without proper postage and it was returned to my address but had a postmark for his hometown (we knew who the guy was and where he lived). Interestingly the people at the magazine companies were much more helpful than the website operators.

None of this went through the legal system or anything like that since a postmark is hardly enough evidence for criminal charges, but several people confronted the guy with the evidence we had accumulated (I wasn't the only guy he was doing this to) and he agreed to stop.

I'm a moderator on a popular forum and I've had something similar done to me by someone who thought I had wronged them (ironically I had nothing to do with what happened to him). Thankfully it only lasted a year or two and they did eventually get caught and stopped. But those two years were really stressful as I discovered that there really isn't much you can do without hard evidence. I can't imagine going through something like this for over 10 years. This guy needs some serious mental help and needs to make some sort of restitution to his victims. A simple "Sorry, I need help" isn't nearly enough. These days your online reputation can be your most important asset. Can you imagine if one of the people he did this to got turned down for a job because their name showed up on a child porn site or pro-Nazi group in a standard background check?

Yes that's true, but then again you need the travesty that is the 32X Mushroom sitting on top of your Genesis to make it work. I actually do have my 32X hooked up, but only for Knuckles Chaotix and Star Wars.

I thing I forgot to mention is that for most systems you will have to find a way to strip out the sync signal from the video cable. You can either build your own device (using a LM1881 chip) or buy something a little fancier like the Sync Strike (http://arcadeforge.net/Scaler-and-Strike-Devices/Sync-Strike::15.html). If you don't use a sync stripper the picture will be all distorted and, as you would guess, out of sync