"If you walk into a Best Buy or any other retail store and head over to the TV section, what immediately hits you is the brightness of most of the LCD sets and the comparatively subdued brightness coming from any (remaining) plasma sets still on the floor. In the unscientific forced side-by-side comparison environment of a brightly lit store, the LCD panels just show better."

This is why.

I just (as in: 3 weeks ago) brought home a Panasonic TCP55VT60 plasma. I knew which model I was purcasing long before I walked into the store, but for giggles (and yes, this could be classified as me being a prick, but it was interesting), I walked into the Best Buy, was accosted by a salesman, and said simply that I was interested in a 55" TV that had terrific color rendition. He showed me every TV they had in 55" EXCEPT the plasma. When I asked about the TV we skipped over, he said (I roughly quote) "Nah, that's a Plasma. They are heavy, run hot, and the screens burn in after a few years, and they're just not as bright or as good." When asked why they have one, the answer: "Well, some people still like them, but everyone else has moved on", implying I'd be an idiot for even looking at it.

I realize that was just one salesman at one store, but it's that exact mindset that killed it. It's not price competitive, they are hot, and they do show like crap in the store. The 65VT60 they had in the store was set in Normal mode, and I noticed that more than a few of the LCD's were set to either Vivid or Showroom modes, really blasting the color out. Nevermind that the VT50's and 60's (and the ZT's, which are even a little better) are beating the very best of the Pioneer Kuro sets, long regarded as *the* gold standard in TV's, and getting them to display to 90% of their potential is a single setting away, no professional calibration or screwing around needed.

It's a unfortunate time for the few of us who give a shit about colour accuracy and black levels. I hope the OLED's are able to cover the gap pretty soon.

Oh, and I told Best Buy to fuck itself and bought the TV from a local chain for less, and with a salesman who wasn't a complete dipshit. And, as a completely unsolicited review, if you're considering one....yes, they are that good. In a brightly lit room, they're ok. In a dark room, they're jaw-dropping good.

"Or you could use the abortion which is XP64, which has shit driver support and compatibility issues."

XP64 wasn't quite as bad as an abortion. You wanna talk about abortive messes? Say hello to Windows ME. Nah, XP x64 was.....misunderstood.

It really was Server 2003 rebadged without the server bits. So driver support was easy....pull the drivers for Server 2003, and everything just worked. Sure, it would bitch that the driver wasn't signed right, but let it complain. I had half a dozen systems in my care that were XPx64....had driver trouble with exactly one of them, and even that took about an hour of screwing around before it worked.

It was a great OS, in a lot of ways. All the squishy goodness we get from an x64 system, the old familiar feeling of XP, and none of the horseshit that was Vista.

"Notably, the fact that E-ZPasses will be used as a tracking device outside of toll payment, is not disclosed anywhere that I could see in the terms and conditions. "

In NJ, buried in the fine print, is a line that reads something like "other information may be obtained by the the Consortium at their discretion", which easily translates to: "We're going to use this to monitor traffic flow, and by doing that, we're monitoring you".

If you're driving on the Parkway (a New Jersey toll highway), there are plenty of places where you can see EZPass pickups buried in the road surface that are nowhere near the toll sites.

I visited that Park. A lot Grew up about 45 minutes away from there. Had friends who "lifeguarded" there.

A little bit of background for everyone: the park was located in Vernon, New Jersey (USA), built into the side of a small mountain, hence it's successor's name being Mountain Creek. It was a combination water park / Ski resort, depending on the time of the year.

Perhaps one of the best ways to think about this place is to imagine your favourite water park, saying to yourself "Gee, that ride is great, but I wish I could do...blah...which is prohibited by the rules and the lifeguards would throw me out.". Now imagine that same situation, except that there was no getting thrown out and no one cared about the rules. It was the inmates running the asylum a lot of times. Sure, it made it a metric ton of fun, but the injuries were often severe. Broken legs, dislocated everything, electrocutions....the ambulance was in very frequent use in that place. Some of it was the ride design, as the safeguards and engineering just weren't there. The rest....well, for insance, they had a "Cliff Dive". It was just that....a rocky outcropping about 35' above the main pool. They had weight restrictions, height restrictions, warnings about this and that....and it was all roundly ignored. The lifeguards were supposed to keep the landing area clear, but sometimes they screwed up and damn near had one person landing on another. Oh, and they warned you not to straight dive in, as you could theoretically hit the bottom. Theory, my ass. You could do it pretty easily. As I said....the engineering wasn't. They ran that park cheap, charged a decent amount for admission, and smiled all the way to the bank.

But, as bad as it was, there were hundreds of thousands of folks who came though there with little more than a smile and some sunburn. For a grabasstic teenager, it was a Paradise.

Come to New Jersey.

It's dependent on the municipality as to what you have to do with the sidewalk. In most towns, you're responsibale for keeping it clear (shovel the snow in the winter, cut the grass in the summer). Some towns, however, make you shoulder the cost of repair/replacing it when it no longer meets the town standards.

Yes, officer, I was on the phone. On my NJ-approved Bluetooth-based hands-free communication device.

Oh, you want to see the headset? Sorry, it's integrated into my car.

The text message? My car reads them back to me though the stereo. I wasn't looking at the screen.



Cops have a hard enough job, and there are already enough laws on the books. More laws do not fix stupidity, nor does increasing the punishment afterward fix the damage that was done.

I was going to mod this as a +1, Insightful.....but if there's a post that needs a "+1 Sad" option, this qualifies.

Please show me a citation for: "fire departments can and routinely discriminate against women".

If the department wanted to be on the wrong end of a lawsuit, sure, go right ahead. Where are we, 1960?

" If they understand the cancer well enough to halt it in it's tracks for 90 to 95% of the patients that are treatable by this drug, and another 90 to 95 of those that take it are alive and in full remission 5+ years later, they certainly know enough to track down a cure if they were so inclined to do so."

Sure! Just like we spent all of those years dicking around in LEO with the Shuttle Program, even though NASA certainly knew enough to have a colony of people living on Mars. Greedy bastards.

Oh, wait. You have to learn to crawl before you learn to walk.

Because of the outstanding, educational, informative, programming that is recorded there, such as The Jersey Shore, or The Housewives of New Jersey.

Now, if we talk about the Galapagos Islands being the Galapagos sub-oceanic proto-islands, who cares? They don't make great TV programs there.

"Scent is a crazy powerful thing for a dog. I can pick up a pine cone, wing it into a yard full of pine cones, and my dogs will come back with that specific cone. Just the scent from my hand touching it for a few seconds, plus the disturbed ground where it landed, is enough to differentiate that specific random object."

The statement: "A Hound is a Nose with a Dog Attached" is remarkably true. I'm sure that goes for other breeds as well. They see the world in ways we can't begin to understand, as we're visual creatures. They are scent creatures.

I second that!

We had the remarkably unpleasant experience of having a house fire two years ago. While the structure itself was alright, just about everything in the house was destroyed due to the smoke and heat, including almost all of our electronics. 3 desktops, 2 laptops, an old Proliant server, 2 UPS's, Printer, 2 TV's, fax machine, scanner, DVD players, 3 cameras.....you get the idea. When we moved back in, electronics wise, we bought only what we missed. The 3 desktops were replaced with one that was faster (and cheaper) than the ones it replaced, the printer by a print/fax/scan combo unit, the 2 TV's were consolidated to one, blah, blah.

Point being, do wait until you see what you need. You'll likely end up with a smaller, but more useful, pile of equipment in the end.

I mistyped:

No. Guns are designed to discharge a projectile at a high velocity. That is all.
They are not designed to hammer in nails, cut a hole in paper, mow your lawn, or kill, though it is capable of any of those actions.
The human pulling the trigger is what determines what the gun's utility on any given day.

No. Guns are designed to discharge a projectile at a high velocity. That is all.

They are not designed to hammer in nails, mow your lawn, or kill.

The human pulling the trigger is what determines what it is designed for,

"Buy your fuel on cold days, you get a *little* more for your $50 than you do on a hot day (hence airlines buy fuel by weight, not volume)."

Used to be more true than it is now. Most fuel station tanks in the USA are 2-3 ft underground, below the frost line, so the stored fuel temperature stays at a relatively constant 50 or 60-something degrees even on the hottest summer days. Sure, if it's a bloody hot day at a station that isn't used much, the fuel that's actually in the pump may warm up a little, but they retain very little gas.

Unless, of course, you lived in Centralia, PA. Then....then you have a very good point.