She was saying stupid things, but you can bet the farm on this: everyone at that council table knows who dad is in Cupertino.

so it's going to be difficult to get my Earth Day tire fire started. But I will keep trying. It's too important!

A friend of mine was renting a room in the house of a lady who lived down the street from me. She had been suckered into a Nigerian 419 scam, was convinced that the people she was communicating with were "Good Christians", and sent them about $30,000. When she took out a loan against her home, her daughters attempted to intervene with the courts to declare her incapable of managing her assets. She ended up losing the house and all her money, and my friend lost his room. She was a nice old lady whose mind was starting to go, and unfortunately was taken advantage of by some cold bastards. Don't mock too hard, it could be someone you love or even you one day.

On my laptop, the last three versions of Ubuntu that I have tried supported my wireless interface out of the gate. On the new 10.04 LTS version, it does not work. And of course, this is just a sampling of the BS I've had to endure when dealing with linux on my personal machine. The main thing I've learned is that if you get something working, turn off updates so that your machine doesn't automagically frack up. Gee, that seems similar to some other system i'm familiar with. Sorry, but I've had zero problems with Win7 and tons of problems with Ubuntu. Linux is great, but not on the desktop. I'm eager to have someone prove me wrong though.

That was actually a Lenin quote.

Muhammad can go suck a big, floppy donkey dick.

....one of the chief things that is causing our country to fail. As an avid boardgamer, I am offended and disgusted.

What you outline here makes me think that Microsoft will have an edge in cloud based email. Say what you will about MS, but they do have tremendous support resources from their company on down to solutions providers. If they are successful in putting exchange in the cloud, it will have a lot to do with them taking advantage of the current old-school knowledge base. I couldn't imagine Google trying to port my company's (complicated but works well) exchange system over to Gmail. It would be a nightmare.

From theonering.net

1.2. What will be included in the two movies? According to the Empire Online interview with PJ and GDT (link above), the two movies will include all of the iconic moments in the book, The Hobbit, as well as being expanded to follow other events that occur ‘offstage.’ This includes the White Council and Gandalf’s comings and goings to Dol Guldur. Pj: “We expanded out the universe a lot more so that we weren’t just staying with Bilbo and the Dwarves on their journey, as the book pretty much does. We started to expand some of what’s happening to Gandalf outside of that journey.” Things we know are included so far: - backstory of Thrain, Thorin’s father - Beorn - Spiders - The White Council - Gandalf’s journeys to Dol Guldur - The three trolls (Tom, Bert, William) - Sauron ( including some of his history)

BillG is ten steps ahead of you. I heard him being interviewed by someone on TV (Larry King?) about his foundation a few years ago. He was talking about vaccines in the third world and was questioned why he was not addressing excessive childbirth in poverty-stricken countries. He pointed out that his foundation had researched this and had come to the conclusion that if you reduce human misery and high infant mortality rates, then quality of life goes up all across the board, and as a result of this, people reproduce more sensibly. I would say this is why he chooses to invest in vaccines instead of condoms.

This vaguely reminds me of William Randolph Hearst's stake in the paper industry, which was a supported his main business, which was major print media. From Wikipedia: Jack Herer and others argue that Hearst's paper empire (he owned hundreds of acres of timber forests and a vast number of paper mills designed to manufacture paper from wood pulp) in the early 1930s was threatened by hemp, which: 1) like wood pulp, could also be used to manufacture paper[12] and 2) also had an advantage over wood pulp, because it could be regrown yearly as well.[12]

The Drudge Report today has a picture of Julius Caeser with the headline "Julius at FCC wants to regulate Internet". If you hurry you may catch it before the headline changes http://www.drudgereport.com/ This headline has personally angered me more than any other I can remember. I have been talking with people online and off for the last few years about this issue with great spirit. I have convinced others of my point of view using reason and civil discussion. At length, I have spent time and energy to do this. Now, as the issue heads to it's legislative climax, we finally get a headline about it on one of the most viewed, mainstream news sites in the world (I give it mainstream status due to it's popularity). Up to this point, the issue has been absent from any mass-market coverage. So, that finally happens, and the gateway to this information is labelled with the banter of a political shill who has seized the opportunity to spread propaganda that is aimed squarely at those who would react to such stupidity in the most blind and uninformed manner. Unfortunately, I am not surprised. I can only hope that if the principles of net-neutrality are not adopted, that one day someone decides that Drudge's traffic is "undesirable", or perhaps he is taking in too much revenue, and that physical access to his POV is hampered. Then he may think twice before throwing mindless, blanket ideology over every idea that concerns him.

"While virtually every Core 2 Duo processor supports the hardware virtualization technology that powers the Windows 7 XP Mode"

That is virtually wrong. In the mobile computing market, most Core2Duo machines that support Intel VT live in the higher end of the price spectrum, such as the P8600. A great many mid-range machines use the T6400,T6500 CPU's, which do not give you VT support.

tinfoil hat, anyone?

Apple can't open it's own record label. From Wikipedia: "In 1978, Apple Corps, the Beatles-founded holding company and owner of their record label, Apple Records, filed a lawsuit against Apple Computer for trademark infringement. The suit was settled in 1981 with an undisclosed amount being paid to Apple Corps. This amount had been estimated to be US$50â"US$200 million, but was later revealed to be US$80,000.[1] As a condition of the settlement, Apple Computer agreed not to enter the music business, and Apple Corps agreed not to enter the computer business."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v._Apple_Computer
They got into hot water with Apple Records when iTunes got big. An actual recording label would blatantly go against the agreement.