Fuck religion, period.

I read Digital Fortress and I think it was his first novel, I thought it was ok at best, pretty amateur... Why are they calling Dan Brown out on this? This guy writes fiction. Without getting into a religious debate with every Googler and Wikipedia addict on the net, there was a time when people read books and contrary to popular belief not every fact or theory is on the net. The problem with Mr, Brown is that he really irked Christians and Catholics alike. How can you call Jesus a regular man? And that he had feelings like other men? How dare he...lol

I wish I was him.

Hey, at least he is being honest. Corporations by their nature are greedy, profit is what drives them at all costs...you just happened to hear it straight from the horse's mouth.

Agreed. Again the question begs as to who gives a shit that their is a new Ratchet and Clank game? They are fun diversions but really who cares? They are running it to the ground, with rehash after rehash, sequel after sequel. Is this news just because all the bad press Sony keeps getting?

I can understand that it may need a certain enterprise level drive to work correctly and reliably but all the marketing fluff is straight bullshit with no chaser. Drives with a good MTBF and all other goodness and magic maybe a little more expensive but not by much. The fact that it's Apple doing this makes people even more upset because last time I checked they dick you very hard over hardware upgrades on their "regular" consumer products. $1,100 for 8Gb of DDR3 1066 ram is pretty steep considering that 8Gb of the same memory will cost you about $100-$120 on NewEgg. Another interesting side note is the way that MS charges a premium for their Xbox 360 hard drives and Sony let's you use whichever one you want. It because MS blesses the hard drives through Kosher rituals and then encases it with a special chastity belt. Sony then tries to dick you by announcing a "price cut" on PS3 models based on their hard drive capacity knowing that you can swap it out with whatever size you want. Talk about disingenuous.

It seems that Sony's service is not so free after all. I mean someone is getting shafted for bandwith fees and in this case it's the publishers. So while we get the demos for free you can bet that it will find a way back to the consumer somehow. Maybe we'll start seeing games for $64.99 to cover the costs of development or they'll just scale back demos and other dlc. At the end of the day nothing is really "free".

I see where the author is coming from with his frustrations. At the end of the day, he is absolutely 100% right. Regular users, which is most of the world don't want to deal with any arcane and esoteric commands. Sure, we feel cool, resourceful and technical but the fact is that most people don't want to search for solutions to simple things such as installing applications. This is why Windows & OSX are so popular, for the most part they just work. People just want to click on icons and dialog boxes, click yes or no, and then be on their merry way to do whatever that is they want. I think that Linus Torvlads himself said that people don't use "operating systems". Ubuntu is moving towards the right direction but it needs to be even dumbed down more for everyday average computer owners.

This is better than anything Uwe Boll ever put together with millions in budget.

4% in NYS but 8.38% in NYC which includes Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Bronx, Staten Island and surrounding areas. I've prepared Sales & Use Taxes for my employer and it is very specific as to how much every locality pays. DVDs & CDs bought in a physical retail location in NY are taxed as anything else, DVDs & CDs bought online from Target, Best Buy or whatever are taxed as well. Amazon & Newegg are exempt as they have no physical presence via either store, warehouse or office, but if you buy from Amazon and the vendor is Target, you have to pay tax and thats normal. If you buy from Itunes you do not get taxed because there is no physical entity called Itunes in NYS. The language in law is very vague at times which opens up another can of worms, it says that you should claim items purchased out of state but it does not say that you have to. Does it apply to streaming? Netflix subscriptions are already taxed and so are XBOX Live cards and points. They will have to create a law that specifically states that all NYS residents who purchase downloaded items from anywhere in the world have to pay a tax to NYS and I seriously doubt that they have any power and will to do it. People buy things online to save money, period. Taxing "downloads" will deter people from buying and foster more "illegal" activity, so nobody wins. It's very hard to compel someone to buy from a store when you can buy it for 20-30% cheaper online with free shipping. I've lived in NYC for most of my life and I can tell you that it is arguably the most corrupt, you really have to pay to play. The more important question is how does a financial capital such as NY not have any money and then wants to nickel and dime everything to make up for lost revenue?

I've used XP for years, I recently upgraded to Vista 64 bit Ultimate. While it was nice and all, the OS took up 24GB on a 30GB partition and I did not install anything. Talk about bloat, it was straight crap. I then decided to give Windows 7 32 bit a try and have not looked back. While there are a few quirks with certain programs, I have yet to have a BSOD or anything. Actually, it encountered a problem installing paint.net and gave the exact steps to fix it. I did not have to google or search arcane MS Knowledge base articles. It was a simple copy and paste to edit a registry setting and boom it fixed the problem. Vista is the equivalent of an over budget Hollywood blockbuster flop. If Windows 7 is making up for that then keep going. Please keep it lean.

I meant hole not whole.