The "volume" of commercials is exactly the same as television shows. Someone screaming on a TV show is just as loud as someone screaming on a commercial. The trick that commercials do is compress all of the audio into the high range. There are no quiet subtle sounds in a commercial. To make commercials not audibly jump out at you TV channels would have to run a filter with an algorithm to reduce the perceived volume of commercials. This could also easily be done by a human. Both methods require another step in the process which costs money, and is technically lowering the volume of commercials below that of TV shows. Advertisers will fight it forever or find another way around it.

I agree with the original poster that people who don't do clean installs are in for a bad time. If you've successfully upgraded Windows on top of an older version you should consider yourself extremely lucky. I prefer to do clean installs and save my good luck for winning the lottery and such.

I guess this stuff is different from the transparent aluminum I've been hearing about for years.

It's fairly easy to boil down the numbers as to whether or not the movie was financially worth it, but was the movie artistically worth it? Considering the writer of the original award winning graphic novel wants nothing to do with the movie, and the unlikelihood of the Watchmen movie winning any artistic awards, I don't think this movie was artistically worth it.

The actual url from the article's screenshot is this: http://maps.google.de/maps?t=m&hl=de&q=Tscheljabinsk+Russland Takes you to the same place with no smiley face. Some cars have been photoshopped out but others are in the exact same positions as the fake photo.