Maybe the reason why we are not ok with it is because it is not Cisco's equipment but our own? I mean, we did pay for it right?

Setting aside all the arguments about privacy, anonymity, and you dont-have-anything-to-fear-if-you-have-nothing-to-hide crap we can at least agree that if you own something... you know... maybe you should own it?

I guess you don't give a fuck if you walk into your house, or business, and you find somebody standing there inspecting or modifying your equipment just because they sold it to you. That's sounds perfectly reasonable.

I wouldn't say D&D was crappy, but it is primitive by today's standards. WOTC managed to oversimplify it... that made it crappy.

These short lifecycles are proof that WOTC (and their Hasbro overlords) still don't know how to manage an RPG. Almost everyone complained about moneygrubbing when 3.5 came out, and then some more when 4e came out. WOTC over-corrected for TSR's failure (too many crap/undersupported settings, and silly supplements) and took the wrong lessons from it. They've reduced the number of settings and put the core system on a version cycle that the model can't support, when they should have let system versions stand for 10 years and draw turnover from new setting materials.

Granted, 1e only lasted ~11 years until 1988 because of a legal spat between TSR and Gygax, otherwise who knows how long it could have run. 2e ended because WOTC thought it was too complex, and therefore difficult to market (it sort of was, after TSR spent its last six years bloating it). 3.5, 4e, and now this are just gratuitous.

And the sad thing is, most people who cut their teeth on 3e+ just don't know how to portray a character (or properly GM a game), because modern D&D is more about combat and powers; it's become somewhat more an FPS/MMO with dice than a classic tabletop RPG.

If this new version trades feats/powers/prestige classes (all the roll-playing junk that metastasized from kits in the brown books) for actual role playing, they'd be getting the game back on track.

I bought my 13" MacbookPro for $1100 (and that includes 8GB of RAM purchased externally, Windows 7, Office 2007, and Parallels). Yes, I exercised educational discounts for all, but for you to say that you need to spend $2000 to get a good computer.

I have a Lenovo laptop and this MacbookPro (as our main machines, we also have a desktop server machine). The Lenovo laptop outlasted its usefulness over a year ago. The keyboard has broken keys and trying to get Lenovo to tell me what I need to buy to replace it is like pulling teeth (no, I should not be transferred around to 6 different people and finally be told that I need to remove the keyboard itself and find the part number to get a replacement).

The Lenovo was an ok machine and I liked their warranty replacement service when I needed it. However the machine feels and looks cheap--because it was. It's woefully underpowered for Win7 even though that's what it came with. It had a TON of bullshit installed on it that I had to spend time removing when I first turned on the machine.

Counter to this is my MBP (13" which I upgraded to 8GB of RAM myself) which I took out of the box and haven't had a single complaint about yet. The machine is rock solid, its fast, even with only 8GB of RAM, and I didn't have a bunch of bullshit software on there.

Yeah, I admit to thinking (and still thinking) $1100 is a lot for a machine. But I use it all day, every day. Just like the bike I bought to commute to work, I need something durable, reliable, and easy to utilize. I particularly love going into a coffee shop or sitting in the airport and looking at the number of PCs plugged in somewhere and the number of Mac users happily chugging along on battery only. The MBP fits that comfortably. I am impressed and as long as Apple keeps this sort of quality up, I will be coming back time and time again.

That said, I figure I can get 5 years or more out of the MBP after an upgrade to 16GB (when it's reasonable) and SSD. I am worried OS X will stop supporting older chips (as they did with PowerPC) and I'll be left with unsupported hardware in the future but I have hope.

However, the Lenovo is underpowered, miserable to use, and has the battery life of a hooker on speed's dildo (even with a brand new battery--less than a month old).

I don't recommend Macs to everyone but it's serving its purpose well for me and I'm glad I made the switch. It does absolutely everything I need it to do and I'm quite happy with it.

YMMV.

The biggest single group of victims of Islamic terrorism and militantism is, by a long shot, Muslims. Even Palestinian suicide bombers are/were very indiscriminate and would often kills as many Arabs as Jews in the attacks.

I kind of see your point, but you are being a little bit simplistic. Perhaps that is why you are being modded troll.

In just about any kind of renewal energy design, that is based on variable power sources, they are using energy storage to provide a constant amount of energy. Obviously the peak energy that can produced will be during daylight hours, and during the parts of the year where there is more sun.

Storing energy in molten sodium is not a new concept. On a smaller point source scale I have seen designs using flywheels and conventional batteries.

If you are going to go renewable, the sources should be multiple, and energy storage is usually a given.

IMO, you don't need to go fully renewable right away. If Germany can produce 1/3rd of its daily energy needs (especially during peak hours) from renewable sources that is valuable progress.

See: natural ice age cycles. We're still coming out of an ice age right now. It's going to get a lot warmer regardless of human activities. Then, it will become cold again eventually, repeating the cycle.

You are not looking out for those you look down up on in secret, the grand-parent was talking about AOL practice to keep people paying for dialup access when they already moved to broadband connections. So it is NOT for people who still use ONLY dialup, it is a scam operated by AOL to convince people that without their dialup service, broadband would not work or people would loose all their email, so people end up paying a high price for just their email account.