Hey, I think it's great you can write your Minesweeper clones in Visual Basic on XP! Too bad MS sends the *user* 'critical' XP updates that break 3rd party firewalls, break Wordpad backward compatibility, or install an unwanted new version of IE. It makes you hold your breath every time you boot, and keeps you on your toes.

Oh, and by the way, I just LOVE flamewars about a soon-to-be obsolete OS with random slashdot posters!

ROFL Hardware agnostic? Fairly open? Friendly? You must be a Microserf.

Have you ever heard of Windows Genuine DisAdvantage? Upgrade your graphics card and The Allseeing Eye of Redmond decides to cut you off from the eternal stream of XP patches.

The only way to lift that spell that is to drop all of your XP licenses in the fires of Doom Mountain. Not easy, since "one does not walk simply into Redmond".

So it's probably already patented.. That, and we'll all be forced to run Windows 9 on our quantum computers. How is that cool?

A lot of it was actually plundered from the rest of Europe by the Nazis. They exchanged the gold for Portuguese wolfram ore.

http://gold.greyfalcon.us/gold6.html

"Allied intelligence concluded Portugal had received $143.8 million of gold from the Swiss National Bank, about half of the increase in Portugal’s gold reserves reported earlier in this chapter. Of this amount, the Allies were certain that $22.6 million was from gold looted from Belgium and of the remaining portion 72% was looted by the Nazis."

Anyway, it can't be used to pay of portuguese debt. It can't be sold in any significant amount, since that would seriously disrupt the gold market.

In Europe, church taxes YOU!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_tax

I saw this presented on Dutch TV a few hours ago, and this thing does NOT have a parachute. The testpilot was wearing one for the test flights though. Not sure how he planned to get out and avoid the rotor and propellor.

To answer some questions in this thread, this is STOL, not VTOL. The rotor is sort of powered, but nor for lift. It just spins up before take-off to get in the air ASAP.

The company plans to get these things on the market in two years. They expect the police to use these as a cheap alternative to choppers, and there was speculation about civil use in countries with lots of space, like Australia.

So, yeah, meh.

Pay your tithe you heathens!
http://stuffgodhates.com/2010/09/87-cheapskates/

So.. you believe in the mythical man minute?