The only thing that is gas in my house is the stove. With 3 full size PC's (700W+) running 24/7/365, and heating/cooling the house with central air/heat 24/7/365 my electric bill is usually between $100-180. I'd be interested to know how it compares to someone using gas to heat and cool. I have a feeling that if you took out my PC's and the central air, my bill would be around $5 a month lol

The 1TB Samsung (good solid main drive if you aren't using SSD's) drive I was paying $59 for before the shortage and the floods for all my personal and customer's builds is now down to $79.99. And you can get 3TB drives for around $170 again as well. Not bad IMO. I'm sure in another 3-6 months the prices will drop again for the holiday's. The price for that 1TB drive was $79.99 around this time last year as well. Only some manufacturers still have outrageous prices, most notably Western Digital.

I really hope that people won't give in without at least expressing their anger to Comcast by finding another ISP if available, when they implement tiered pricing. I hope Comcast users push back like us TW users did.

One of the MAIN reasons these ISP's are introducing tiered pricing is simply to avoid the costs of upgrading their infrastructure. Instead of modernizing their networks and equipment to handle today's higher demand for more and more bandwidth, they simply implement overage fees and/or tiered pricing to keep people's usage within the confines of what their infrastructure can handle. It really is a scam on so many different levels. This is why the US is so far behind in broadband when looking at other country's broadband statistics.

Money hungry as ever, the largest ISP's over here just don't see the need to provide a higher level of service to home users when it means investing hundreds of $Millions, possibly more, to do it.

In addition to that, you have places like Rochester, NY where no competition can EVER break into the market because 1 or 2 ISP's have monopolized the space for new fiber and/or copper runs, effectively creating a stagnant market where users have no choices for service (ISP's such as EarthLink give the ILLUSION of choice, but really only lease space on another larger ISP's lines, such as Time Warner).

...was my idea, according to Microsoft. Steve Ballmer is definitely the worst CEO ever, giving away ideas like that.

The word "fact" doesn't appear in either of my posts. Actually, I specifically say in the second one that most of what I say after are my opinions. Also, I've read several articles from different sources that list Trayvon as weighing approx. 140 lbs, and Zimmerman weighing approx. 250. No exactly double, but close enough in my book. I can only go by what is being reported.

While this is obviously just my opinion now, I have a hard time believing that all of a sudden Trayvon just came charging full speed at Zimmerman with the intent to kill him. Instead of simply getting back in his car and driving away, Zimmerman then chose to "stand his ground"? Ridiculous. It would be different if the kid had been armed with ANY kind of weapon. But Zimmerman is twice his size and had a gun. What could Trayvon have possibly done to Zimmerman? Even if Zimmerman had got in his car and even simply locked the door, what could have been done to him? The whole situation stinks of bad decisions and paranoia.

He was told by the dispatcher NOT to follow and to wait for the police. He didn't. That should be the end of the story right there. He chose to go after this kid, with a gun. Regardless of who started the fight that lead to Martin getting shot, it should have never gotten to that point. Only someone looking for trouble goes stalking after some kid at dusk with a gun.

I'd be willing to bet that there is no provision specifically saying "You can't curse on the internet" since they specifically say in the article:

which tells me that they decided this on the spot. And if there actually IS a rule listed that says they can't curse on the internet, that school is fucked and it's better he is going somewhere else anyway. I made an entire website against my school when I was a young'n and all I got was a couple days of suspension before they eventually APOLOGIZED for suspending me and expunged it from my record. They even sent a tutor to my house while I was on suspension so I didn't fall behind. Schools nowadays are WAY too PC. If you try to sanitize kids artificially like this, you will end up with cookie cutter, boring kids entering college who aren't prepared for the real world.

Also, if this DID take place on the schools network, then the network administrator for that school should be fired, since anybody knows you block social networking along with many other things in work and school environments, especially on school-owned computers. It's enterprise network management 101.

...when he found out he was expelled was probably "Fuck" so all the school is doing is encouraging his profanity.

Seriously though, this is happening more and more across the country. I don't understand how the school gets off thinking it is their job or right to police what kids say outside of school or what they do with their accounts or anything on the internet if they are not specifically mentioning the school. At the very most, he should have had the school issued laptop taken away. That's it. Sure if they are attacking a staff member directly they can go from there, but trying to stop anyone from cursing ridiculous at least, and most likely a constitutional violation.