Topping off your car in Oregon is illegal now too. Pretty soon it'll be required that you have a hazmat suit and a special "vehicle fuel dispensing" license just to put gas in a car. Ugh.

I have the RTM and I only have DVI monitors, no problems.

Holy crap that's depressingly accurate. Can we get that made into a billboard?

They may whine but I would counter their argument with an argument about wear and tear on the road. I have no stats to back up my claim but my guess would be that a tractor trailer or a hummer would do just a bit more damage to the road surface than a Prius would. They should, therefore, pay more than the prius owner.

This. Don't let the government fool you. They're not in the business of taxing you less or taking taxes away. They're in the business of lining their pockets. Yes, I've become a bit cynical over the years.

The same is true in Oregon with sales taxes. There are always people pushing them. What they always leave out is that they aren't going to decrease property taxes, state income taxes or any other source of state revenue accordingly. They're just going to tax you even more than before.

FTFY.

This is probably close to the truth. I found the Windows 7 install to be dead simple. It's by far the fastest, easiest windows install yet. I was actually quite impressed. Of course, I was doing a clean install, not an upgrade. Upgrading your OS is just asking for trouble IMO.

Note: I'm talking about the 64bit install on a 2.67 GHz C2D with 4 GB of RAM and a 10k HDD. Although I also had excellent results on an ancient 2.4 GHz P4 with only 1GB of RAM. Obviously the latter wasn't nearly as fast as the former but it was still much better than doing an XP install.

That is awesome. Thanks for the tip.

This is part of the reason having multiple monitors rather than one large one was useful for so long. Windows 7 has better window management built right in although you still can't specify that you'd like to treat an arbitrary area as separate. As monitors get bigger we're going to need better window management tools.

Ultramon is cool but I don't believe it will let you select an area of your screen and say, "this is an area that defines the limits of maximzation" (please correct me if I'm wrong!) Even on a 24" display it can get tiring constantly arranging your windows into the correct configuration. Multiple 30" monitors would only make you go crazy. That's not to say I wouldn't enjoy though. Having 3 1600x1200 monitors has been great. I wouldn't complain about having a few 30's. :)

This is true, however, this is also the reason you don't piss off cops. Don't let them violate your rights, sure, but don't be a jerk. They will instantly acquire an almost da Vinci-like creativity for inventing reasons you've broken the law. It's not worth the hassle.

The scale of Microsoft's sites exacerbates the problem, but it's not the cause. I don't think Microsoft has ever had a standard look and feel across all of its sites. They just don't make unifying the look and feel a priority. It's completely doable but it's time consuming and time is money. Obviously there is either no top-down direction for site look and feel or if there is, it's got no teeth. The individual divisions all do their own thing. The total lack of consistency is evidence of that. Consistency doesn't come as a result of tinkering or playing with the look and feel. It comes from developing a standard and rigidly adhering to it.

Having spent some time trying to dig through their various sites over the years, I have to agree. The trouble is Microsoft has everything from office software suites to games. Although a cohesive design would really help navigation and usability I wouldn't envy the guy that has to try and do it. I would, however, really like to see it happen. Half the time I give up and just google something rather than try and find it using their navigation.

Did someone say.... BACON!? FF to 2:00 for applicable material!

Saying, "I told you so," isn't nearly as much fun when you have to clean up the mess. It's always the smart guy that ends up paying the price when the dumb guy / management screw up. Who stays late and fixes the code / saves the server when things break? The guy that knows what he's doing. He may feel like a hero afterward but mostly he just feels pissed off that he had to do it at all.

I can't count the number of times I've wondered why I'm in a meeting or why I've been consulted at all. If you aren't going to respect my opinion, you needn't bother asking. It only makes it that much more depressing when I have to clean up your mess later without so much as a, "yeah, I guess you were right."

All right, time to start the ol' betting pool up. Let's guess how long it'll be before someone hacks that and just permanently steals everyone's DPP. I must say, however, it's awfully nice of them to make theft easier than ever. Why bother to leave your house when you can do it from the comfort of your office chair? If you'd like to ransom their belongings you can use the Internet for that too! Thanks Internet!