does not can...

Not that anyone ever should have taken prince seriously, but if anyone still can they need to go watch an evening with Kevin Smith lol.

When I worked in the mortgage industry, everyone said that these people would destroy your credit. I saw instances of them submitting the same account to the 3 credit rating bureaus under different business names so that credit reports made it look like people had way more outstanding debt. I've heard horror stories about them as a lender in general in fact, so much so that I've been given advice to never accept a store credit card that's backed by HSBC. I also briefly did work for them as a real estate appraiser, and our firm rather rapidly decided to stop doing business with them entirely, though I cannot remember what the reasoning is now (it's been several years).

My parents own an 04 or 05 Highlander, and I've got to say it's really been a dog. I've always thought very highly of Toyota, but the Highlander has been enough to make me think twice about buying one anytime in the near future.

1st it's got a check engine light issue. The charged my parents a few hundred dollars to reflash the ecu to take care of the issue. Except it was back in less than a week. Now they say it needs new catalytic converter(s) and will cost $1100+ to fix. The car runs just fine however and doesn't leave an unburned gas smell like a non-functional catalytic converter would have so I'm not really sure if it's just them wanting to throw parts at the problem. Further, the problem sometimes goes away after getting gas, leading me to believe that it might be related to the gas cap which is incredibly funking on the car.

2nd it's got an air pressure monitoring system that sometimes just trips and you can't untrip without going to the dealership. That means anytime the air in the tire gets low, or the system thinks it is even if it isn't, you have to take a trip to the dealership because the method for reseting it doesn't actually work. They supposedly fixed that last time it was in the shop, but I rather doubt it.

3rd the heater doesn't work. More specifically, the heater doesn't work in the winter. You absolutely cannot get the heater to come on in the winter. However, if it's warm outside and you hit a bump it will come on regardless of where the dial is. Supposedly they fixed that this summer at the shop, except I've driven it twice this winter and been unable to get the heater to come on.

4th when you step on the gas, it doesn't really do anything. It's my understanding that this was one of Toyota's first cars that had the electric gas pedal. And while I'm certainly glad it doesn't just start accelerating like some of them have done, it presents it's own form of danger. You can floor the gas pedal, and it takes almost a full second for it to notice you've hit the gas. It seems slightly less noticeable when you're making a less drastic change in position of the accelerator, but that may be because you're not really expecting it to change drastically then. This is dangerous. If I need to get the hell out of the way of something coming at me, I don't want to wait a full second for the car to figure out that I've pushed the gas pedal. It does the same thing if I'm already driving and have to suddenly press the accelerator down to speed up. You can literally mash the pedal to the floor and then lift your foot back up with absolutely no change in engine speed on the car!

While the first issue may not be an electronics issue, as we're not really sure, the second, third, and fourth issues certainly are. In the hurry to make everything electronic, I think they've introduced some serious reliability issues into their vehicles, which is a shame because growing up I always thought of Toyotas as being of high quality and reliability. I still wouldn't hesitate to buy an older Toyota, in fact I've been looking at getting a late 80's 4runner, but I don't think I'd buy a new Toyota right now even if I could afford to.

Yes, I'd certainly prefer smokers did smoke inside their homes rather than outside, even if it destroys their electronics. Why? Because then I'd be less likely to have to smell the disgustingness of it. I hate being stuck behind someone on a sidewalk who smokes. I also hate being stuck behind a car that smokes, because it then gets sucked into the air intake coming into my car and smells inside my car. It might be one thing if smokers would smoke their damn cigarettes, but it seems like half the time they're just standing there polluting the air with their cigarette in between their fingers and not actually smoking their cigarette. I don't think smoking should be illegal, but I think it should be something that is illegal to expose other people to, especially children.

I wonder what my UID would have been if I'd signed up when I first started coming here instead of lurking for 6 or 7 years first heh.

GIMP takes me 12 times as long to get ANYTHING done with. I'm certainly not a power user in photoshop, but simple little things take me a lot longer because of just how different GIMP seems to work. One of these days I'll get around to installing photoshop in WINE and then I can disregard GIMP totally.

Actually installing office works just fine in Linux (Office 2007 at least). Though MS Access doesn't seem to work currently, how many home users really use that anyway?

I agree. I run on Linux for my own personal use these days (though I do still have to boot into windows for a couple of Windows applications for my work), but my family is die hard windows only. I've recently started converting them to limited user accounts as I format their systems to repair the terrible damage they've done to them. My father, who's been using computers for around 25 years now, is the only real holdout I have who refuses to use a limited user account. The only problems you might run into is a lot of windows applications insist that they need administrator access to run properly, so be prepared for an onslaught of dealing with this. It's especially bad if your users are on something like Windows XP, where it's not as easy to elevate the privileges temporarily. For instance, my mother uses a loan processing/origination software for her work called Calyx Point. In XP it does not run on a limited user account by default without messing with the registry and permissions of the directories. Same deal with a lot of games as well. When I setup my nephews PC I put him on a limited user account on his windows xp system, and when he wanted to start playing Diablo II, I had to do some searching to figure out just what I had to change to let it run on a limited user account. I haven't had these limited user systems up long enough to really see a noticeable difference in if the systems get as fouled up, so it will be interesting to see. I did use all my normal security settings and programs on top of the limited user accounts. Hopefully this will keep my family from trashing their computers twice a year. I'd suggest trying the same thing. Of course if they don't have to have windows, by all means stick them on something like Ubuntu, just be prepared for all of the "Why can't I see the dancing bunnies?!" questions you'll get heh.

I've modded a couple of my systems over the years. Most notably my sega saturn? The main reason why? As games get older and older, and become harder and harder to find, I'd rather play my backups than originals as it gets harder and more expensive to replace them. This is especially true of optical media where one small mishap can render a game unplayable.

Another reason IE has market share: there are industries where the websites that are required to work in them requires IE. For instance, I'm a real estate appraiser, and every year or so I attempt to login to a paragon MLS system with firefox and java to see if it will work. It doesn't, things don't load right if they load at all. It only works with IE and java. For now what I do is use the IE tab firefox plugin for those webpages that require IE, but that's not a real solution by any means. Maybe someday I'll actually be able to do my job from within Linux, until then I have to continue having the option to boot into windows. (In all fairness, my primary software: Ala Mode Wintotal doesn't work in Wine anyway, and I've not seen a real replacement that's compatible with Linux).

Seriously. I used to tell everyone to use firefox instead of IE. Now as firefox seems to get more and more bloated, chrome looks more and more appealing.

Don't you mean "d00d"

The thing I always find scary about zombies is that they can't be reasoned with, there's nothing to connect with. If you look at many of the other horror movie/story staples, there's often something that can be connected to. Frankenstein's monster had some humanity left that could be connected to, the same with vampires, and even serial killers, but the zombie is unable to communicate, and can't be connected to. (unless you're talking about one of those weird zombie movies where they can, like one I watched part of on AMC the other day, I want to say return of the living dead or something, about some kids in a mortuary). At the same time, I find the older style zombie stories about the witch doctors less scary for this exact same reason. Perhaps the witch doctor can be reasoned with, or in some cases even the zombie itself. It's for this reason that I didn't really find the serpent and the rainbow http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096071/ a scary movie at all. At the same time, I did find it an interesting and good movie.

You know, I logged in specifically to suggest just that. Anytime I buy anything online from a store I haven't used many times in the past, I will do as much research as possible on them first. Additionally, I read reviews for said item on as many different sites as I can to try and avoid bias.