It ain't easy being white,
It ain't easy being brown,
All this pressure to be bright,
I got childrens all over town!

Oh yeah, the guy in the $4000 suit is holding the elevator for the guy who doesn't make that in 3 months... COME ON!"

That's fine if the salespeople have the authority to offer such discounts, but for many suppliers that's probably not the case, in which case your chit-chat is just that.

If a worker drone isn't allowed to do anything but toe the company line, then they probably won't.

FFS, moderators! Don't mod people up for parroting the same fucking line every time someone mentions RAID. Everyone knows that RAID isn't a backup solution, and the OP didn't say it was.

Throwing mod points at ACs just for mindlessly repeating the incredibly obvious is retarded.

Amen. Backup Exec is a steaming pile of turds. How do you turn a simple backup operation into a hideous unreliable abomination? Ask Symantec.

You could all go out and buy a copy of Rage to show your thanks. You don't even have to play it. ;)

Ok, it seems you're not the only one who gets this wrong, so...

PEDANT MODE ACTIVATED.

The term is "Film at 11".

It comes from the dim and distant past, when news broadcasts from out in the field were recorded on actual film, which had to be cut and processed in studio before it could be aired.

A story would be announced earlier in the evening, promising the "film at 11", when you could tune in and actually see the footage.

Get it now, Mr Frosty Piss?

That's nice and everything, but I'll wait for Ivy Bridge, which is due March 2012.

According to Wikipedia:

Ivy Bridge feature improvements from Sandy Bridge were expected to include:

Tri-gate transistor technology (up to 50% less power consumption)
PCI Express 3.0 support
Max CPU multiplier of 63 (57 for Sandy Bridge)
RAM support up to 2800MT/s in 200MHz increments
Next Generation Intel HD Graphics with DirectX 11, OpenGL 3.1, and OpenCL 1.1 support
The built-in GPU is believed to have up to 16 execution units (EUs), compared to Sandy Bridge's maximum of 12.
The new random number generator and the RdRand instruction, which is codenamed Bull Mountain.
Next Generation Intel Quick Sync Video
DDR3 low voltage for mobile processors
Multiple 4k video playback

So yeah, just hang on for the die shrink if you care about performance and power consumption. My next system will definitely be Ivy Bridge based.

My brain is fried and beer-addled, so I can't even begin to figure out how much rice we'd need to match the annual demand for this protein, but I can tell that it's a LOT.

As a supplement to existing sources (blood donation) this might be marginally useful. When the yield increases about tenfold, I'll be more excited.

Until then, it seems like you could save a lot more lives by just giving starving people ordinary rice. It would cost less, too.

I can't wait until one of the knucklehead police operators accidentally flies this thing into a tree or power lines or something.

Then they get to explain to the media why their $300,000 toy just became a $5 pile of twisted metal.

I think Rick Perry would execute his own mother if you gave him $5.

This should be installed on every glass door and floor-length window in every shop, mall and office building in the world...

...with hilarious results.

I am, in fact, on Virgin Media cable. 100mb is the top tier.

I know that their 100mb service isn't available in all cable regions (yet). I also know they claim that they shape P2P on all tiers. However, I've torrented quite a bit and never seen evidence of shaping. I can max out the bandwidth on torrents. Maybe if i did it 24/7 they'd start shaping it, but it hasn't happened yet.

Americans seem to have REALLY low expectations of their ISPs.

Here in an average-sized town in Scotland I've got a 100mb connection for £35($54)/mo. No capping, no traffic shaping, no services blocked.

The "realities" are that US customers have been trained to expect and accept shit service from their ISPs. Lack of competition in many states compounds the problem.