What of those big full page ads in the yellow pages? They don't give those away for free. I don't think phone book companies deeply screen their entries.

I do like the phone book analogy.

Jack Thompson will come out and say that the bad juju from violent video games is whats causing the surge in autism?

Besides, I was under the impression that it was the combination of vaccines before the age of 2 (36?) that was the leading factor. Specifically MMR+Chicken Pox combination.

They should field test this in Chicago. With so many damn pot holes on the road, they could get years of lab testing done in about a week.

When talking to my dad on the phone we joked about the amount of money involved with the stimulus bill and the TARP... while chatting I opened up 'calc' and did some math for him.

We figured that if every dollar of these two bills went to pay off mortgages under $250,000; 5,600,000 could be paid off in full at the very least. Now imagine 5.6 million families with a sudden $2000/month in disposable income. /end rant

real question; Should the government impose a moratorium on foreclosures until 2010 or 2011 under certain circumstances? (loss of job, medical, natural/artificial disaster, etc.) Its awful to see people get evicted from their homes because of some things they could not control.

Using my very foggy memory; Windows ME wasn't the first culprit in the gamble. Though very much the most visible.

Win95 was "fixed" by Win95b/c.
Win98 was fixed by Win98SE
WinME ... yeah... I guess was fixed by Windows XP
Windows Vista will now be "fixed" by Windows 7.

Microsoft has a history of coming out with fixes for products that trump the first versions by leaps and bounds. Not how one would expect to do business, but its worked for them so far. They just got burned really badly by vista.

How long until people are able to figure out how to mask their undesirable data to make it look like mission critical data.

When friends and I ran a private FTP server from my high school (higher bandwidth back then)I thought I was clever and assigned it to a port that was used by the game Team Fortress Classic. Eventually we got a call from the bandwidth nazis saying we were running a possible game server on our network; find it and get rid of it. Many laughs were had.

Also my downloads from usenet today were crippled until I told my news reader to use port 80; all of a sudden my download speeds tripled.

How long can companies play this song and dance?

until states start outsourcing their call centers to other countries to save money?

Anyway, the Illinois TeleServ system is constantly busy. I have to use my cell and ground line to dial at the same time to try to get through.

A developer designed a "AAA" PC game that was designed completely around a dual+ GPU hardware spec?

Look at the past with the move to hardware 3d acceleration. Games designed (not sponsored) around a specific hardware requirement, spawned ... sales!

I don't want a game that barely supports SLI/Crossfire. I want a game that requires it by design.

from "Borging" an existing/profitable patent; licensing out the technology. Then using said profits to fund non-budget allocated black projects. Since the patent office will side with the NSA already.

I'm just sayin'...

You know, kinda like RAMBUS except instead of black projects; you use lines of cocaine for executives.

lived and died with 440BX. I owned a BH6,BX6 and BE6 rev 1 and 2. I enjoyed all of those boards very much; though I had lots of issues personally with the HPT366 controller on the BE6 rev2 but meh I survived.

After that I just moved on to other companies. Mostly ASUS. Never really got into the ABIT scene again really. Ah memories.

Otto was the Autopilot.

My wife and I were just discussing her the other evening; while watching WALL-E. Feeling sad that pixar didn't cast her as the voice of the ship's computer. Instead we got a vague homage to Alien in Sigourney Weaver.

What I am now coming to realize by digesting this sad news; is that playing the voice of such a seemingly mundane role -of a starship's computer, Has become an icon of the Sci-Fi genre. While certainly not the first to play such a role. She certainly changed the entire paradigm of how the role was portrayed.

Her efforts to continue her husbands work and support of the genre will be sorely missed.