For a long while I was set on getting an ereader. I just had to have one. I tried reading books on my crackberry but the screen was just too damn small and scrolling was a pain. The only thing that kept be from buying a Sony ereader or a Kindle was the price. For the money you can instead buy an Xbox 360 (I have two and the last was only $160 thanks to a coupon at CircuitCity), or an Iphone ($199 for an 8 gig) or hell, get both. So that's what I ended up doing. I bought both.

Is my ereader experience as great as that on a Kindle? I dunno. What I do know is that it's "good enough" for my uses. I just want to read some fiction. I want to kick back and read some Robin Cook or Dean Koontz in the can or at a theater while waiting for the show or whatever. I use Stanza on my iPhone and I downloaded a few collections via torrents and I'm all set for quite a while. Plus I have a phone and an mp3 player and God knows what else I've added to my phone. And like I said earlier, I also have a second Xbox 360 which obviously lets me play games but I wanted a second for streaming movies and tv shows into my bedroom.

Maybe if I had a train ride to work everyday a Kindle would make sense, but even then it's too big to be dropped in my pocket and I'd still have to have my phone with me. Who wants yet another gadget to lug around?

This is why I don't bother with PC games anymore. The last game I bought for PC was HL2 and then I picked up the Orange Box for 360 and have never looked back. Sure 360 games have some bugs but I don't have to worry about what hardware I have, are my drivers up to date, do I have the latest patches, and all the other crap that goes along with pc gaming. Plus, I know a year from now my 360 will still play all of the 360 games (unless it breaks of course) whereas with pc gaming, my hardware that I have today may not be able to play the latest and greatest a year from now, at least not with decent looking graphics with a good frame rate. Console gaming is cheaper, less of a hassle, and in some cases, a much better overall experience.

I have the Xbox 360 version and on Tuesday I bought the first DLC. I then spent nearly two hours trying to find the stupid thing because what I read online said to go west from the factory when in fact I only needed to go a short distance south. Had I not read that, I would have probably found it on my own in five or ten minutes.

That said, I've been more than happy with both the original game and the expansion. I don't feel that the expansion does the game justice as it's too linear and doesn't quite have the same feel, but I feel like they pull it off because it's a simulation of something else so it still fits. I've had the game lockup a few times and I've gotten stuck three times. The last time I was stuck happened within the expansion and it was when I cut the corner on a walkway and stepped off the beaten path. My character could turn around but could not jump nor move in any direction. I reloaded from my last save and all was fine. I've learned when playing Fallout 3 you need to save early and often and I do just that.

I realize from reading a lot of material concerning the game that there is literally a shitload of bugs in this game but I wonder if that has anything to do with the sheer size of the game. I've never played anything else that allows you so much freedom. Games like HL2 are nice and long but very linear. It has to be easier to test a linear game. In Fallout you have so many options, so many ways you can do things. Do you follow the guidebook and do things in order or do you just wander all over the place? And is there even really an order to it at all? You have so many sidequests and encounters that a huge number of variables need to be considered when testing the game.

Honestly I think the game rocks. It's immensely fun to play and I've logged close to 40 hours in game thus far. Are there bugs and problems? Sure. But don't you find that in nearly every game these days? Can Bethesda really be expected to find every single bug? They worked on this for years. It's massive. At some point they need to turn a profit to stay in business. How many testers and how many hours would it take to test every possible scenario? To do so would be crazy. They test most of it and hope they get all of the major bugs.

Yes, yes it did. You can however, find it avail online at the usual places, as a rip from a game that sounds a lot less crappy. Odd that the store bought version is the crappy one. I typically download all of my tunes and on occasion I grab something that is less than great. I then grab another copy from someone else. I was thinking everyone had a crap copy until I read the news that the actual master was shite. How can a band as large as Metallica make such an amateur mistake? If we want to crank things up in our tunes or overdrive our amps or whatever, we can do that after we buy the cd thank you very much. No need for you to muck things up in the studio.

Not that it's all that great of a cd anyway. They have a couple of slower parts that sound really great and then they go into the heavy stuff and I dunno... just doesn't feel right. Tis a shame. I think they have a lot of talent and I used to be a huge fan.

The desperate need something too. Isn't some job paying some wage better than nothing at all? Just because you are unemployed doesn't mean you qualify for any handouts. My wife just this week finally found a job after being unemployed for the past four months. Could we make it on just my income? Not quite. We had to miss a few payments on the car and had some other issues. She now has a job that pays decent but it's only temp and doesn't offer bennies. But so what? It allows us to get things back in order, get caught up on bills, and work toward something better/more permanent. The bottom of the barrel jobs can help people get through tough times. They aren't careers, but sometimes you just need something to get you from point a to point b.

As for companies offering only minimum wage and no bennies, in most cases when you find yourself or both you and your spouse suddenly unemployed, anything IS better than nothing. In my wife's case we knew she would be unemployed for a bit because we just moved to somwhere much cheaper than where we were living so it was not unexpected and we planned for it the best we could. However, I have a number of friends that were SUDDENLY and without warning let go. For some of them it was a same day deal. Show up to work and find out you no longer have a job. No advance warning at all. For some they had no idea the company was planning on downsizing at all.

I think a large part of what is making the current crisis so bad is how quickly some of this has been happening. And of course how widespread the problem is isn't helping matters. I've always been able to find a job by just asking around among friends and someone always knew some company that was hiring. Not anymore.

Your ideas intrigue me and I wish to subscribe to your militia.

My first thought was WoW as well. How the hell could any game beat WoW with so many people paying every single month. I don't believe for a second that GH has beaten it. Then again, if we are talking just console games... I don't think WoW is avail on console is it? I've never played it so I dunno... just know that I'm in the minority as it seems to be the most popular game there is.

I can confirm that for Xbox 360 systems, the hard drives are swappable. I had a pro system that got the dreaded rrod a couple days ago. Picked up an arcade model and put my hard drive on that with no issues whatsoever. I had to redownload updates for games but all of my saves, profile info, and other data was all there. I don't see why a hard drive would be locked to a system since systems are known to take a dump on occasion. Seems a tad bit ridiculous.

And IIRC those new HDTVs that claim to do 120 don't actually do it they just generates a frame that links the other two. Please correct me if I'm wrong about that though

You are wrong. The whole point of the tv's that that do 120 is that they don't have to add any frames. Film is usually 24 fps. At 120 hz you show the same frame 5 times and everything is peachy. At 60hz you have an issue. You show it twice and you are at 48... so you need to make up the difference somehow. That said, from what I've read, 120hz on it's own doesn't make much of a noticeable difference, however other things like smoothing, anti-judder (or whatever it's called... that's what it was called in a cnet article) can make a big difference.

your local bittorrent tracker

umm... what? For some reason this made me think of unions... where did you get the torrent for (whatever)? Oh, I hit up tracker local 142. It's got all the goods! lol

Your point though remains and I download most tv shows and movies that I want to see. For tv shows I can get the wide screen version without commercials. Sometimes I even get episodes before they air. Weeds had the first four or five eps posted online about a month before the season started. Was great until I had to wait so long for the next episode after watching them all back to back in one sitting.

I know it's not an online game but it is an rpg and similar in many respects. This is a genre I've never gotten into before due to the learning curve. I normally stick to run and gun shooters like Halo, Gears, etc. Fallout 3 starts off with a nice tutorial that doesn't seem like just a tutorial. You don't have someone saying look up, look down, look left, now right like in some games. It starts with the story, with your birth, and then you have to do simple stuff that progresses the story and teaches you the basic controls at the same time. I didn't have to stop and think about how to do something or check the control mapping before proceeding. I found it to be quite intuitive.

Brighthouse had some failure a couple weeks back and cable tv service was out for 8 to 20 hours depending on where you lived. Happened right when two big sports games were on tv so a lot of people were pissed. Brighthouse is doing pro-rated refunds for that time period. They also sent a coupon for a free pay per view movie and a letter of apology. A coupon for a free pay per view event, wrestling, boxing, whatever, would have been much nicer as I've already seen all of the pay per movies that I want to see right now. I thought it was a nice gesture though.

Yea yea, blah blah. Make your own god damn films if you feel so strongly! No seriously. Make some films so we have something better to watch then the current batch of horse shit. You can't. Neither can I. Nor can anyone else. That is why we get the same shit recycled over and over. That's not always a bad thing. For example, I thought Rob Zombie did a good job with Halloween. To me he proved himself with his first couple of films and then he took on the remaking of a masterpiece. As far as slasher films go, you've gotta give props to the original Halloween. It paved the way for Jason and Freddie and everyone else. That's not to say it's one of the greatest films of all time, but in the horror genre, I think you've gotta put it in the top 10 or 20.

That said, if you could find the funding to make a really great non-recycled-horse-shit movie, how many people would ever get the chance to see it? There are a lot of great indie films but they don't get shown on every screen everywhere like the shit Hollywood churns out month after month and until society wises up and says fuck this, I want quality or I'm not going to spend my money anymore, nothing will change.

Then again, I like a lot of what Hollywood has been putting out lately. Vantage Point, Strangers, and Alphabet Murders are three movies I watched last night that I thought were decent.

Thank you for clearing that up. I'll admit, I was one of the confused.

New rule: confusing shit is not to be posted until mid-afternoon so that we may have a chance to get enough caffeine into our weary bodies that we just might notice the slight difference in the name. Or, if that's too much to ask, pertinent info such as this could be included in the fucking summary.

It's amazing the company survived after producing these turds. The funny thing is that other computers at the time also had their share of problems. My brother-in-law bought a scanner for his Windows machine and couldn't get it to work at all. I bought a scanner for my Performa after he'd fiddled with hsi for 2 or three weeks with no success and mine was working in a half hour. Of course the whole machine would lock up occasionally, or do really odd things, but when it was working, it worked better than his.