I agree--and I also think my lawyer friend must have had a braino when he typed "attainder" instead of "ex post facto".

Saying first outright that I'm not impressed by the proposed tax changes to take the bonuses back, I was discussing this with a tax lawyer on another forum and his opinion was that it wasn't a bill of attainder since they have not yet paid taxes on that income and functionally it's no different than any other tax code changes that are enacted in mid 2009 to apply to income made in early 2009 and on taxes filed in 2010.

If I'm in one of AIG's still-profitable groups, like life insurance or whatever, there's no question that I'd keep it.

If on the other hand I have professional or personal guilt over poor performance, even if I'm a low-level employee (say I'm a salesman for sub-prime mortgages who sold a record number of them or something) I might well find myself feeling personally and professionally obligated to give the money either back or to charity (on the grounds that the mechanical bonus for my success in selling X contracts doesn't change the fact that my company is in hock partially because they all defaulted)

...my wife just started playing WoW.

Nice to see some folks return to the fold, although like the man above I can't remember why I friended you. =)

Funding for high school courses in firearms safety and marksmanship, and civics courses focused on gun ownership and the legal use of deadly force.

Again, the federal government should have nothing to do with education. At best the federal government should stay out of it.

In fact, when I was in high school, Pennsylvania offered free optional, after-school courses on hunting safety (and firearms safety as encompassed by that rubric) to high school students over age 11ish every year. This is probably one of the better ways to do it (especially as PA requires that course for a hunting license to be issued).

Cons: Not for anyone over 12, unless they took the short bus to school, or are TOTALLY trashed || bombed :-/

I find my group of friends uses this when someone wants to have a game on but most of us just want to talk--it's a pretty decent "background noise" game.

Except at New Years Eve, when your latter con applies, and you have a dozen people giggling because someone said the Dry Bones character portrait looks like he's gonna grab your balls.

Take this with a grain of salt, because I liked Twilight Princess (which has some pretty fun set pieces once you get out of the cutscene-heavy stuff--the duels on the bridges and the defend-the-cart-on-horseback scene are both favorites of mine because the horse archery works way better than Ocarina's did).

Boom Blox and De Blob are both a lot of quick, zany fun, with the added bonus that Boom Blox will do more for your ability to finely control the Wii remote than any other game because it uses motions you already know how to do in real life (as one of the game modes is essentially Jenga).

I can't get enough of Metroid Prime 3.

Mario Kart is kinda fun but I find it very hard to steer to the extremes consistently while holding the controller in midair.

I'm fairly sure the Guitar Hero series is much better supported on the Wii than the Rock Band series, and GH3/World Tour are both a lot of fun with some rocking set lists.

Oh, and the Strong Bad DLC games are a heck of a lot of point/click fun for $10 per.

Things I hated:

Any minigame collection.
Metal Slug Collection (needs better controls)

My work is a nice mix of all linux servers with a pair of Windows Domain controllers talking to a Samba/LDAP server, and a desktop contingent of about 60% Windows 35% Linux 5% Mac (because I don't care either way, and since we buy Red Hat the TCO is depressingly similar) for the eclectic mix of developers we have here.

Most of whom play Battlefield 2 after hours.

Namely, gaming. I technically keep a Gentoo dual boot up to date on my Vista 64 Ultimate machine. I don't ever find myself wanting to boot to it except for monthly "grab all the updates" runs because my computer primarily exists to play games and Blu-Ray discs.

I recognize that the latter "problem" in particular is more in the hands of the various consortia that don't care for open source than in the hands of Linux but at the same time it's going to be frustratingly hard for me to make any kind of switch. And I'm one of those (few) people who supported Linux gaming enough to actually buy the Linux editions of games--for all the good THAT did in 2000ish.

Linux still works harder--my home server is a pat little CentOS box, and my servers at work are all Red Hat and Ubuntu--but as for my personal home machine, *yawn*, wake me when it can play some serious games.

I hate Blu-Ray for the DRM but I liked it for the price (that is, free player from a dude I know who bought the drive and then decided to just buy a media center PC + a few blu-ray movies for christmas). Like you said, too, as well as hate DVD or AAC--like it or not, I like movies and I'm frankly willing to pay $30 for anything I was willing to see in the theaters more than once.

Vista 64 meanwhile has been the most stable gaming and general computing platform since Windows 98 for my purposes, so no complaints there.

Addressing the substance, thanks for the BD+ info--I have at this point straight BD ripping working fine, I just now need to figure out how to on-the-fly downsample it without it looking like ass if I want this to work the way I want it to work.

Thanks, I'll give that a shot (I'm on VLC 0.9.6 at the moment).

Not bad at all, even if you keep Vista on it (you'll want to downgrade to Home Basic graphics though, just to keep yourself sane)

Believe it or not, as someone who isn't a Brit I don't actually read British news. =P