I didn't even need to turn it off, as apparently it doesn't work for me for whatever reason. However, if it did, I would turn it off from what I've heard about it. I type relatively fast and generally know exactly what I intend to type before the page even loads, so it's a fairly useless feature. Let me know when they allow verbatim searches. I'm really tired of it mangling my quoted strings to offer more results that have nothing to do with what I searched for.

I see a few cheaters in Left 4 Dead from time to time, and it's always fun to mess with them. After verifying it (such as a speed hack, which is extremely obvious), I watch them for a bit to see how they play and how they use whatever cheat(s) they're using. Then I come up with workarounds and torture them until they get frustrated and leave the server.

The most recent involved someone using a speed hack. When playing as the survivors, he would just rush along to the safe room, leaving his team behind. So, I would get a hunter and take a couple shortcuts and cut him off, leaving him dead and with nothing to do for the rest of the round. As infected, he liked to spawn far away and run up to our team incredibly fast to perform an attack. Unfortunately for him, he always followed the same pattern of offsetting his position when he ran back out of range to prepare for another attack. With a bit of work, I could predict when he'd show up, and smash his face in with a shotgun before he could attack. After a few rounds spend either dead or not able to pull off a single attack, he was gone and the rest of us were able to enjoy the game.

I'm still trying to get my head around the fact that these marketing dweeds thought that it was a good name.

It seems to be a common trend lately. This name is almost as bad as Farmers Feed US.

You're right about "PC" encompassing Mac as well. My main point is that the description should have been "for Mac OS and Windows" in the way most people seem to have taken it, or "for PC" to be more general and accurate. Whatever happened to using the correct terminology to describe things? "PC" is not an operating system. If "PC" is synonymous with "Windows", then would you consider IBM's PC-DOS to be an early version of Windows?

I don't know why they would specify "Mac or PC" with a Flash game. It ran on my Linux system just fine. They had me thinking it wouldn't work under Linux for some reason (and I do know of some Flash apps that crap out under Linux!)

You seem to be confusing "PC" with "Windows".

It's no good being absolutely brilliant but without means of communicating your brilliant discoveries to the outside world.

I've never understood this extreme method of thinking when it comes to communication skills. Just because someone isn't a professional essay writer doesn't mean they are incapable of expressing themselves. I could quite easily write a 500 word essay with very little effort. All that's required is a basic understanding of the language in which you're writing. In fact, I did write a 500 word essay for one of the standardized tests I took before starting college. I wrote it in about 20 minutes by hand and turned it in. Oddly, my score in writing was my highest of the bunch measured, one point ahead of math.

This is the same amount of effort I would have expended on an essay if my college had required one as part of the application process, with the possible exception that it would be typed instead of hand written. I'm currently sitting on a 4.0 GPA and I still consider essays on arbitrary topics to be useless.

I say; if you can't write a 500 word essay, you won't succeed in a scientific field.

This I can agree with. I think there would have to be something mentally deficient about a person to be unable to write a 500 word essay.

Several years ago, I was working in computer repair at a locally owned business "competing" with the Geek Squad and a few others. And by "competing", I mean we were the place people came to get their computers fixed after the Geek Squad fucked them up even more.

During my time working there, I had written several custom diagnostic tools, and eventually a handy front end for them so we could have a single disc with most of what we used daily on it. The front end was configurable to some degree, so we could add new tools without having to recompile the front end as well. Unfortunately, as tends to happen, periodically some of these discs would get left in a CD-ROM drive when a computer went back out.

A few months after I originally created it, we got a computer in from someone who had recently taken it to the Geek Squad. In their CD-ROM drive was a utility disc from there. Upon further investigation, it was a CD running my front end that had been slightly modified to make it look like their own software. In one part of the program that doesn't get used frequently, it even still had the name of the company I worked for. So, as many others have said, they really are thieves.

I have a similar dislike of advertising. My line of thinking is that if I want to buy something, I'll find it myself when I go to the store. If some company wants me to buy their product, they should make sure it's in the appropriate aisle. If there's something they consider to be special about it, put it on the label/box/bag/whatever. Anything beyond that is unacceptable to me. It's a shame it's not really feasible to stop buying products from or patronizing companies whom I'm "forced" to see an advertisement for. Eventually, I'd run out of things I actually could buy.

You might find this article a good read. Particularly the part that says:

The phrase that a person is innocent until proven guilty refers to legal as opposed to factual guilt. In every case, the defendant either committed the offense or they did not; a fact that will remain true regardless of whether the jury acquits or convicts the defendant. The phrase means simply that a person is not legally guilty until a jury returns a verdict of guilty--which is little more than a tautology.

Obviously just anecdotal, but my cat certainly appears to be very intelligent.

He'll lay next to me and watch TV/anime with me (his head actually follows the characters on screen, and he remains focused on it for the duration of the show). He knows when I go to bed each night and will actually stop whatever he's doing a few minutes before hand and rush to the bed to lay down. He's learned my habits so well that he can generally predict where I'm going throughout the evening and when I get up to go somewhere he'll rush off to meet me at my intended destination more often than not.

I've seen him flip on light switches in the middle of the night. One night, I forgot to check the food dish before I went to bed. The next morning, I found him opening the kitchen cabinet that his food is stored in. He hasn't quite mastered the doorknobs here yet (they're the round kind), but when I took him with me while visiting my grandparents, he could open any door in their house, as they have the handle-type knobs. One of his newer tricks is that he likes to stand up alongside the chair at my main computer and reach up and press keys on the keyboard (probably imitating me).

You would have a very, very difficult time convincing me (or any of my friends who've seen my cat for any extended period of time) that he's not intelligent. Sure, he doesn't do tricks on command, but he'll come to me when I call him, that's really all the obedience I need from him.

Who should we blame when other children around the world have better second language skills in English than our childrens' first language skills?

Are you sure about this one? I work in an office of about a 50/50 mix of US workers and English as a second language workers. Most all of us are 20-40 years old and to a person, every single one of us raised in the US write more effectively. In fact, I have to rewrite most of the ESL papers before submitting them to clients due to the vast amount of simple grammatical mistakes. (Most due to verb tense (we work on instead of we worked on), if anyone was wondering.)

Does this count as irony? The not-stupid college guy above your reply made the same mistake. The original question included "when", as in this particular situation has not yet occurred, but the poster seems to believe it is inevitable.

I used to work at a PC repair shop several years ago. We were, in my opinion, one of those fairly priced and honest shops, for the most part. There's just nothing like selling USB cables for around $6 and having people refuse to buy them because "there must be something wrong with them" since Best Buy has them for $35-50 for the same lengths.

As far as the article goes, we had a policy of doing a quick check of the system before even filling out any paperwork for it, assuming it was possible (the exception being if we were so swamped with waiting customers that we didn't actually have 5 minutes to spare). The memory problem would have been fixed right there, the customer charged maybe $5-10 for labor and sent on their way.

He was quite literally the biggest star the world has ever seen.

Actually, I think VY Canis Majoris is literally the biggest star the world has ever seen.

I tried that a few years ago. After a few months of having sex 2+ times a day it just gets really boring and monotonous. There's only so many ways you can have sex with someone, and it just doesn't really seem to be worth the effort after a while.

I'm using 3.0.11 right now with 9 tabs open across 2 windows and Firefox is sitting happily at 170 MB of memory and 0% cpu usage. I've also never had a problem with it being slow or unresponsive, even when I've had 30-50 tabs open, including Flash/JavaScript pages, etc. I can't imagine how some people are managing to get the usage to 1 GB+ and such that I've seen in other posts.