1) Connect to my dynamic IP address ISP
2) Post ad on eBay for the IP
3) Sell it
4) Disconnect
5) Repeat from 1 to 5
6) Profit!

You sinner!!! I hope that when you are done in Earth you get a Job(s) as the doorman in hell's Gates!

(All right, all right, this one was awful!)

It can be the problem. But is this the default for Win7? If so, it's Microsoft's fault anyway, as if a single restore point eats up 550Mb the default total limit could never be set to 700Mb.

Another question is why the restore point uses half a gig, when XPs restore points are a lot smaller than that...

You are right about the times when the system is crippled and can't even boot. But when the system is OK but something starts to behave not that well just after you install a driver, a software or something like that, the System Restore can help you most of the time, specially when some computer illiterate friend calls you asking for help. 9 out of 10 times someone called me JUST AFTER the problem appeared (again, problems caused by the installation of something, not viruses of things like that) the System Restore solved the case. Some examples are the USB ports don't recognizing anything after a driver install (and no, uninstalling the driver and reinstalling the original one didn't help) or a very, very old version of something installed on top of a newer system that have affected some DLLs.

This explains the missing part of the Apple's apple. Jobs saw him stealing the apples and shot with his rock salt iShotgun.

A brazilian writer told once that the problem with humanity started when stupid people realized they were the majority...

The question is not the lack of something, but the deliberated lack of something with the only objective of making more and more money. I compare Apple's way of doing things with the more draconian DRM you can imagine. DRM tries to stop you from using something you OWN in the way you want. Apple do the same, but does it with a HARDWARE. And this is unnaceptable to me.

About the iPod, at the same time Apple was selling it by "X", you had a ton of much cheaper options if you just want to play music. Maybe not so "cool" - but I want to play music, not to participate in a coolness contest. In fact - at least here in Brazil - at some point the iPod's price was pratically the same as a Palm TX. And you need to agree that as outdated a Palm TX is, it plays MP3 as well as an iPod - and do a handfult of other things, too.

The iPhone is maybe the only example of something really "different" - for some time. Now, you have a myriad of other options - options where you can use external batteries, install your own programs - or from third parties - withoud Steve Jobs personal approval, and do whatever the heck you want - and without any "jailbreak". I have an Android phone (again, replaceable battery, USB, totally open platform, etc, etc) for a small fraction of the iPhone's price, with the data plan I want and with no chains attached. And I get tons of FREE (as in beer) programs from both the Android Market and the Internet.

In a nutshell: the question is not geeks X grandmothers nor slashdotters x fanboys, the question is the right of doing what I want, when I want and the way I want with something I've paid for X giving more and more money for someone that IS transforming the market indeed - in a place where you don't own anything, you pay for the (supreme) honor of using someone's elses device.

What I really would like to see is if the iThings were made from Microsoft. Then, Redmond would be the devil (I'm not saying they aren't). But Cupertino? It's OK. It's cool...

... how they are capable of taking numbers out of their asses with bogus researches...

      Maybe, if they try harder, they can take new business models, honest ways to do business and such from the same asses...

The same happened with HDs. Sure, for maybe 5 years or so now the price is dropping and the size increasing, but everyone that used a MFM or RLL hard disk - and even the IDEs for a long time - knows that we waited very long to see the prices really going down.

It will be like everything else: with the time passing they will get market share, then decrease the price. Even the RAM memory finally dropped, so why not the SSDs? But not tomorrow, I'm sure.

Nobody needs the source code to exploit Microsoft software...

FacePALM!

(...) will be back TO THE MARKET (and not Marketing). ;-)

The newspapers are dying in it's today's form, not just the death notice market. I know that it will not happen tomorrow nor in the next 5 years, but it will eventually, as more and more people reads the news on the Internet. And the question here is not just the price (zero x something), but timing. In the past, you would need to wait until the next day to read about some big news in depth, as TV news tend to be just a highlight of the situation. But now? 5 minutes after anything happens you can track the news almost in real time, and not only in your local news sources, but around the world.

The fact is that the Internet is changing every single thing we do, but impacted more extensively in printed materials. The news, the media, the classified ads, the yellow pages, the way we search for restaurants, etc. This is a good thing for sure, but in the process entire businesses will die, people will be unemployed and entire professions will be obsolete, like it happened in the past with cobblers, typewriter repairmen, etc. And then new professions will flourish, and the ones that adapt will be back in the marketing. More of the same, but this time in a much bigger scale.

I am from Brazil, and right now you would be fine here, as we don't have this type of corporate lunacy (or shameles political influency) *yet*.

But believe me, this type of news worries me a lot, just like Internet filtering proposals, mandated DRM and such, as our politicians tend to wave away the good things your (and other's) country do, but promptly import and adopt the stupid ideas - specially when the proponents are filthy rich companies.

Unfortunately, there's people that thinks it's ok when these things happens in another countries (and specially in the most influential ones). But they are the same people that in the future will say: "At first they came for the USA consumers, but I did not complain as I am from Brazil"...

Task Computer_Gum_Music

10 Chew Gum
15 Think of words to type
18 Search for the spelling of the word
20 Hear Music
25 Lift fingers
27 Use right fingers to hit the right keys
30 Shake head
35 Eye look at screen
38 Check for typos
40 Hymn a little bit
45 Check for grammar mistake
50 Shake leg
60 Goto 10

      You can put some IFs to check if the gum is out of taste yet, etc, but basically this is not multitasking. :-)