It's not that space is so big. It's that time is so big. The question is not where are the alien civilizations, the question is when are the alien civilizations. Either that, or God only bothered to make humans and the Primitive Christians are on the right track.

Which NOT easy method do you recommend?

People pay you to help them. To make their computers work. And you want them to do what you've done, read all about computers and fix it themselves....and then why would they keep your mean angry little self around?

...stupid. I recently picked up HL2 Orange Box. It does NOT work on 3 machines, one 3 years old, two new this year. Steam just downloads and downloads forever over 22 mbps cable connection and the game never starts. I also just picked up Neverwinter Nights 2. It needs to patch for about 5 hours before it's playable. I tried the unpatched before patching. The game deadends easily and crashes frequently and runs really slow. I feel sorry for the folks who bought this back when it was new and had to wait for the patches. Even if the games worked as designed, the general design of games is so poor when it comes to playability that playing them has become boring. So, when money is tight, people quickly figure out what's necessary and what's not necessary and broken crappy games at $40, $50 or $60 are simply not necessary. Expect sales to continue to decline.

... the E in E-Book stood for electronic. Turns out it's Evil.

Banning Ricdic for making $5,000 in real money from the game will probably result in him making more real money, from real work, in the real world. He might even meet a real girl and have a real relationship and real children. Hardly seems like much of a punishment, if you ask me. If the developers of EVE wanted to punish Ricdic, they'd have given him two more accounts....for free.

Do projects of a similar scope on Windows/SQL Server succeed while others fail? I contend that the answer is yes. Here's the secret....the programmers and customers assigned to work on the custom development project and their skills, ability, intelligence and maturity will determine the success of the project. This isn't a platform failure. It's a people failure.

killing has always been acceptable, as long as it's done outside our borders (or in slums). And sex has always been highly suspect. This is nothing new. Our tendency toward mass violence is tightly intertwined with our general sexual repression. If we're all just laying about smoking dope and having sex, who will kill our enemies? And you know, we've got a lot of enemies. They hate us for our freedom.

I'm using Office for most 90% of my word processing and spreadsheet work. I am far more likely to switch from Office to Google Docs than either SoftMaker or OpenOffice's offerings. Why? Google Docs offers simplicity, collaboration and built-in backup. I believe it is 1000 times less likely that Google will lose my files compared to me losing them if I have to store them on a hard drive and remember to setup some kind of backup facility.

>> Getting a liver transplant is a long, involved, and lengthy process.

Not for Steve Jobs. Because his net worth exceeds $100 million, he doesn't have to worry about what his insurance company will or will not pay. He simply writes a check.

She's a good-looking sexual psychopath. Once you've lived with one of these for a decade, you never go back.

experience under my belt. And today's games bore the crap out of me. Except World of Goo.

George's trifecta more than anything that involves coding.

But voting for third parties is a waste. The third party candidates will be corrupted by campaign finance the minute they get elected. Unless you're talking about a third party that only runs in-human robots for office. The root problem with US democracy is campaign finance. Until we deal with campaign finance (aka legalized bribery of elected officials), all the rest is re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic.