They can't be honest about what they are selling, they'd look like a bunch of hypocrites. Bog forbid!

Nonsense, from now on, cigarettes will have pictures of balloons on the brightly colored packages and they'll be known as DeathStix_TM_LucasFilms

  Good points. I have to ask, however, that if the base idea of the patent can be shown to have prior art, shouldn't that invalidate the rest of the patent, regardless of embellishments? Shouldn't the patent applicants at least show that they have something new to contribute, and be required to patent just that aspect or aspects that can be shown to be original?

  Lately it's becoming fairly widely recognized that many if not most patents already reflect ideas that if not already thought of in detail, have prior art in substance. In the field of copyrights this is viewed as "derivative works". Perhaps the same thing should apply to patents.

GSVEMR

  Small wonder that so many people out there consider government's doings to be little more than "legalized" theft.

  Perhaps not in the abstract, but as is frequently said, there's a difference between theory and practice...

  It gets the point across ;-)

  All due respect, but my experience is exactly the opposite of yours.

  I've custom built and sold over 800 systems in the last five years, and the AMD based systems, in terms of hardware reliability, are far, far better than the intel based systems - especially in the mini case formats, where heat is a factor, but including the gaming rigs.

  Just looking at my invoices for this year, hardware replacement for the intel systems is over three times as common as it is for the amd based systems - and that includes the work I've done on systems I didn't build.

  I'm not even going to go into mobo driver issues, except to say fuck ATI. Any cognitive diss wrt that you can pipe to devnull.

  I agree with the GP. AMD kicks ass. I have seven custom built systems at home, all AMD/nvidia combos now as of early this year, because Intel's kit has not treated me very well since at least '05. They are rock solid. Downtime? What's that?

  YMMV, Flame on.

  GSVEMR

  Hah! Needs a Not Safe While Drinking Beer mod.

  I like your sig. Reminds me of a t-shirt I have:

"You laugh because I'm different. I laugh because you are all the same."

  GSVEMR

Bake a cantaloupe in the oven at low temp until it's hard enough.

  (Yes, actually know someone who tried that back in the early 80s. Thankfully, it wasn't me who had to deal with the parents coming home to a very evil smelling house. You know who you are, sis.)

  "My grand-dad died peacefully at 102 years of age, unlike the screaming passengers in his car." - ? :-D

  I like that idea - when I was a kid in the 70s I once mounted a battery powered megaphone on my bicycle, just for kicks - but it'd only distract the morons behind the wheel that much more ;-(

Back in the 80s, I had, literally, BOXES full of floppy disks.

  Then I used to have several 250 disk CD holders with backups. Then I used the same ones for DVD backups, but could store a lot more. I still use them, but mostly for video clips/etc that we want to watch on the tv.

  Then hard drives got cheap enough - and reliable enough - to keep a couple of larger standard IDE internals around just to copy things off to, then store away until I did it again. That was a pain, but not as much as losing all my "stuff".

  Then until about a year and a half ago it was two Maxtor OneTouch 300GB usb drives. (Always keep a mirror drive - always)

  Then two 500GB externals.

  Now it's two 2TB WD externals, usb,firewire,eSATA, one drive operates continuously as a network aware backup drive, the other I rsync the first one to once a week or so, and when not in use it is stored in the firesafe. Even with the amount of backup data I have - about a terabyte+/-, dating back to the mid-90s for the most part with some older stuff going back to before Win3.1, I probably won't have to upgrade for at least a couple years.

  I'm waiting for multi-terabyte solid state storage to get cheap enough... which it will, eventually...

  Still, however, I do some really important backups - like my financial stuff, email, pictures, etc - to DVD, and store those in my safety deposit box. Along with a hard drive containing the same data, which I upgrade every year or so (hard drives are CHEAP nowadays, near enough free it makes no difference).

  Paranoid, me? *g* Hell, yes. I've lost entirely too many memories, and important work, over the last 25 or so years because of media failure. I did all the video/picture work for a good friend's funeral in '99, and lost it all, because I didn't back it up soon enough. Never. Frakking. Again.

  The importance of multiple backups cannot ever be stressed enough; even for what seems unimportant at the time, because one never knows what one might want to look at years later.

  The platters are *awesome* for that. Highly reflective, and with a nice hole in the middle for aiming. Plus, they're free...

  To ensure I don't need it as a backup drive, then I wipe it, test it, and sell it on Ebay.

  It's amazing what some older drives will sell for, particularly IDE laptop drives.

I've been physically assaulted for jokes.

  Ditto. Not twice, tho. Not yet. Didn't have to pay their hospital bills, either. I might have to visit that particular bit of karma on a neighbor, soon, however. I'll survive it. He won't.

  Even here, where one would expect a certain level of humor, it often falls flat.

  I agree, but I think if my karma was in trouble I would refrain from cracking wise.

  I will not refrain from being honest, nor cracking jokes; "karma" on slashdot is an artificial thing that has nothing to do with real life.

  I find it pretty sad that anyone really cares about that. Honestly, who cares? It's just a website.

Whatever.

  GSVEMR