And I was agreeing with you. The ISPs provide no services beyond the pipe; Google and others do, which adds value to that which the ISP does provide.

Yeah, no shit. I don't recall Comcast, Qwest, Charter, or Century offering any kind of quality search engine or a user generated content service such as YouTube. I'm not praising Google for their services, but if any is to be given, Google has earned more than any of the ISPs I've suffered.

And also the damn Validating Steam Files error. I swear I've as many hours logged validating as I do playing TF2.

I agree, Dune is still one of my all time favorite movies. An amazing movie considering the depth of the story, and I think they did a superb job in translating the novel to the screen. Not an easy task, I would imagine.

If I recall City of Heroes is an comic book themed MMO. I had always wanted to play it, but I was under the impression that it was subscription based so I avoided it. I like the MMO genre and am currently playing Champions Online (F2P). I don't expect the world to last for ever, even when I do invest some cash into the game. One of the reasons though, that I will consider spending cash for, is that Champions Online is also based on the pencil & paper RPG. The servers may shutdown, but I will always have my character and as long as my boys and other friends play, I will always have access to the world. And I find traditional RPG games to be far richer than computer aided games, but on the other hand they are much slower to play and require a good crowd.

I think I still have an old SB16, but its an ISA card.

My desktop now is a machine I pieced together specifically for my upgrade path. The board is a Gigabyte G41M-Combo, allowing either DDR2 or DDR3 RAM. A few months ago I upgraded my RAM to 8GB DDR3, my only upgrade left is from the Core 2 Duo E5700 ( Dual Core @ 3.0ghz) for a quad core. I do admit though, that this is the only PC I've built with a path like this in mind.

I'm much more of a traditional desktop person. From a hardware perspective, the Fire HD was comfortable to hold and felt solid. I'm sure it would have made a great device to play with. But, I decided to use that credit to upgrade my PC instead. New case, PSU, and SSD drive; my PC feels like an entirely new machine.

Well said. I find it hard to have any respect towards those who would seek out power and opportunity such as this. Power does not corrupt, but power attracts the corruptible.

I unfortunately have. I received a Kindle Fire HD as a birthday gift. I tried to be open to using the device, but the amount of spam on the device was disgusting. It went back after about 3 days.

In regards to the rest of my web experience, I see very little, thank you Ad Block Plus and No Script. But were these to go away, and I have no option being online without all the spam, I will happily disconnect. I already bother with little of the WWW as it is now. Personally I wish the sites that complain, would go to an ad-free model and charge for subscription. It would make it very clear that I don't place the same value on what they've published.

No its about conformity. What other purpose of wearing the lanyard with the battery and RFID removed is there? It seems to me the school does not want to encourage other students to be individuals and determine for themselves if they agree with being tagged like cattle.

So the lesson to be learned is one of conformity then?

I had bought that Bundle, specifically for Torchlight. It has run fine for me under OpenSUSE 11.4 w/ Gnome 2.

Reminds me of when a spam email went around in the late 90s or early 00s which informed people of a virus infection and if you had an AOL icon on your desktop, you were infected. Hahah. AOL was flooded that day with tech support calls from many who were not able to dial in. Post a similar threat warning on Facebook (fAOLbook?) and we'll have come nearly full circle again.

Yes Century Link cares, only as far as receiving your payment, however. I had Qwest when I first moved into Denver area. A month later, Century Link took over and disregarded the install payment plan we had arranged with Qwest, and received a disconnection notice as our first contact from Century Link.

I made a payment with the credit card over the phone for $100, and said I can pay the other $30 with my next bill. OK says the CSR, and 10 days later my net and phone are disconnected. Finally finding a payphone, I call and am told that that there was no payment plan agreement and if there was, $100 paid and $30 next cycle is not acceptable, and service will not return until it is paid in full. They also said that phone service should not have been interrupted, but I guess that may have been due to the telco box on my building missing its cover and having a trash bag taped on with electrical tape, which facing west into the wind, the bag is shredded, leaving all wires exposed. A year later, and the box is still vulnerable. Oh, and I am with Comcast now, and have refused to pay Century Link another dime. I'll take the hit on my credit score.