I bought a PC from there for work. I needed Vista Ultimate 32 bit on it instead of the Vista 64bit Home. But all they had left were PCs they had opened with Geek Squad "optimization" done on them. I told them I (my company) wasn't going to pay $75 for a service I didn't want or ask for, especially when what I was about to do was install 32bit Vista over it and wipe out everything their service had done. I am sure there is a reason why the only PCs of that model left had the optimization on them. People don't actually want to pay for that worthless service, but when all the "non-optimized" PCs are sold, Best Buy can still sell the service since they already put it on the PC before you ever walked in the door. Eventually I won the argument and paid the normal price for the PC. All was fine with me, because I was going to format it anyway. But if you plan on keeping the OS version it comes with, this current state of affairs where they "inspect" the PC would piss me off as well. They need to stop doing that shit. Full disclosure: I worked for Best Buy as a seasonal employee one year, and my girlfriend currently works for Best Buy selling computers. I am sure we will get in to an argument about this tonight as they have her thoroughly brainwashed that their services are a value to people. She even thinks Black Tie Protection is a good idea /facepalm.

From what I have seen it would take from thousands to tens of thousands of years to travel to the nearest star. Instead of having generations upon generations living and growing up on a ship, with only the first generation actually having a choice in the matter, I have a better solution. Send DNA. "Grow" humans once you get there. Assuming we can even build something that can last that long, you send a ship with the tech to grow a human outside of the womb. If the ship gets there and there is no viable planet for sustaining life then you don't start the "growing" process. If it gets there and we find an Earth-like planet that has a chance to sustain life, then "grow" a small set of males and females which would then be the first generation of humans to seed that planet. Sure its a bit far fetched from what is possible today, but it seems to me to be way more viable than sending people on a 20000 year trip not knowing if it will ever result in success. Can you imagine being one of the generations to grow up in the middle of a trip if were were to just ship people off in to oblivion? I would be pissed knowing I will never see Earth or even the destination, and rather be confined to a ship my entire life, since I grew up in say year 1000 of a 20000 year trip. Unless we can prove Einstein wrong and travel the speed of light, I thinking "growing" humans at the destination is the only viable way.

I don't think this is a true statement. People rarely are able to write .Net application without P/Invoke? I wasn't talking about people that write applications then decide they want to make it cross platform. I am talking about people that use mono from the start so they stick within the available framework. What portions of .Net are you talking about that would require P/Invoke under windows?

This statement makes no sense given the fact that by the very nature of the .Net, it is cross-platform capable. There seems to be only a small portion of the framework that the Mono crew couldn't move to their platform. Microsoft hasn't done the best job to spread it to other OSes, but if it was meant to keep people on Windows then it was really a poor business decision to make a VM style language framework. .

I have actually found answers to questions using experts exchange over the years (im a programmer), though I scroll to the bottom of the page to get result rather than paying them. Not a big fan of their "SEO" hack though (hiding results at the bottom and making page look like you have to pay to see results). Granted though, I have no idea if I would have found the same answer had it not been the first google result. Maybe a decent answer was lurking in the second google result, but they aren't totally worthless.

.NET is their answer I would have to assume. Drivers and legacy win32 code (the software i write :X) I would think will not work, but .NET would of course work just fine, They could do what Apple did with Rosetta which they are actually just now phasing out when they release Lion. And there is always XP mode aka virtual machines. We actually have a developer at work that is already having to run all the development software under XP mode in Win 7 because of compatibility issues with one piece of software which causes everything to have to be in XP mode for him. Having to explain XP mode to beginner will be painful though. We have been always wondering at work when a Windows release will force us into having to rewrite on .NET, and I think Windows 8 will be it.

It is irrelevant as to whether you have a problem or not with something you are doing if it is negatively affecting others, because you are impeding on others' freedom. That is how United States freedom works (in spirit, not practice).

You may have no problem with ISPs reverting the internet back to the good ole' AOL/Prodigy days of fragmented networks where AOL internet =/= Prodigy internet =/= Compuserv internet etc. But the fact is that society has integrated the internet in day to day business operations and personal communication, so if we allow these kind of practices you will hinder businesses (ISPs excluded) and people.

You may have no problem that the electronics you buy that waste power lead to increases in my cost of living even if I choose to own products that waste as little electricity as possible. If you drive a gas guzzler, you may have no problem that it is part of the reason we rely on people we don't like to supply our fuel. You may have no problem that it causes unnecessary amounts of pollution that I have to breath. You may have no problem that it will help accelerate the coming of the next ice age and possibly lead to a situation where the mechanics of the Earth cannot recover as it has in the past. You may not care about this stuff, but it affects me, everyone else on the Earth, and untold countless others who have yet to be born. Though on this topic it is more likely that you can't wrap your simple mind around the big picture and the fact that your air pollution actually has a lasting affect on the Earth. After all, based on your blog you are obviously a right wing Obama birth certificate nut job, so I guess we can't really expect much in the way of intelligent thoughts coming from you when it comes to science. It's too bad you guys aren't big fans that whole science thing, it's pretty cool stuff.

There is nothing busybody about making sure we do what we can to insure that we are not helping accelerate the inevitable next ice age. It would probably be good to have as much time as possible to prepare so our species is certain to survive it. There is nothing busybody about making sure corporations don't have the lock and key to what information you and I are allowed to view. This is VERY important stuff and the fact that you see no reason to fight for stuff like clean air and freedom to communicate really boggles my mind. Regardless you are free to think and say what you like and likely will scream it as loud as possible so as to drown out the opposing views. After all, that is the Republican way.

Lol it is really dumb to think air pollution is a local issue. It is not local to to anything but the Earth itself. You do realize there is no invisible barrier between New Jersey and the rest of the world right? Do you also not realize that you likely have cleaner air because of California regulations? Cali is a giant market, so if they say cars or any product have to meet their standard to be sold there, then manufacturers will make changes to the entire line. So California's air quality regulations actually help the smog in your city directly and indirectly.

I live in Texas, but I am glad they do what they do (if only they could balance a budget :X). Standby power in appliances is the same kind of thing. By Cali regulation, appliances made after 2007 must have less than 0.5 watts of phantom power (power drain when device is off or on standby). What this means is that the people making these appliances can't be lazy and not care how much power the device draws when it is off. An article on the BBC website noted that in HOME STEREOS in the UK cost UK consumers each year $463 million US dollars in electrical charges and create 3.5 billion lbs of CO2 just from phantom power alone. You may not personally care that your stereo / tv / whatever is wasting power and causing pollution, but I do because it affects me. It causes my electrical bill to go up. Because you are unnecessarily increasing demand, this means they have to increase capacity more often (build more plants), which costs a shit ton of money, which is passed on to me in higher electrical prices.

Have you not heard of what Comcast is doing? Their network is maxed out in regards to the link between their customers and the rest of the internet, yet traffic inside their network is allowed a much better connection. Part of this is a technical issue, but you can't deny it is also an issue with their corporate model and how they do business. Comcast refuses balance this out by buying more hardware or any other solution, because the end result is that big name websites that have high bandwidth content (video streaming etc) are having to move part or all their servers to the Comcast network (i.e. pay the blood money) so they don't risk having Comcast customers not able to view their content. Trust me, you do not want this kind of crap to continue. If this doesn't affect you now, it very well could in the future when your ISP follows suit. Content providers couldn't possibly house mirrored copies of their content with every ISP in the US. But that is the direction they would have to head if another big volume ISP does the same thing. I am not sure if the FCC rule will prevent stuff like this, but it needs to and I support any step in the right direction.

Do you see how this works? You are not in your own isolated world. What you do as a consumer or as a corporation affects me in at least a small way because we are all linked. My general mindset is that everyone should be able to live their lives and do what ever the hell they want, as long as it doesn't adversely affect other people. When your habits or practices or w/e affect society in a negative way it is the role of government to step in. If FCC, from a legal standpoint, can't regulate what ISPs can do in regards to equal access, then we are all fucked.

The answer to why is that it is not a graphic/image. It is text shaped in a "half circle". I use Chrome, and as others say that works. He probably didn't notice the problem because he likely uses Chrome (and so should you?, after all it is freaking fast as hell, i use it for my day to day). SVG seems like a bad idea as well because it is not supported by IE except for v9 beta (which btw renders this incorrectly as well). I am not even sure what he should have used since its not a good idea to either publish stuff that only one browser can view (what he did), or in a format the most popular browser can't view (SVG on IE). And image files don't seem like the right idea because they would have to be huge to have the text readable. Using font/text vs image seems like the correct choice, it's too bad the browser ecosystem still hasn't really gotten there yet.

I would assume the answer is no, but I am nervous about it. Can I rely on everyone having dual stack or only ipv4 INTERNALLY for atleast the next 5 - 10 years? I write software for a living and our software more than likely will break if attempted to use with IPv6. My main problem is that the technology we use to develop the software is old (10 years or so?) and not maintained any longer (Delphi 5 + BDE). I am sure the Firebird database we use either works now with IPv6 in its current version or it will in the near future as it will be necessary, but the BDE technology we use to connect to that database is no longer being maintained as far as I know. If I can rely the internal networks all having IPv4 internal addressses then its not much of a problem. But if I have to support IPv6 internally, I think it would require a complete rewrite with a modern programming language.

I downloaded the Robotics Dev Studio and tried to run the samples. As far as I can tell they don't compile with VS 2010 Express. Way to dominate guys :(

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