Yes, fair enough. But the immediate suggestion elsewhere that buying tractors helps Zynga is false.

I admit it, I'm level 40 - have been playing for a long time. I've never spent any money on it. You do get given FV cash occasionally on levelling up, but not enough to make a difference. I think I have 15 neighbors or something. I do my wife's farm too, which has helped with various bonuses, etc.

Yes, the fuel thing is frustrating, since a tank is nowhere near enough to harvest/plough/seed, and you are reduced to thousands of clicks. However, some of the "holiday gifts" still available contain 1 or 5 tanks of gas, and next week is "free fuel week", whatever that means. No doubt of course as a promotion to encourage people later to buy it.

Except that tractors cost 30000 coins, which is easily obtained with patience, and doesn't cost any real money at all, certainly not the "FarmVille cash" - unless they've changed something recently.

Well, certainly BCD confusion caused a similar problem for RISC OS. Machines have been skipping to 2012. More here:

http://www.riscository.com/

HP's offering: http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF05a/12454-12454-321959-338927-3640405-4063703.html - $199
This is ARM-based mind.

From Dell:
http://www.dell.com/us/en/home/desktops/inspiron-zino-hd/pd.aspx?refid=inspiron-zino-hd&s=dhs&cs=19
$250 right now, but was about $200 during black friday

From Acer:
http://www.frys.com/product/6054148

$200, has been $180.
To be fair, all these products are very recent, and I wouldn't expect anyone to be aware of them.
There are others too, but they tend to cost more.

> Oh, right, because they charge $25/lb for moderate-grade injection-molded plastic.

And yet, it will last 30+ years, making exceptionally cheap compared to most other toys.

I have one TiVo I got for $12, and another I got for free. Both series II, one is a dual tuner.

It turns out both of the models I have require a chip mod for you to be able to do anything at all. There's a guy that sells these, but he doesn't publish much information about them. Alternatively, he'll do if for you at (IIRC) $100 a pop. After that, you can start to put in your own mods, etc.

About the only widespread hacking information you'll find is on how to increase the disk sizes on your TiVo. As others have noted, TiVo supporters are fiercely in support of the company.

Probably my only options now are to reuse the HDs, DVD-R and perhaps the remote (my MythTV one's buttons have their labels wearing off). Plus, the TiVos are not HD, which means they are now perhaps of limited interest to me.

Ultimately, my MythTV machine is much more flexible, although HD/cable recording with firewire remains a joke. Getting an HD-PVR might my the best bet here to link up to it.

English muffins are readily available in the UK and other Western countries.

In the same theme, "Danish pastries" (Wienerbrød) and "Brazil nuts". (castanhas-do-Pará) And to extend it
further, the shower water heating unit in my UK bathroom had a model name of "California", even though
I've never seen such a thing in the US.

Never mind "Double-dutch", or indeed "French", when talking about swearing.

And let's not forget Firefox 1.0 -> 1.5 -> 2 -> 3.0 -> 3.5, some of which have substantial architectural changes.

I've dug through the Mozilla source extensively (although that's not saying that much, there's a good deal I haven't looked at), but there's still a mess of old code in there, endless needless layers, and plenty of code that doesn't conform to their current coding standards required for submission of patches.

Actually, that _is_ the plan. At least, the local one is associating itself with a frozen yogurt place.

Of course, this wasn't at all obvious, since the site itself is hopelessly disorganized, and the front page is a photo of a bunch of geeks, and doesn't really say anywhere what the whole thing is about (the about page says a bit more, but that stuff should be on the front).

Oh well, maybe some lessons to learn for next year.

I feel compelled to say something at this point. Oh yeah, that's *Mr* Slacker to you.

'zactly. Just paid my $36 a few days ago. I don't think $3/month is at all unreasonable. Still would like to skip a bit more, but hey. I can still pop over to Imeem or Deezer.

Be well John Spartan.

Not after the Linspire debacle. Plus:

http://kevincarmony.blogspot.com/2009/04/michael-robertson-wants-to-fool-you.html - which is about this very issue.

Yeah, I know KC has a huge thing in for MR, but rightly so. Anyway, I can't be bothered to read all of both articles, but this is Slashdot.

Perhaps you can cry that there are different collective nouns (other than "school" of course) for different species of fish.

I don't ;-)

Ok, I work for a competitor, and our product is quite a lot more expensive. But I personally made sure that every freakin' mobile device (I know of) available in the US over the last few years, and many more sold outside the US, work with it.

Oh yeah, our stuff does that no one else really does effectively, which is aggregation of mobile (and wired) connections. But the pricing is such that's not really a consumer level product:

http://www.mushroomnetworks.com/

The product in particular is the PortaBella.