Never lived in a college town, have ya?

..three times. I have gone to doctors over a span of years who have never correctly diagnosed a few issues I have. Always saying it's one thing or another. Well, over the last five years I've diagnosed, presented and suggested treatments for each issue to my present doctor. I have hyperhydrosis of the palms. It's not severe, but it definitely makes shaking hands or trying to open a pickle jar problematic. I had a GP who had never seen this type of issue before, and wanted to schedule me for specialist sessions with both a neurologist and a dermatologist. I told him to let me think about it as I was living paycheck to paycheck at the time, and had cobra health care that wouldn't cover it. Fifteen minutes of searching online gave me an answer to what the issue was. To which I presented to the GP, he looked up, and verified. Which subsequently answered my next problem, dyshidrotic eczema; which randomly affects my hands. Again, not in a severe manner, and isn't noticable unless I were to point it out, but something my GP couldn't identify himself. In the end, both of these were caused by a third issue, an allergic reaction to certain metals in my diet. For each of the issues Google was able to identify, diagnose, and offer treatment plans for. All of which my GP researched after being presented with and acknowledged. If I had gone to the specialists would I have been diagnosed correctly? I'm sure I would have. So does this mean I am as well versed as a specialist over a standard GP? No. But it certainly has saved me cash along the way.

No, U. I asked "what comfort you could conceivably give up that would give Brazilian farmers an alternative to deforestation?" If you believe our luxurious choices of shopping at Wal-Mart instead of shopping at Mom n' Pawp (who wholesale with the same traders as Wal-Mart) will alter the old supply and demand curve until Brazillian Farmers can make money from practices aside from getting free cropland by mowing down the unclaimed forests, then I would like to hear your illustration to that point.

Oh, stop getting your panties in a twist, Slashdot, and RTFS: Here are the curriculum documents, with the TEKS and SBOE changes-color coded.

The wild-eyed claims being made about these very mild, mostly correct changes are absurd. Jefferson is not being cut or even importantly sidelined, the Founding Fathers are not being portrayed as Christian Righties, and anyone who's mentioned Orwell in this thread should be beaten to death with a bat made of cliches. So everybody calm the frak down and get informed.

With apologies to the late great comedian:

Personally I think we shouldn't let anyone with really big hands on an airplane.

While at the same time, Linux systems are not on this treadmill - largely due to software design.

With Windows systems, the hardware you get is usually just 'adequate' for the software, even if you get a higher end system. This is less the case with W7, but it's been the case with every release so far. Furthermore, upgrades down the line are either not possible (OS X and the limited lifecycle) or tend to hit performance pretty hard (Windows service packs).

The average life cycle of my Linux systems has, so far, been about 5 years, with new memory and/or replacement disks being purchased either when they were cheap (RAM) or due to failure (hard disk). An Athlon 550 I bought in early 1999 ('98?) functioned well until I relegated that system to 'file server' and got an IBM Thinkpad X30 in 2004. That laptop lasted until last April (until the third disk failed and I decided it was time to replace it - 512M was actually getting a little tight due to Firefox and the desire to virtualize).

Throughout this time, I've not "skimped" and kept old software, and I've not gotten agitated by lack of performance (the x30 came close with the RAM limitation, though). No, the systems haven't been suitable for gaming, but then neither are most new systems, either. I suspect this Phenom II will last a good number of years for me: certainly 3 years.

(Granted, I've also been somewhat fortunate to get new systems right after the latest-greatest is cheap enough to consider buying - eg. DDR3 - allowing me to upgrade my RAM several years into use for 'pennies').