>In Europe we continued trying to wipe each other out and it caused a lot of technological improvements. IIRC, During a World's Fair in 19th century London an attendee said to Hiram Maxim, "Want to make a fortune? Invent something to let these Europeans cut each other's throats with greater efficiency." and then started on a path to develop the first true machine gun. Gatlings were well known, but not a true automatic weapon, since each shot was actually tripped off by the manual operation of a crank. In fact, the ATF treats Gatling guns as semi-automatic.

Glock vs. 1911, AK vs. AR platform. All are excellent guns, but don't tell that to any of the "purists" on either side!

Duke Nuked 'em... Forever.

Sometimes I'm just so sick of my life, and sick of people. I think I'd be quite content to sell my suburban apartment, and live on some plot of land way out in Nevada, Arizona or New Mexico. Just a tidy double-wide, a sturdy vehicle, a bunch of guns and a nice looking gal to share it all with.

To Crystal Meth while drilling!

Sounds silly, but once a parking valet couldn't find my car key... I would have been stuck 35 miles from home if I didn't have my spare car key. Also once shoved a set of keys into my pocket, but not deeply enough. They promptly fell out into the snow - silently, stealthily. It didn't occur to me that this happened, I thought that I had perhaps left them somewhere. Panicked for a moment, then used my backup set of car and housekeys. Found the "lost" set as soon as the snow melted away.

Core(tex) 2 duo?

Years of pent-up anger boiled over. My high school tormentor was sitting across a cafeteria table from me. I decided right then and there,that I was going to strike back, as brutally and spectacularly as possible. I used the attached round stool as a launching pad and dove into him, knocking both of us to the ground. I rose immediately, punching him in the hard part of the side of the head - hard enough to indent my middle knuckle to the point that it's now level with the rest of the other knuckles. He was humiliated, I was vindicated (and suffered very mild punishment), and the BULLYING STOPPED FOR GOOD because the 1200+ other students in that school learned through the usual grapevine that I FOUGHT BACK.

1. Perhaps "NSA" was supposed to be "NFA" - National Firearms Act? Which classifies certain types of weapons as "destructive" and regulates their use/possession. 2. I've been to the Knob Creek Machinegun Shoot twice, and on each occasion, a fellow there brought a Civil War cannon, a rather large muzzleloader he fired about once every 20 - 45 minutes or so.

The fall of this satellite into the ocean might wake up the Cloverfield monster... again...

>saying that the amount of time people are playing >games is on the rise, in part due to their low >cost-to-time ratio. Or the inreasingly high "time to job ratio"

One Layoff Per Worker? Perhaps they should extend the "two for one" and just close the company...

Sometimes I wonder about some of the other folks that post replies on here. The attitude toward low-level retail and service industry people is almost staggeringly contemptuous. Here are some gems I pulled from other posts: "Salesdroid" in reference to a CC employee not knowing about IDE ---> SATA adapters "a crappy burger spanked together by surly wage slaves" in a parallel drawn by the reply-poster, who used a food analogy to compare a premium and a generic retail experience. Another one I recall reading (but can't find again) made a scornful reference to the folks that spend hours standing by a busy road, holding up liquidation signs announcing an ongoing store liquidation. OK, so... other than a frisson of "ha, I am smarter and make far more money than these people" what exactly is this accomplishing for you?

I come across some systems that are mildly infected - I can clean them up using manual removal methods, and several different legitimately free apps like ad-aware, spybot, etc. When they are simply just over-clogged, or unstable after malware removal, I do reach for the reinstall. Sorry, but I have up to eight client stops in a day... and if I spend that sort of time, potentially many hours, on one machine, I won't make anything. Why? Because I simply won't charge for every single hour I spend on such a situation. I hear all of the time of techs charging far more than I do, and having no compunction about charging far more than the cost of a new PC for the work! I'd rather recognize when a machine is simply overwhelmed, cut my time losses, back up all of the data, reinstall Windows, repopulate data. The client gets a clean machine, free of malware and "winrot" and I get to stay on schedule, as well as charging a middle ground price that is fair to both the client and myself.

Previous poster(s) hit the nail on the head... very little incremental cost, if any, to put XP images on their machines, vs. Vista unless MS' bulk price for XP licenses has gone up. I'm surprised that a handful of people have defended Vista as performing reasonably well, and stably. I fix and set up PCs for home users, and I have yet to see a Vista machine, whether bargain basement warehouse club cheapy, or high-end gaming rig, that didn't pause at odd, arbitrary moments during simple operations such as opening up a folder, or populating the control apps in the Control Panel. The performance issues I described are after I do a thorough performance tuning - putting it in Classic Mode, removing bloatware, using MSconfig to disable all startup items other than the security package, and disabling unncesessary services. I've done perhaps a hundred of my own vista ----> XP "downgrades" (Had customer buy an XP CD) and they've gone rather smoothly, resulting in far better performance. The thing I feared since the day after the official launch (the day I did my first downgrade), are manufacturers that are making OEM devices that go into system boards, such as sound, networking, etc without publishing XP drivers. So far, not so much, with the glaring exception of a Dell Studio laptop with a Broadcom wireless device for which I could only get Vista drivers.