zkissane

I don't know if any PC at $99 (or any "civilized") price will fly. Maybe if you took a pocket PC or something and strapped it to an R/C airplane it would count, but other than that, I doubt it. One could always try though.

Also, a Star Trek movie that broke the phenomenon of even-numbered Star Trek movies being pretty good and odd-numbered movies being crap (it was #10 and it was crap).

Macs aren't as bad as people make them out to be. I have not found them to be as good as the Mac zealots claim (I have and use a Macbook on a daily basis), but they're not terrible. All shapes and sizes.

I'd take water, too, or a convienient way to carry water. I've never taken a train before, but even a half day of airplanes and airports powered only by pop/soda/Coke and airline snacks makes me feel bad (headache, dry mouth, lethargy). Don't get me wrong, I gotta have a pop/soda/Coke at certain points in my day, but if that's all I drink, I'm in trouble.

Dammit, I bought this new porn DVD but when I put it into my XBox it comes up as Madden 07. Worst porn flick ever.

Well, that's 2/2 in crappy ports from the 360 to the PC for Ubi. Splinter Cell: Double Agent is the most bug riddled game I've played since Savage: The Battle For Newerth. I can't load my game in between the Iceland mission and the prison mission; crash to desktop every time. It's the first game I've played since the Windows 98 era that doesn't handle alt-tabbing gracefully (crash to desktop again, every time). The framerates are also less than spectacular on my machine.

Though I have very strong opinions on the subject, I will make no comment on Bush's success or failure as a president. However, there is no public record of an IQ score for him: http://www.csbsju.edu/uspp/Election/bush011401.htm http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/hoaxes/presiq.htm The closest that exists is his SAT score, a 1206, which put him in the top 16% of college bound students at the time.

Another perspective: If you're talking about computers for other people, give a lot more thought to buying an off-the-shelf PC. Unless you like being someone's go-to computer guy, don't build them a PC. Personally, I hate working on other people's machines. It seems like the problem they have is only the tip of the iceberg. And after you fix their problem (which often takes twice as long as you expected it to), and you tell them "don't do X unless you want to do this all over again", a month goes by and you're back in front of it and it has the same problem.

It's simple physics. There are 3 ways to get a hard drive to pump data out faster: 1) Make the platter(s) spin faster 2) Increase the data density of the platter(s) 3) Use a more efficient filesystem #3 is obviously beyond the control of hard drive manufacturers. #1 has the downsides of increased wear, temperature and noise. #2 requires advances in materials science and in the reader thing on the head. Flash memory is OK, but it has its flaws. Hard drive failure rates are described by a curve called the "bathtub curve" (i.e. early DOAs are high, few die in the middle of their expected lifetime, and more and more fail as they approach the end of their expected lifetime). Flash memory is more linear; the more you write to it, the more it wears out. This makes it OK for occasional write things (camera memory, BIOS memory, thumb drives) and applications where drive failure is relatively consequence free (like Vista's ReadyBoost and ReadyDrive). It's not good enough to use as a normal hard drive; everyday use is simply far too write intensive (think about how many times your swap file gets written to).

How so? Part of the HD deal is that at no point should an end-user (even a technically proficient one) be able to get access to a decrypted HD data stream.

What, do you think MS likes having to do this HDCP crap? What does MS make that needs it? They don't make movies or music. They've already got the copy protection for their products the way they want it. Trust me, I bet they put a ton of man hours into coding and testing that crap, and in the end it doesn't even protect their content. Seriously, if you want someone to blame for HDCP, blame the **AA. Blaming MS for implementing it makes about as much sense as blaming NVidia or ATI for implementing it.

You guys act as if MS voluntarily did this. HDCP is going to be required for every piece of hardware that handles HD-DVD and the like. Even entertainment systems that have no PC in them at all will have HDCP. MS just wants to be on the HD bandwagon like everyone else, and HDCP is part of the price that content providers (read: **AA) insist on being paid.

My friend and I have a blast whenever we play Ice Hockey for the original NES. I bought a used Xbox about a month ago and now I'm looking for a hockey game for it. Looking on Amazon it seems that it's a 2 horse race between EA's franchise and 2k Sports'. I read users' reviews on Amazon about each of the games but neither one really wowed me. I know there are some hockey gurus here (cough cough Happy cough) so I was wondering what people thought. Finding used games shouldn't be a problem and, with respect to the Xbox game pricing scheme, money's not really an issue (i.e. if you convince me that there's a $40 hockey game that's really good, I'm OK with spending that $40). Neither my friends nor I know enough about the NHL today to really care about accurate rosters, career/franchise/dynasty mode, or things like that. I also don't subscribe to Xbox Live and don't plan to. I'm basically looking for a game that would be fun to play with friends. Supporting 2 players is good, 3 is better and 4 is awesome; allowing combinations of co-op (something like 4 of us humans on a team against the CPU) and head-to-head (2 on one team and 2 on the other, backed up by CPU teammates) would really be awesome. Thanks for the help.

I have personally experienced problems of having an inadequate PSU (lockups in games, CD burners that refuse to burn) and have had to fix a computer that a faulty power supply managed to ruin (everything that was connected to the power supply was dead, like the motherboard and drives, but not the processor, PCI cards, or RAM). I won't make those mistakes again.

My boss was riding his motorcycle down the highway (at about 65 mph), listening to his iPod when it came loose and fell off into the road. A pickup truck pulling an empty horse trailer came along, and the truck part missed it but the trailer ran over it. It has two huge scratches in the screen but otherwise it works just fine.