Zixar

Zixette and I saw it this afternoon, and I can honestly say it's one of the few remakes that improves on the original. The story moves faster, has more action, more suspense, and more robust characters. NOTE WELL: You have to stay to the end of the credits. 'Nuff said. Four stars for zombie-film fans, three for general audiences.

Sudo: Not to derail any further, but the reason it's only being done now are twofold. One, the Baby Bells wanted to make sure they weren't caught in a bandwidth crunch if there were a swarm of new subscriptions, so they went conservative on the speed at first. Two, it requires faster switches at the main internet junction which weren't cost-justified until the subscriber base reached a certain level. DSL is really capable of 10Mbps speeds, same as cable modem. Deadwood: Tonight's show seemed like a filler episode, except for the big ending...

More bull..... Aspartame is made from two vital amino acids, phenylalanine and aspartic acid, bound by a tiny amount of methanol. There is so little NutraSweet in the average diet soda that the amount of methanol released when it breaks down is minuscule, easily metabolized by the liver with no ill effects. In fact, methanol occurs naturally in most fruit and vegetable juices. A glass of fresh-squeezed tomato juice has six times the amount of methanol in 1 can of diet soda. To put it in perspective, in order for you to drink enough diet soda to cause a case of acute methanol poisoning, you'd have to drink over 700 cans in one sitting. Geez, if you knew how much really horrible stuff is routinely filtered out of your blood by your liver and kidneys every day, you'd wonder how you ever survived infancy. Methanol, formaldehyde, cyanide, etc., etc. Anytime you hear another one of these doom & gloom stories you have to consider the source, and their agenda.

Sudo: I don't know if I'm supposed to mention this, but BellSouth is going to start 3 Mbps DSL service in the second quarter of this year...that'll bring them up to cable speeds. :)-->

Tom: No, you can't use a splitter because the satellite tuner has to send a signal back to the dish to flip the polarity for half the channels. If you call DirecTV though, they'll install the second cable as part of the install, usually for free. You really want it though, because otherwise you can't watch another channel while you're recording the first. With dual-tuner units, you can record one and watch another, or even record TWO programs while watching a third that you've already recorded! My 2nd DirecTiVo only cost me $99.

Tonight's Penn & Teller: Bull....! episode talks about cell phones and cancer, along with more "Safety Hysteria". Here's a link to the episode synopsis: Safety Hysteria

Yea, verily, TiVo be an wonderful thing.... Especially dual-tuner satellite DirecTiVo. :D-->

Everybody sing! (to the tune of the Oscar Mayer wiener song) Oh...I...was... S'posed to be a greasy spot by mid-niiiiight, That is what the MOGFOT screamed I'd beeeee.... But it's been years since then and I am not quiiiite... Just another lie they told to meeeeee! They said they had a corner on the truth, see? But it was hard to follow all the twists. "Present truth" would change as it was handy, To grind you down, or fill their greedy fists! They told me that I'd be marked and avoided, If I wouldn't spy upon my friends. They marched around with fingers sharply pointed, I told them, Stick them all up your rear ends! So, I never did become a little grease spot, Unless you count my time on this cafe. The ministry of liars, thieves, and whatnot Will get a rude surprise on Judgment Day!

It's more likely to get giardia from a restaurant than at home, but since a head of lettuce has so many nooks and crannies, there can still be traces of contaminated irrigation water in one from time to time. Giardia is not a bacterium, it's a protozoan like an amoeba. Consequently, it can live in a wider range of temperature conditions than most bacteria. Use bleach on all your sinks and fixtures, making sure to get at the grout and gaskets. If the sink nozzle will unscrew from the filter, dunk that in some bleach, too. Use Lysol on such things as toilet paper holders and doorknobs.

John may be being a bit picky when it comes to components. If you have the cash to spend, his recommendations are good. If not, you can get by perfectly fine with lesser stuff. There's absolutely no reason to be on the bleeding edge of technology. For instance, BestBuy has a machine on sale now for $389 after rebates that has a 2.7GHz Intel Celeron processor, 256MB RAM, a 40GB hard drive, Windows XP Home, a 17" monitor, and a color printer. Unless you're playing the latest graphics-overloaded games or doing real processor-intensive work (like video editing), that will be a good amount of computer for most people. For another $80, you can upgrade it to have John's recommended 512MB of RAM, a 2.8GHz processor and an 80GB hard drive. In my opinion, it's much better to spend $500 on a mid-level machine today and another $500 on the equivalent-level machine two years from now than to spend $1000 on a higher-level computer that won't be as good in two years as the then-$500 models. There are always new features coming along, and the price is always high at first. It's sort of like leasing a car instead of buying it, although you can always use the old computer as a file server or second terminal. I have a 10-year old PC that probably couldn't even boot WinXP, but it works just fine as a Linux server.

P-Mosh: It may or may not be the water. Your wife might have giardiasis, which she could have picked up from improperly washed lettuce or other produce. It's highly communicable, so she may have passed it on to the dog unknowingly, or vice versa. Here's an info link about the giardia parasite. CDC on Giardia

That episode was good. I could see Christopher doing exactly what he did, but I was still on the edge of my seat when they dragged him out to the boondocks and put a gun to his head! I hope Tony and Carmela get back together--those two deserve each other. ;)-->

Looks to me like that prohibition is only against the quotation or publication of the mark by a legitimate news site. In other words, if a news commentator wanted to comment negatively on Coca-Cola, he could not be held liable for using the term "Coca-Cola" in his article, even though it might negatively impact Coke sales. Registering the domain name in bad faith is clearly prohibited. You might be able to claim using the mark on your site in commentary or reporting, but the site name itself has no innocuous news use. I think you're going to lose and lose big on this, Pat. That's your right, of course, but it's going to make all ex-TWI sites and organizations look bad in the process.

Wacky: That's not borne out by the research. On average, both are equally intelligent. Women have a narrower bell curve than men, meaning there is a higher chance that any random woman will have the average IQ than a man will. They are less likely to be slow, but also less likely to be geniuses. Roughly translated and grossly oversimplified, say the average IQ is 100, and you take a sample of 100 women and a sample of 100 men. In the middle 30% of the IQ scores, say 10 men have IQs of 80-95, 10 have 95-105, and 10 have 105-120. Women might have 5 with 80-95, 20 with 95-105, and 5 with 105-120. The average IQ is the same overall, it's just distributed differently between the sexes. There are fewer brilliant women, but there are more stupid men, if that makes a difference. Of course, that could also be part of unmeasured bias in the tests, etc.

A typo's one thing, Pat. Perhaps even changing the wording of an option, but you changed the order, too. The original poll had "Don't let them bully you" first, then "Bend over and give it to them", then the "Sell for X" options. You've now changed it so that the people who told you to just give it to them have now voted for you to sell it to them, and at the time I read it, 100% of the votes were for you to just bend over. It makes it look like you altered the poll because you didn't like the way it was going. I think you're going to have to accept that TWI is never going to offer you a penny for that address. If you know that all this is going to wind up in their evidence file against you, why do you keep grandstanding here? It just adds to their claim that you procured the domain in bad faith. It's not like any of us here can sway the judge one bit, and if I know anything at all about the courts, it's that judges hate the smug. TWI's lawyers aren't stupid and you can pretty much bet they have an ace up their sleeve. A ruling against you on this could be used in a future civil suit over your anti-Way activities. Your case is going to be difficult at best, Pat. Take some advice and be a little more circumspect. Rein in the gleeful vengeance and focus on winning the case first.

I was just thinking that Swearengen was going to run out of goons and toadies to kill if the series runs much longer... :D-->

That's a pretty lame excuse, Pat.

Pat: Are you going to admit that you changed the poll answers after some folks had voted? Bad form, mate...

Here's a telling passage from that link George posted: (emphasis added) The last sentence has an interesting parallel. In the first season of Penn&Teller:Bull....!, the guys did a similar test with three Feng Shui "experts." They were given the same room with the same furniture and told to arrange it to its optimum Feng Shui-ness, or whatever. The three experts were not aware of each other. None of them put the same thing in the same place, yet all of them came up with official-sounding BS to defend their FS as the optimum. "...which is the expected outcome of measuring a nonexistent phenomenon." ;)-->

Chas: SWEET! Your machine can now officially beat up my machine! :D-->

Oak: LOL! I'll see what I can do... ;)--> (Just kidding, Cindy...)

Ooh, good thing I asked! Paw: I managed to get an external 120GB HD (combo FireWire/USB2). Is someone going to have a PC or laptop so we can consolidate the video footage?

That brings up a good point--are the wedding guests mostly ex-Wayfers, mostly NBWs, half-and-half, what? Is there anything I shouldn't talk about in the toast? Nothing sucks worse than listening to a bunch of in-jokes and obscure references only wayfers would get.

I don't know the particulars, but it seems that would be just fine for RedHat, since the graphics card is a popular one. The processor's no problem. Linux has come a long way from the days of the command-line installer. My RH8 install was as easy as a Windows install--but shorter. It automatically detected everything in that old clunker of a system on the first go-round.

LG: I didn't remember all that. Thanks for bringing it to my attention. I believe you're right, if that is the case.