Humodour

http://www.physorg.com/news175267656.html They can be as much as 40-60. The trick is that the side it started on is the side most likely to come up.

So what are we talking about here? A completely broken application that needs ten patches and a lot of computer know-how to even get running? No. It's an application that auto-installs itself and then needs one patch to work properly (and by properly I mean works perfectly until you need to download something bigger than 270 MB or something). ONE PATCH. One that's automatically linked for you. Yes, I had to install the same patch when I bought Operation Anchorage. Download, install, done. Nuisance? Yes. Worth complaining your ass off on the internet for? In Bizarroland, apparently yes. So I assume your router doesn't support Windows XP's standard MTU size, correct? Because that is what GfWL uses. And this is GfWL's fault? Whose fault is it that your floppy disc reader doesn't support CD's then? I may be both delusional and a troll, but at least I can get an almost idiot-proof program to run. Think about that for a second. Let's start a war. Let's start a nuclear war. AT THE GAY BAR, GAY BAR, GAY BAR!

That's the first thing I thought of when I read your original post.

Well, I was thinking about the long-term. Put money in an investment in America, then wait 5 to 10 years for the next currency cycle when the AUD hits a low, and pull it out. I just wanted to confirm there wasn't a flaw in my thinking. That's pretty sweet. Better still, the AUD should be at parity with the USD for another year or so which meshes well with when I intend to start investing what I've saved.

Thanks heaps Oerwinde, GD, and Moose. I have enough info to start doing some reading. I've always sort of wondered this: Suppose I invested $100,000 in American shares while the AUD was at parity with the American dollar, and then a year later the AUD dropped to, say, 50% of the USD (i.e. 1 AUD = 0.5 USD) as it regularly does... if I were to then withdraw those shares and convert them to AUD, would I then have about $200,000? If that's true, isn't that pretty much a guaranteed get rich quick scheme, given the regularity of Australia's currency cycles? OK, so having money in the share market for only 1 year is silly, let's say it was in a savings account in America for a year instead.

From the Finnish macstore. It's completely irrevelant what kind of sales they have in the US. Even if I imported one I'd have to pay 30% tax, and if I did import I'd just get a similar PC for half the price Yuck at that import tax! But I just checked the Finnish Mac store and it's below 2000 Euros there, still nowhere near the 3000 Euro figure you mentioned. I was specifically talking about regular macbooks, not pros. Did they add dedicated GPU's since last summer? Cos that's when I last checked. They used to have ****ty Intel chips but that was updated exactly a year ago. The regular Macbooks have the nVidia 9400 I mentioned with 512 MB shared DDR3 1066 Mhz CPU RAM. It's about 25 times faster than the previous Intel onboard graphics card (no surprise). Edit: messed up quote tags

It sounded like she was eating all the random snacks people gave her as gifts, not her actual food rations.

Housing prices here will increase by about 20% by 2012, however I doubt $50,000 is enough to invest in the property market. I don't think they sell quarters of a house. Edit: And maybe I'm missing something, but 20% by 2012 is supposed to by a high increase, yet that's less than 7% per year. I could make that kind of appreciation on a basic long-term savings account. Hmm or maybe that was by the start of 2012 making it 20% in two years - that would make more sense.

Securom disk check. No limited activations. Supposedly copies made before the release date will have an online activation in that it phones home to check the date in order to prevent pre-release copies being playable. Any discs made after the release date will not have this limitation. Steam version just has Steam itself. Nothing extra. Information from here. Also supposed to have single disc LAN capability. No activation limit but we DO still have to activate it? **** it, no more Securom activation bull****, I'll just buy it on Steam. Given the exchange rate it'll probably be half the price anyway.

Maybe it's just me in my own little world then, but I thought all these games were coming out mid 2010. If that's the case, what else that's interesting or big is coming out this year?

They should've put a minimum price of $1 on it. Still, I'm betting that even considering that 30% of people, they're still making lots of money (and sales they otherwise never would have gotten) of this promotion. I imagine people would be a lot more free with positive word of mouth praise if they paid for it this way, too.

There are a lot of smart people on here who've invested money before. I on the other hand have never invested before, and as I said, I do plan to see a financial adviser eventually. Oh, wait I didn't say that, I deleted that part of the post for some reason. Have you done it yet? It hasn't arrived. Maybe you didn't hit 'send'. I am very interested in this plan. Please respond.

The following games will be unlocked on Steam (and I'm guessing other stores, digital or otherwise) in the next 1 to 4 weeks: Borderlands (5 days) Torchlight (6 days) Dragon Age (1 week, 6 days) Left 4 Dead 2 (3 weeks, 6 days) I only post this because I was personally surprised that all these guys were about to be released and figured others might like to know.

The problem is that it's hard to tell how much you want to pay for the game until you've played it, so people will err on the side of caution and pay a low price. Of course, it has a demo, so that's a good solution to the problem.

Be generous! If you don't pay at least $5 I will beat you with a stick. http://2dboy.com/games.php It ends on the 25th of this month (4 days). I bought the Linux version for $30 because it's a good game and I'm glad to see them supporting Linux. Edit: Here's some data on how this sale has worked for them so far. http://2dboy.com/2009/10/19/birthday-sale-results/

If you had $50,000 dollars at the start of 2011 and the basic interest rate on a long-term deposit account was about 7% (and likely to be so for a long time to come) while inflation was about 3%, what would you do with the money? Assume you have no debts or financial obligations and won't touch this money for 5 to 10 years. I'm guessing high-growth options on the stockmarket?

reliability, actually. theslug specifically mentioned credit rating being correlated with education, though. That's a solid reason for employment purposes, though I don't really get how it would help insurance companies; they're not creditors.

So credit rating is a measure of education and ability to hold down a job?

Yep. Most people don't realise this. It's not just pipelining, either. Bit-level parallelism, instruction parallelism (where pipelines come in), superscalar processing - and all these happen before you even get to multiple cores or CPUs. We've had parallel computing for decades. Data-level parallelism and task parallelism are the new ones.

And thats with Apple making people pay for service packs. Impressive. Upgrading from MacOS 10.5 to 10.6 is like €30, which is completely insane. Imagine the global ****storm that would hit the fan if Microsoft started charging for windows upgrades. OS X upgrades are not really service packs. This one had fewer new standout features than is typical for an OS X updgrade because they focused on performance and optimisation this time around. Among general service pack optimisations they introduced 3 significant new changes: OpenCL, Grand Central, and 64-bit support. Moreover Mac OS X upgrades never cost $200 or $300 dollars like Microsoft's do; they're a tenth of the price. It's a different business model. As for you ranting about Macs being 'useless', the fact that they're certified Unix is anything but useless to me. Certainly more useful (and powerful) than Windows (though admittedly not Linux). Macs also rival PCs in terms of power and performance on a hardware level. It's no secret they're more expensive though and I'd be lying if I tried to argue otherwise. My next PC will be a custom-built box which I'll put Ubuntu 10.04 on and a dual-boot to Windows for the games that don't run on my current Mac. After that it'll be another Mac Mini (one of the most awesome devices ever). I would like a Mac Pro but I think I'll just spend the money on a trip to Europe instead.

I'm 21 and I finally got a credit card. The catch? It's attached to my savings account so it's actually just a debit card with the MasterCard brand on it that works for any credit transaction. Basically so I can do online shopping. I'm like you: I can't really conceive of buying something I don't have the money for. Luckily credit scores aren't as important in this country (transactions only last on your record for 5 to 7 years too) and seem to be based on other factors besides credit cards. This caught my eye though: Insurance and employment being based on credit rating seems disturbing.

Just like my ex-girlfriend. Hahahahahaha. Sheer elegance in its simplicity!

Apple's market share has been increasing for years now (since long before Vista) while Microsoft's has been decreasing. I don't know where you got that from. It's certainly not true for the Vista release (Apple gained when Vista was released and kept those gains) and the data from before 2000 when Apple became resurgent is non-existent. It's true that analysts expect Windows 7 to boost Apple marketshare but I have a feeling Apple would be just fine even without Microsoft donating customers.

The N900 is one sweat-arse phone and if I don't have a new one once it comes out (unlikely) I'll be buying it the first chance I get. It's Nokia, it's Linux, it's a smartphone. What's not to love? Also of interest, Microsoft quarterly earnings come out Friday.