metadigital

But mine is an IBM. AN IBM!!11!!one!1

I doubt VERY much Madeleine was abducted for sex-slavery. She is a member of a British family vacationing in the Algarve, where abduction is almost completely unknown (read: HI PROFILE). Sex-slavery preys on the weakest, the defenceless of society; those that cannot fight back are easy pickings. (Driving down the cost of supplies is a cornerstone of capitalism.) This is more likely a crime of opportunity, though it does seem to have been executed with considerable care (or a lot of luck). Edit: latest development

That's pretty cruel.

She's much more likely to die in a car accident before she reaches twenty.

I think that sums up the issue nicely.

The reason (well, one of them, anyway) that I have a pile of books to read is based on the times when I have seen a book that interests me, and I haven't purchased it. Only to find later that I couldn't find it. The best example is the book I am currently reading: 1759. After deciding that it was worthy of reading, I decided I would "buy it later", only to forget its title and author ... so it took me probably more than two years to find it again (by British Museum Search of every bookstore I went into, which is a dangerous activity for someone who nearly always walks out of a bookshop with a handful). The lesson I learnt from that (and other instances) is that it is much better for me to have a pile of books from which to choose my reading, at leisure, than to be irritably looking for something good to read, especially something that I know I want to read and can't have. Now I pick up a book from my pile(s) and, no matter how long ago I got it, I know I will enjoy reading it for some reason.

Oh, you're talking about the original post. Yes, yes.

My current rig is a laptop. My next, imminent purchase will be custom.

IIRC AMD-ATi have the best cards for each of the DX9 price categories, so they aren't out of it by a long chalk, even if there first DX10 card is a stinker. The jury is still out on the next gen CPU, though, I hope they do better.

Too late! :D

Who "they"?

Yes.

Excerrent.

I'm no lawyer, but just because someone settles out of court doesn't test/prove the precedent. Novell were just limiting all expenses: no long drawn-out court battles and counter-suing with Microsoft and (most importantly) each other's customers. Proving patent infringement is almost impossible, save for direct code theft (as you intimated). And it is quite comical that Microsoft are upset at people infringing their graphical interface, when Apple did it a decade before them, and the Palo Alto Lab invented it a decade or more before them! It's all sabre-rattling. As an aside, oh how far Novell has fallen ... from having over 80% of the Network OS market in the 90s, when Windows was just elbowing onto the stage ...

^^ Scottish Protestant Puritan. Also, no Italian would ever cook with Spam. They would eat scorpion poop first.

What about that live-action tv series ... was that Clone Wars?

You get a gold star from petty cash.

What? you are you saying that I'm Christ or something? (that's my name your messing with you know) Only the tr00 Messiah denies his divinity!

It's hard to tell (further to Gfted1's comments), I initially thought the carrier was stern-towards, but it does seem to be a bow ... Here are some historical carriers (4 US Navy carriers right after the war), showing the size and length difference between an early battlecruiser conversion, the Saratoga (bottom), an early fleet carrier Enterprise (2nd from bottom), a war time built Essex-class carrier (2nd from top, the Hornet) and a light carrier based on a cruiser hull, the San Jacinto (top):

Hey, neat. I might re-install KotOR again soon ...

Sadly, yes.

It comes from not understanding history ... say, when people don't read books written before they were born ...

I read a book recently (Imagining Imaginary Numbers) wherein the author claimed that "imagining" was almost outlawed in (he said Texan, but I would more believe the mid-West) schools, and certainly self-censored OUT of text books, because the word "imagine" was too close to "magic" and therefore ANTI-KRISTIAN!!2!!1

And the British have a reputation for poor food. "