you don't "BUY" a house, you get the bank to buy it for you, and then you lease it from them
Wrong. You borrow money from the bank to buy the house, and get a lower interest rate by giving the bank a security interest in the property. The bank does not have the title -- you do. The bank DOES have a lien against the title, but it's still YOUR property, not the bank's. If it was the bank's property, they would be responsible for maintenance and taxes.
With a house your mortgage payment is fixed (or at worst slightly variable if you have an ARM). As long as you can still make the mortgage payments, you get to live there regardless of whether you have positive or negative equity. Negative equity only hurts you if you have to sell or want to refinance.
Even if you can't make the mortgage payments, you still won't necessarily lose your house if handle the situation correctly -- even without filing bankruptcy. (Most banks would rather work with you on payments rather than go to foreclosure).
Well, it's not completely safe, but one of the safest areas from natural disasters is Harper's Ferry West Virginia (and neighboring areas of MD and VA). You don't get many hurricanes (they tend to hit the Outer Banks in NC, and the ones that do dodge the Outer Banks don't do much damage that far inland. It's geologically stable, so you're safe from earthquakes and volcanoes, and the area is not particuarly prone to tornadoes.
Well, the only version of AD&D I've played was 1st edition, which had no provision for buying points. I've looked at (but haven't played with) the 3.5 rules, and they look pretty lame and restrictive to me compared to GURPS.
Just a FYI Apple, no matter how cheap something is it is NEVER as cheap as free. Free will always win out.
That's only true if your time has no value. A $.05 download beats a free one if the paid one doesn't force you to use a spyware-laden client, has a high-bandwidth connection, and provides files of known good quality, and provides a good search engine.
A P2P network might get you the song you want for free, but you've got to spend time finding it, and even then it's a crapshoot whether or not it's a good rip or if the person hosting it has a decent net connection.
That's why I prefer a points-based system for character generation (like GURPS) rather than a roll-the-dice approach. Since everyone starts with the same number of points, you don't have anyone to blame but yourself if you don't wind up with a character you want to play.
Sure, you can build an unrealistic combat monster this way, but a good GM will penalize players that do that by putting them in situations where they need non-combat skills to succede.
They discuss these thoughts and it can eventually develop into a group suicide.
So what? That's just Darwin in action, putting a little chlorine in the gene pool. A predisposition to terminal stupidity is a contrasurvival trait which should be eliminated.
SCSI, in its current form, is just opening itself up to becoming antiquated
It would be more accurate to say that the SCSI pricing model is becoming antiquated. Vendors have gotten used to being able to charge a 300%+ premium for SCSI hardware because, until recently, it was the only game in town for serious server storage.
The current generation of SATA gives you roughly 90% of the performance of SCSI for less than 50% of the price. Unless you absolutely need every shred of I/O throughput money can buy, the price/performance ratio of SATA makes it an attractive and realistic alternative.
For the same reason that Al Qaeda attacked the WTC and Pentagon - to make themselves heard.
Silly me, I thought their operational objective was to provoke the US into attacking an Islamic country, thereby gaining them more popular support among hard-line Muslims.
Looks like they accomplished THOSE objectives perfectly.
Do you really think third-rate military dictators would laugh at America and burn our flag in contempt if Ronald Reagan were president?
I think the idea of electing the corpse of a man with Altzheimers is pretty laughable. Of course, Ronald Regan's corpse is STILL smarter than The Shrub.
Let's consider the hypothetical situation where Airbus releases the A380 prematurely (to keep ahead of the market)
Bad analogy. Aircraft are one of the most HEAVILY regulated products on the planet. You need to pass dozens of government inspections before you're allowed to sell a new aircraft design. Desktop software is completely unregulated.
There is NO legitimate reason whatsoever for a modern, patched operating system to be vulnerable to a simple, 8-year-old DOS attack. What's next, reintroduction of the Ping Of Death vulnerability? This is sloppy quality control, pure and simple.
This incident is just another example which demonstrates the importance (or more accurately, the lack thereof) that Microsoft's corporate culture places on security. Hasn't anyone at Microsoft ever heard about regression testing?
Microsoft has consistantly demonstrated that, regardless of what their press releases say, security is NOT one of their priorities. People need to start waking up and realizing this before they entrust their critical infrastructure to Microsoft products.
So download the FLAC file and re-encode to AAC. What's the big deal?
A lossless format like FLAC is perfect for long-term archivial storage. A lossy encoding is great for putting on a portable device. A modern CPU can encode a song in a few seconds, so it makes sense to store the lossless file and re-encode when you transfer it to a portable device.
I use Aeroplayer to listen to oggs on my Palm, and burn mp3-cds to listen to on the player in my car. For me, it makes a lot more sense to re-encode at burn/copy time than it does to store both.mp3 and.ogg files on my hard drive.
ETs that just happened to have an extremely similar genome to apes of Earth?
Don't you know anything? Homo Habilis were the ETs. The only reason they started evolving was because Tree-of-Life wouldn't grow on Earth, so there weren't any Protectors around to kill off the mutants.
A cron job to run an NTP update once an hour and viola, this technique is useless.
That does nothing to correct the drift RATE. You may be setting your time correctly every hour, but it INSTANTLY starts deviating again. It's this RATE of deviation which is being measured. Running NTPD would help, because it constantly adjusts for the hardware skew rate.
IIRC, modifying system parameters via/proc isn't persistent between reboots. I'm pretty sure you'd have to add this to/etc/sysctl.conf if you want it to be persistent:
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Even if you can't make the mortgage payments, you still won't necessarily lose your house if handle the situation correctly -- even without filing bankruptcy. (Most banks would rather work with you on payments rather than go to foreclosure).
A P2P network might get you the song you want for free, but you've got to spend time finding it, and even then it's a crapshoot whether or not it's a good rip or if the person hosting it has a decent net connection.
If you want lightweight rules, try GURPS lite, available as a free download from your buddies at Steve Jackson games.
Sure, you can build an unrealistic combat monster this way, but a good GM will penalize players that do that by putting them in situations where they need non-combat skills to succede.
Why does a frelling PHONE need to be able to EXECUTE attached files in the first place?
External enclosures can be had for less than $30 and 250GB drives are under $140 each. Is your data worth $340?
Tyan makes some very nice AMD-64 rackmount barebones systems.
The current generation of SATA gives you roughly 90% of the performance of SCSI for less than 50% of the price. Unless you absolutely need every shred of I/O throughput money can buy, the price/performance ratio of SATA makes it an attractive and realistic alternative.
Looks like they accomplished THOSE objectives perfectly.
This incident is just another example which demonstrates the importance (or more accurately, the lack thereof) that Microsoft's corporate culture places on security. Hasn't anyone at Microsoft ever heard about regression testing?
Microsoft has consistantly demonstrated that, regardless of what their press releases say, security is NOT one of their priorities. People need to start waking up and realizing this before they entrust their critical infrastructure to Microsoft products.
A lossless format like FLAC is perfect for long-term archivial storage. A lossy encoding is great for putting on a portable device. A modern CPU can encode a song in a few seconds, so it makes sense to store the lossless file and re-encode when you transfer it to a portable device.
I use Aeroplayer to listen to oggs on my Palm, and burn mp3-cds to listen to on the player in my car. For me, it makes a lot more sense to re-encode at burn/copy time than it does to store both .mp3 and .ogg files on my hard drive.