"The situation is similar for Catholics. Of the estimated 15 to 20 million Catholics in China, less than half belong to state-approved churches, which put authority to Beijing before authority to Rome.
Those Christians who want to avoid the state-controlled religious movements meet in unofficial buildings or even each others' homes - hence their description as "house churches" - risking fines, imprisonment, torture and even, in some cases, death."
It is one thing to say you can practice but another to actually let you. It is a well known fact that even the true Roman Catholic church has gone under ground in China. The one that is has so many members is state controlled and regulated.
I contend that it is you who needs to get your facts straight. Go to google and type in Christians in China or chinese persecution of christians, see what comes up.
They have pulled the wool over your eyes my friend.
"Notice that nations like Russia and China don't have religious fundamentalists participating in organized attacks against science and scientific discovery. "
Thats because in China religion is pretty much illegal and they jail you, torture you or kill you for being a Christian especially if you speak out.
Li is also documenting the cases of 117 religious people who have died while in official custody, 700 who have been put in labor camps, and 550 who are wanted by the police but are in hiding. He is also investigating 300 police officers accused of being especially abusive."[christianitytoday]
That sounds so much better than here were we let those fundies run rampant! Is this what you want and the example we should follow?
"They attempt to make up for their own lack of education by forcing their twisted ideas about the world on others, including people and organizations who wish to improve our understanding of nature via the scientific method."
Thank you for stero typing. I'm a christian, probably not a fundamentalist, but a Bible belivin Christian. I have a college education in software engineering. Also, 3 of the Math professors, 2 engineering professors and a physics professor at my college were all christians. I would say a PHD in science or egineering is pretty good education. I went to small(4,00 students) secular state school.
When did fundamentalists go after NASA? Please provide so proof to back this up.
I know it's easy to say "darned backwards stupid Christians cause all our problems!" It's nothing new, Christians were blamed for the fall of Rome too which is why Augustine wrote City Of God.
"A nation cannot remain a leader in today's technological world if it will not maximize its scientific potential."
I definitely don't want to live in a nation where scientific progress trumps all moral and ethical obligations. At what cost is it ok to maximize our potential. Why don't we just allow all scientists free reign to do any research they want. Whatever it might be. We could learn so much, we might have to hurt or kill a lot of people to get there, but hey it's progress and for our nations future!
There is a balance and place which will remain in place and should. I honestly hope neither side ever wins and that they alway balance out. there needs to be a balance between science and mroality. There needs to be a balance radicals on both sides can screw this up.
If breaking windows doesn't set off the car alarm, then why does it go off when I bump into the car in the parking lot. Car alarms are generally more sensitive than you realize, my dad has an old classic we cruise around in that has a really loud engine. It's not uncommon for us to set off peoples car alarms just by driving by.
I think the reason people break car windows is it's easy.
Find Brick, rock, bat, bottle,other blut object
Smash windows with said object
Steal Stuff
Run
Also, if someone wants to rip a hole in my hous'es dry wall they can have fun. I live in an all brick house, and I think the drilling/cutting required with power tools will wake someone(probably the whole neighborhood).
I really think you overesitmate "junkies". Most of them just throw a brick through the window. When was the last time you heard of a house getting robbed by cutting down the fence, and tearing a person sized hole in the wall. All my neighbors who have been robbed were bricked.
Someone can always get in if they truly want to, but if all that is truly worthless to you, why don't you leave your money in a paper bag on the porch? I mean after all, the doors, locks, security systems, fences and safes are useless right? So, just leave all your valuables outside and save the theives the trouble; I mean they are gonna get it anyway right?
From article: "he can't leave his house between the hours of 12.30am and 7am on weekdays, and between 12.30am and 10am on weekends, for two months"
The weekday one is a bit of a joke. No 16 year old is leaving there house before 7am or is even awke then. Also 12:30 isn't a horrible time to have to be home, he can still have plenty of fun. And when I was 16 I usually woke up around noon on weekends, so 10am isn't all that bad.
Basically the judge should have just said "I sentence you to a solid 7-8 hours of rest every day!" it would have the same effect.
I forgot to mention using adawre or something like it. Thats also very helpful.
And if you don't want to use a firewall or anti virus, please come to my college and connect to the network. Wait 10 minutes while your computer gets owned.
Within 1 hour of moving into my apartment on campus, Zone alarm has logged almost 1,000 inbound access attempts...now that's scary.
I never assumed my software firewall was some amazing thing that kept me 100% safe. But I would still never want to surf without one. I don't care if it only protects against some attacks, it's definately better than none. I would rather be protected from a little than nothing.
My view has always been using a combination of things that help is th ebest idea. Using a router that has a hardware firewall + a software firewall + antivirue + a secure browser(firefox) is a decent way to keep safe. This won't stop everything, but it's better than surfing around with no protection. Also add not doing stupid things to that equation for maximum protection.
This makes me think back to the warn button on AIM. I don't know if it's still there, but that thing was stupid.
The idea was if someone was abusing/bothering you you could "warn them" which would cause a warning level to show for them on everyone's buddylist(who had them on it). Also, if you got a warn level high enough you got booted from AIM for a certain period of time. Each press of the button incremented the warn level more, eventually you had to stop.
When I was in middle school it was funny to gang up on a friend and warn him to the point where he was banned. Basically we had warn wars where we would see who could boot the other first. Of if you got mad at them and wanted revenge it was good fo rthat too.
I read this and just wondered if there would be similar "abuse wars", only this time the police are involved. How many 12 year olds are going to get mad a friend and hit the button or do it just to mess with them?
I've been an intern all summer at a rather large software company in town. When I landed the job they told me all this great stuff I'd learn about software engineering(which is my major) and documentation and such. It was all a bunch of crap.
I'm in the Business Analysis Dept, which really just writes software specs. I would say in a given day I do a solid hours work if any at all. There were days where I had more, but not many. I aksed around to some friends I've made here and it appears no one does much work.
Basically, I surf the web all day or bring a book and read it. My cube is back in a little cubby hole all by itself, and no one comes back here ever. I often wonder why I even come in here most days. I would do work if I had it. I actually go ask my manager for assignments every few days and he never has any. So he gives me some BS work like "get familiar with this spec" which involves reading a 600 page spec that I will never need to work with.
They have decently strict filters here and it makes people mad. I think the general idea is that if we have nothign to do at least let us surf the web a bit more freely. Anyways the whole point of this post is that if I had stuff to do the filters wouldn't really make me mad. I wouldn't be online too much and might not notice. But with nothign to do I bump into them constantly and get annoyed and try to bypass them.
It seems to me that MS is finally acknowledging Firefox's popularity.
What I never understood is the whole browser wars thing, how does MS make money off IE? It's free to download. I guess this signals the end of the browser wars, with both sides sitting down to work together(interesting indeed).
Maybe they realize that Firefox is a good product and IE isn't actually making them any money so why not support Firefox.
Or maybe it's just a PR stunt in light of all the recent Vista scare stuff. They wanted us to see it; I'm sure they could have contacted mozilla somehow without the public knowing. The fact is they want us to see this for some reason.
Well if you don't want to sit there, I think there are programs out there that will do the e-bay sniping for you. I've never used one so I don't know if they are legit, but I have heard of others using them.
So, now the new problem will be people scheduling bids through programs and such. Kind of unfair since they are way faster than human bidders.
I personally am an E-bay sniper, it's stupid to bid on somethign that has 5 days left. You just make yourself pay more money.
Ebay also owns Half.com which is really popular for buying text books for cheap. However, I have siwtched to amazon/campus bookstore since I have been burned so many times.
Ebay doesn't care, they won't help with fraud because most of it is from over seas. For example I bought a $100 Engineering text book, that was supposedly a hard cover U.S edition. When It came it was paper back and the text wasn't english at all. Ebay did nothign to help me and when I went to leave negative feedback ti told me the seller was "on vacation" and I couldn't leave feedback. Now I have an expensive chinese paper weight.
Basically, this guy scammed a bunch of people in a short period of time and then marked that he was on vacation so no one could leave feedback. Then once the deadline for leaving feedback passed he was magically back selling again, but I couldn't leave feedback anymore.
I've had other minor experiences like this where "like new" really meant "utterly destroyed", so I have stop using Ebay. They need to help customers with fraud otherwise even the insane book store prices are better than the scams!
Isn't much of that already on servers anyway? Your bank has a server somewhere with all your records, your credit card numbers are on a server somewhere too. You're ISP probably has some of your e-mail still on a server, at some point all of it was on a server. Also, all those servers are probably U.S. Based(if you live in the U.S.). The only one not out there yet is probably your Calendar, and I wouldn't be too paranoid about Google knowing I am going to the dentist tomorrow.
If however, you are not a U.S. resident/citizen then you might have reason to be paranoid about a U.S. sevrer. You're info is still on a server somewhere though and might still be on a U.S. based one.
It's pretty easy for me to see why G-Mail hasn't caught on yet. You have to be invited. I can go to yahoo or hotmail and easily sign up for an account(or 17). I actually have 1 of each from the past probably(great for those sites requiring an e-mail address and spam).
With Gmail someone has to invite you since it is still beta. So even if you want an account it is hard to get one without knowing someone. Once the beta is over and it's easy to sign up I suspect it will become more popular much faster.
That said I have about 100 Gmail invites anyone need one....
Please cite your examples, I'd like to read more about it.
But from what you mentioned how do we have any idea if these fish were separated for millions of years? Where you there watching them?
Do you assume that no Athiests have adgendas? Maybe that's why almost all of them support evolution, they need it to explain away those foolish Christians.
There are adgendas on both sides, it's ok you can admit it.
That is kind of scary since I drive through a tunnel to work everyday. Alot of the traffic in my city goes through the same tunnel and it would be all too easy to pull this off.
The tunnel is about 2 miles long.
It would really suck to get sealed inside there, being in it for 10 minutes a day during rush hour is bad enough.
Yes, of course it's all a plot to sway us into voting republican!
It's not like Al Qaeda promised they would be performign majors attacks or anything like that..
http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/07/27/zawahiri .tape/index.html
Sometimes there really are people out there who want to hurt us, they have done it many times before. We forget so quickly the attacks of the past and assume any new attack mentioned is a conspiracy.
What we need to do is cooperate with the authorities. If they are lying it will come out. So you have to buy shampoo when you land, big deal! At least you will be landing. Why do we get so mad about these minor inconveinces and delays. Would you rather they just didn't do anything and let anyone on a plane with any suspect item?
I recently bought a laptop from dell that came with Windows Home. I gave that disc to my sister and bought pro with my student discount and actually got both versions for less then dell charges for Pro.
I wiped the drive, set up a dual boot(ubuntu) and installed pro a few minutes after opening the box. When I booted up it asked me to activate, so I setup my internet connection and tried to activate online. It wouldn't let me, it kept saying my internet wasn't configured and presented a web link for help. I clicked the link and it worked just fine.
When I got to the site it said my copy was probably not genuine and I should take action to fix this by buying a legit copy. I bought my copy in a box off microsoft(through the college). I tried everyday for 29 days to get it to activate and everyday the same thing happend. Finally I did the phone activation which worked fine.
This made me wonder how many people would beleive there copy was not legit and buy a new one from MS. It also made me wonder why it would direct me to a website to resolve the issue AFTER telling me my internet connection was not valid.
I knew my copy was legit, but how many people have been duped into buying another copy this way? It assumed activation failed because it wasn't genuine, not because my internet connection failed. It just all seemed very odd...
Clearly you've never had any interaction with the poor. Very few of them have iPods, most of them would be happy with a coat or just a meal.
Go to a soup kitchen, volunteer there for a day and see whats it like. You might also want to visit the shelters they live in.
Finally, look up how much welfare pays out, see if you can support a family off that. Then see if you can pay for a computer, internet access, and an iPod. You might also want to try making minmum wage and trying to support a family. You'll be making about 800 dollars a month before taxes and all the other deductions. Assuming of course you actually get 40 hours a week.
Before you buy into all the stereotypes, try actually seeing how things truly are. Sorry for feeding the trolls, I just couldn't let this go unopposed..
Colleges still have a similar program, but it costs more. You can now get legit XP pro for 60 bucks.
Our school also has an MSDN membership, free Visual studio was kinda nice. Although I could just buy for 30 bucks off the school.
The funny thing is our campus is regulated to 1gb of downloads a week, so downloading stuff of MSDN basically means you won't be doing much else online that week(especially after you update it). 3 violations and you get to run at 56K for the rest of the semester. 4 and no internet for you!
By the way I'm a Software engineering student, but we don't get a bonus discount or anything like that. A history major and a software engineering major pay the same price for it all.
I will most likely be buying Vista very early on. Why would I do something so crazy? Student Discounts! I graduate in May and I want to get Vista Pro(or whatever is equiv) full version for 60 bucks. Just like I got XP pro full version for 60 bucks.
I then plan on putting it in a drawer somewhere for quite some time though....
Hey Microsoft hurry up and get this thing done before my student discount days are over. If I have to pay full price I think I'll be waiting a few years. During which time I will be getting more acquainted with Ubuntu.
Don't worry too much I dual boot Ubuntu. Sadly I need Windows for school, since everythign everyone uses is Windows based....
Ok cue the:...Ubuntu...
Ah. I think I see where you problem is.....
If you think Anti-Virus software is not essential, I'd like you to go to a large college campus and connect to their network. Without a firewall and AV software you will probably have some nasty worms, viruses and trojans in about 1 hour.
I have my computer set to scan everyday while I am at class. It finds at least 2 viruses a week. I use firefox, zone alarm, and keep windows updated. I also turn the comp at night, but stuff still gets through.
I just wish people on campus would get AV software, the school gives it away for free because the situation is that bad. I have spent hours going around the dorm putting AVG or Norton(free from school) on friend's machines because they were completely trashed by worms and viruses(I usually have to reinstall everything first).
On a side note turn off file sharing on your hard drives people. Everyone on campus can access all your files. And whoever the owner of "Matt's Comp" is, you may want to rethink putting all your passwords and usernames in a file labeled "passwords.doc" in your My Documents folder...
Slashdot Mirror
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/3993857.st m [BBC]
"The situation is similar for Catholics. Of the estimated 15 to 20 million Catholics in China, less than half belong to state-approved churches, which put authority to Beijing before authority to Rome.
Those Christians who want to avoid the state-controlled religious movements meet in unofficial buildings or even each others' homes - hence their description as "house churches" - risking fines, imprisonment, torture and even, in some cases, death."
It is one thing to say you can practice but another to actually let you. It is a well known fact that even the true Roman Catholic church has gone under ground in China. The one that is has so many members is state controlled and regulated.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/3343535.st m [BBC]
I contend that it is you who needs to get your facts straight. Go to google and type in Christians in China or chinese persecution of christians, see what comes up.
They have pulled the wool over your eyes my friend.
Thats because in China religion is pretty much illegal and they jail you, torture you or kill you for being a Christian especially if you speak out.
http://www.persecution.org/newsite/countryinfodeta il.php?countrycode=16%5Bpersecution.org%5D 8 .html%5BChristianitytoday%5D
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2002/003/11.3
"The largest number of testimonies comes from central Henan Province, where persecution has dramatically escalated since 1999. Li's group has also collected partial reports on 17,000 others, mostly Christians, persecuted for their religious beliefs.
Li is also documenting the cases of 117 religious people who have died while in official custody, 700 who have been put in labor camps, and 550 who are wanted by the police but are in hiding. He is also investigating 300 police officers accused of being especially abusive."[christianitytoday]
That sounds so much better than here were we let those fundies run rampant! Is this what you want and the example we should follow?
Thank you for stero typing. I'm a christian, probably not a fundamentalist, but a Bible belivin Christian. I have a college education in software engineering. Also, 3 of the Math professors, 2 engineering professors and a physics professor at my college were all christians. I would say a PHD in science or egineering is pretty good education. I went to small(4,00 students) secular state school.
When did fundamentalists go after NASA? Please provide so proof to back this up.
I know it's easy to say "darned backwards stupid Christians cause all our problems!" It's nothing new, Christians were blamed for the fall of Rome too which is why Augustine wrote City Of God.
"A nation cannot remain a leader in today's technological world if it will not maximize its scientific potential."
I definitely don't want to live in a nation where scientific progress trumps all moral and ethical obligations. At what cost is it ok to maximize our potential. Why don't we just allow all scientists free reign to do any research they want. Whatever it might be. We could learn so much, we might have to hurt or kill a lot of people to get there, but hey it's progress and for our nations future!
There is a balance and place which will remain in place and should. I honestly hope neither side ever wins and that they alway balance out. there needs to be a balance between science and mroality. There needs to be a balance radicals on both sides can screw this up.
I think the reason people break car windows is it's easy.
Also, if someone wants to rip a hole in my hous'es dry wall they can have fun. I live in an all brick house, and I think the drilling/cutting required with power tools will wake someone(probably the whole neighborhood).
I really think you overesitmate "junkies". Most of them just throw a brick through the window. When was the last time you heard of a house getting robbed by cutting down the fence, and tearing a person sized hole in the wall. All my neighbors who have been robbed were bricked.
Someone can always get in if they truly want to, but if all that is truly worthless to you, why don't you leave your money in a paper bag on the porch? I mean after all, the doors, locks, security systems, fences and safes are useless right? So, just leave all your valuables outside and save the theives the trouble; I mean they are gonna get it anyway right?
That's a my bad. You are correct, I misread the article thinking "employer" meant one guy instead of one company.
You do realize he only spammed/mail bombed one guy right?
The weekday one is a bit of a joke. No 16 year old is leaving there house before 7am or is even awke then. Also 12:30 isn't a horrible time to have to be home, he can still have plenty of fun. And when I was 16 I usually woke up around noon on weekends, so 10am isn't all that bad.
Basically the judge should have just said "I sentence you to a solid 7-8 hours of rest every day!" it would have the same effect.
And if you don't want to use a firewall or anti virus, please come to my college and connect to the network. Wait 10 minutes while your computer gets owned.
Within 1 hour of moving into my apartment on campus, Zone alarm has logged almost 1,000 inbound access attempts...now that's scary.
My view has always been using a combination of things that help is th ebest idea. Using a router that has a hardware firewall + a software firewall + antivirue + a secure browser(firefox) is a decent way to keep safe. This won't stop everything, but it's better than surfing around with no protection. Also add not doing stupid things to that equation for maximum protection.
The idea was if someone was abusing/bothering you you could "warn them" which would cause a warning level to show for them on everyone's buddylist(who had them on it). Also, if you got a warn level high enough you got booted from AIM for a certain period of time. Each press of the button incremented the warn level more, eventually you had to stop.
When I was in middle school it was funny to gang up on a friend and warn him to the point where he was banned. Basically we had warn wars where we would see who could boot the other first. Of if you got mad at them and wanted revenge it was good fo rthat too.
I read this and just wondered if there would be similar "abuse wars", only this time the police are involved. How many 12 year olds are going to get mad a friend and hit the button or do it just to mess with them?
I'm in the Business Analysis Dept, which really just writes software specs. I would say in a given day I do a solid hours work if any at all. There were days where I had more, but not many. I aksed around to some friends I've made here and it appears no one does much work.
Basically, I surf the web all day or bring a book and read it. My cube is back in a little cubby hole all by itself, and no one comes back here ever. I often wonder why I even come in here most days. I would do work if I had it. I actually go ask my manager for assignments every few days and he never has any. So he gives me some BS work like "get familiar with this spec" which involves reading a 600 page spec that I will never need to work with.
They have decently strict filters here and it makes people mad. I think the general idea is that if we have nothign to do at least let us surf the web a bit more freely. Anyways the whole point of this post is that if I had stuff to do the filters wouldn't really make me mad. I wouldn't be online too much and might not notice. But with nothign to do I bump into them constantly and get annoyed and try to bypass them.
What I never understood is the whole browser wars thing, how does MS make money off IE? It's free to download. I guess this signals the end of the browser wars, with both sides sitting down to work together(interesting indeed).
Maybe they realize that Firefox is a good product and IE isn't actually making them any money so why not support Firefox.
Or maybe it's just a PR stunt in light of all the recent Vista scare stuff. They wanted us to see it; I'm sure they could have contacted mozilla somehow without the public knowing. The fact is they want us to see this for some reason.
So, now the new problem will be people scheduling bids through programs and such. Kind of unfair since they are way faster than human bidders.
I personally am an E-bay sniper, it's stupid to bid on somethign that has 5 days left. You just make yourself pay more money.
Ebay doesn't care, they won't help with fraud because most of it is from over seas. For example I bought a $100 Engineering text book, that was supposedly a hard cover U.S edition. When It came it was paper back and the text wasn't english at all. Ebay did nothign to help me and when I went to leave negative feedback ti told me the seller was "on vacation" and I couldn't leave feedback. Now I have an expensive chinese paper weight.
Basically, this guy scammed a bunch of people in a short period of time and then marked that he was on vacation so no one could leave feedback. Then once the deadline for leaving feedback passed he was magically back selling again, but I couldn't leave feedback anymore.
I've had other minor experiences like this where "like new" really meant "utterly destroyed", so I have stop using Ebay. They need to help customers with fraud otherwise even the insane book store prices are better than the scams!
If however, you are not a U.S. resident/citizen then you might have reason to be paranoid about a U.S. sevrer. You're info is still on a server somewhere though and might still be on a U.S. based one.
With Gmail someone has to invite you since it is still beta. So even if you want an account it is hard to get one without knowing someone. Once the beta is over and it's easy to sign up I suspect it will become more popular much faster.
That said I have about 100 Gmail invites anyone need one....
Please cite your examples, I'd like to read more about it.
But from what you mentioned how do we have any idea if these fish were separated for millions of years? Where you there watching them?
Do you assume that no Athiests have adgendas? Maybe that's why almost all of them support evolution, they need it to explain away those foolish Christians.
There are adgendas on both sides, it's ok you can admit it.
That is kind of scary since I drive through a tunnel to work everyday. Alot of the traffic in my city goes through the same tunnel and it would be all too easy to pull this off. The tunnel is about 2 miles long. It would really suck to get sealed inside there, being in it for 10 minutes a day during rush hour is bad enough.
Yes, of course it's all a plot to sway us into voting republican!i .tape/index.html
It's not like Al Qaeda promised they would be performign majors attacks or anything like that..
http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/07/27/zawahir
Sometimes there really are people out there who want to hurt us, they have done it many times before. We forget so quickly the attacks of the past and assume any new attack mentioned is a conspiracy.
What we need to do is cooperate with the authorities. If they are lying it will come out. So you have to buy shampoo when you land, big deal! At least you will be landing. Why do we get so mad about these minor inconveinces and delays. Would you rather they just didn't do anything and let anyone on a plane with any suspect item?
I recently bought a laptop from dell that came with Windows Home. I gave that disc to my sister and bought pro with my student discount and actually got both versions for less then dell charges for Pro.
I wiped the drive, set up a dual boot(ubuntu) and installed pro a few minutes after opening the box. When I booted up it asked me to activate, so I setup my internet connection and tried to activate online. It wouldn't let me, it kept saying my internet wasn't configured and presented a web link for help. I clicked the link and it worked just fine.
When I got to the site it said my copy was probably not genuine and I should take action to fix this by buying a legit copy. I bought my copy in a box off microsoft(through the college). I tried everyday for 29 days to get it to activate and everyday the same thing happend. Finally I did the phone activation which worked fine.
This made me wonder how many people would beleive there copy was not legit and buy a new one from MS. It also made me wonder why it would direct me to a website to resolve the issue AFTER telling me my internet connection was not valid.
I knew my copy was legit, but how many people have been duped into buying another copy this way? It assumed activation failed because it wasn't genuine, not because my internet connection failed. It just all seemed very odd...
Go to a soup kitchen, volunteer there for a day and see whats it like. You might also want to visit the shelters they live in.
Finally, look up how much welfare pays out, see if you can support a family off that. Then see if you can pay for a computer, internet access, and an iPod. You might also want to try making minmum wage and trying to support a family. You'll be making about 800 dollars a month before taxes and all the other deductions. Assuming of course you actually get 40 hours a week.
Before you buy into all the stereotypes, try actually seeing how things truly are. Sorry for feeding the trolls, I just couldn't let this go unopposed..
Our school also has an MSDN membership, free Visual studio was kinda nice. Although I could just buy for 30 bucks off the school.
The funny thing is our campus is regulated to 1gb of downloads a week, so downloading stuff of MSDN basically means you won't be doing much else online that week(especially after you update it). 3 violations and you get to run at 56K for the rest of the semester. 4 and no internet for you!
By the way I'm a Software engineering student, but we don't get a bonus discount or anything like that. A history major and a software engineering major pay the same price for it all.
I then plan on putting it in a drawer somewhere for quite some time though....
Hey Microsoft hurry up and get this thing done before my student discount days are over. If I have to pay full price I think I'll be waiting a few years. During which time I will be getting more acquainted with Ubuntu.
Don't worry too much I dual boot Ubuntu. Sadly I need Windows for school, since everythign everyone uses is Windows based.... Ok cue the: ...Ubuntu...
Ah. I think I see where you problem is.....
If you think Anti-Virus software is not essential, I'd like you to go to a large college campus and connect to their network. Without a firewall and AV software you will probably have some nasty worms, viruses and trojans in about 1 hour. I have my computer set to scan everyday while I am at class. It finds at least 2 viruses a week. I use firefox, zone alarm, and keep windows updated. I also turn the comp at night, but stuff still gets through. I just wish people on campus would get AV software, the school gives it away for free because the situation is that bad. I have spent hours going around the dorm putting AVG or Norton(free from school) on friend's machines because they were completely trashed by worms and viruses(I usually have to reinstall everything first). On a side note turn off file sharing on your hard drives people. Everyone on campus can access all your files. And whoever the owner of "Matt's Comp" is, you may want to rethink putting all your passwords and usernames in a file labeled "passwords.doc" in your My Documents folder...