Pain_Man

Only YOU would know some shit like that. And that's saying something considering the amount of utterly useless (and profitless) trivia floating around in my gray matter. But hey, if it wasn't for useless stuff , what would there be worth knowing?

No, he just nicks mine.

I assume you've applied for the $1,000,000 reward offered by The Skeptics Society? No? No, I haven't applied yet, however, since I am astral projection through the Fourth Dimension, I already have in the future and claimed the prize by reviving Houdini from the dead. Even he, who helped set up such a fund, had to admit, it was a fair cop and pretty damn good trick! OH STOP IT! Be honest with these good folks. I got there thirty seconds after you revived Houdini and hit him with my Super Death Ray. Hah! You shoulda seen the look on your face. That's whatcha get for stealing My Time-Travel Suppositories! #39;(

Taking nothing from 'Wheel, it was you that turned me on to snopes. And after being embarassed --not intentionally I'm sure--by putting the--unknown to me--hoary "celebratin' Arabs" story I decided to check this story when my wife sent me the email. My little voice said, "Bullshit!!" Sho' nuff, Little Voice was right as he almost always is ('cept, of course, when he isn't).

Fundamentalist penis-enlarging baby-killers? Maybe that all that dope I did in the 60s really did fry my brain. Except that I wasn't born until 1970. See what I mean. Brain = gone.

You can have my Yahoo! Mail account which I've had since 1997. I average 5000+ SPAMs a month, everything from the aforementioned Swedish-made penis enlargers (which they now sell in my pharmacy!) to the Nigerian bank scam to watching "hot slut and donkey action!!!!" Bizarrely, many of these spams contain nothing at all. Just a bunch of addresses, usually nonsense, and maybe some completely random collection of letters, but often just...nuthin'. Can't these people do something useful, like steal cars? At least that keeps the insurance companies in business. SPAM just pisses people off. Has anyone EVER bought something because of spam? (Seriously...)

I second the second and third the third.

I never seen all of Cabaret. Not exactly a big Liza fan. There's some archival footage of Hitler, sometime before the war. He's moving through this town, in a motorcade, standing up, doing the ripped-off Roman salute (imagine how horrified Cato, Caesar, Augustus, Trajan, et al would be if they could have seen that!). There's this woman, probably early 20s, in the crowd. She got the most insane look on her face. She's literally intoxicated with Hitler. As though he were a drug and she'd OD'd. Those eyes, I've never forgotten them. The closest you'll get is the look in the eyes of the Islamofascist choadswallowers. But it gave me a taste of the fanaticism that inspired the German people to follow that Austrian pig-humping asshole to start another goddamned war that kills two and half times as many people as did the first one. (20M* vs. 50M) *(half the deaths were military KIA; most of the civilian deaths in WWI, in fact the overwhelming perfcentage was caused by deprivation, malnutrition, etc.)

Full webpage: http://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/5981.cfm The relevent portion: Ultimately, content owners would love to see a scheme where you can watch a TV show, but you must pay few cents for recording it. And most likely you could only watch the recorded show only a specified number of times. And transferring to other devices would cost few cents more, etc. Like I've been saying for years: The real purpose Rights Destruction Technology (aka "DRM" or "copy protection") has NOTHING to do with piracy or file sharing. NOTHING! "Content Owner" and "consumer." Now, which is which? It's all about money and control and money and money and money. Oh yeah, and control. And money. The "Bill bill"--Lord Gates of Redmond gave away more information than he ever intended when he floated that trial balloon of the "Bill bill"; [paraphrase] "Everyone will get their phone, their computing, their internet, the cell, the telelvision content, everything throught Microsoft for one low, monthly fee." Hypocritical, lying bastards. Why not just have the balls to say, "We own this stuff and since it ain't required for life or health, we're going to squeeze anyone who wants to watch, listen or record it. And we're creating technologies as tough as possible to make sure the concept of 'consumer choice' vanishes like sanity at a Democratic National Convention. HAH! 'Mr and Mrs Average Knucklehead' we're going to get every last stinkin' penny out of you!" One keeps hoping that the vast majority of people will wake up one day and decide, "We don't need these assholes. Humans survived for 200,000 years without 'digital entertainment.' Fuck it. We don't need this shit or the assholes that own it." Fuck em ALLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL!

Hah! I got the Urban Legend first! My wife sent me an email she received from a friend about soda cans contaminated with a powerful bacteria called Leptospirosis--which reportedly killed a woman. Doing a minter, I checked snopes. com. Guess what: FALSE. Here's the snopes.com page: 'Tis an Urban Legend.... which debunks this (which I considered unlikely anyway).

Decided to see what differences there would be between running scans in the BenQ DW1655 and the Pioneer 110D 1.39. Since DIP doesn't scan CDs (yet, it assures us), I used Nero CD/DVD 2000 (latest v. 4.51.1; which comes with v. 7.2.0.3 or you can download it separately at www.cdspeed2000.com I used a CDDA copy of Bach on Lute, Disc 1, Nigel North, lute (6 course, for those interested; it's an excellent 4 disc set of music Bach wrote for the lute, and for a rare machine called, in German, a lautenwerk, basically a keyboard strung with lute-string as well as some transcriptions). The disc I used is a Sony CD (not a rebrand). For those wondering why the scans weren't done at the same speed, the Pioneer will scan only at its tops speed (40x). Oddly, the Pioneer's avg speed is half the BenQ's. The way I understand it is that scanning at slower speeds should produce more accurate results (by all means, correct me if I am wrong). First scan from the DW1655: Not bad. Then I scanned it in the Pioneer 110D: What the hell??? 5666 C2 errors? This disc should be a coaster. According to this second scan this CDR (which I burned only a couple of months ago) shouldn't be playable!. Notice that scan 2, from the Pioneer doesn't even have a jitter measurement. I don't know if there's some compatibility issues with the software and the drive; I'm going to run some further comparative tests, even with some pressed discs, to see if this wild-assed discrepancy is a fluke or something stranger (you know, maybe it's Them!!!!) I've noticed some differences in DVD scans using this tool and the two different drives but never something this wild. Any ideas what could cause such a wild discrepancy?

sounds like a good idea. Did it work well?

I remember your telling me about them. Wasn't disputing just noting my own experience. Tho' for about ten minutes this morning I was very clearly recalling the tales you told me.

Yes, yes, I remember now to. I too suffer from repressed memory syndrome. It was much worse. ImgBurn raped my rats and stole my wife's New Kids on the Block CDs. It was just awful. I want JUSTICE!!!!

I could be wrong but I think that bit the dust with XP. A 9x/Me feature if memory serves. (See, They found out we liked it so it had to go.)

"doing Connie Sewer in a film"? Doing? You'll have to be a little more specific than that.

connoisseur ............... even i (the typo king) knew how to spill that one You;l; not $teal my croun! Ask mintey, I'am the typo kIng! (!)

Nope. Just an esky. It was invented in Oz in the 50s. OK, I'll ask the dumb question. What dost thou mean by "Oz"--and I'm assuming it's not an L. Frank Baum reference. Bernard Shaw's old maxim just hit me full with force: Britain and America: two nations separated by a common language." 'Cause frankly, much as we love y'all , ya do talks funny. And don't even try the "it's our language" ploy ; we both speak dialects descended from 17th century English, whether from the Midlands or the south (sources of the Northern and Southern American dialects respectively). 'Sides, I suspect have more English blood than a goodly number of UK citizens. You guys have 55M people in that tiny island (does that # include Scotland and Wales?). Yet all the British TV I watch, I see so much open space. London has 11M people, the metro area probably even more. You guys must be packed in in your cities.

Thank you. I had NO idea what the hell they were talking about. I thought it was some Brit joke that Americans didn't get. Instead its a cooler. Uh, why don't y'all just call 'em...coolers? This has got something to do with calling wrenches by the incomprehensible name of "spanner" doesn't it?

Errm, if memory serves me right that's below freezing, who wants a fookin frozen beer. Beer's freezing point is rather lower than water. And, believe it or not, freezing beer doesn't hurt it. I accidentally froze a bottle (thankfully not a can!) of Steinlager. I thawed it out and it tasted great. No damage at all. Of course, in the immediate term I can't argue with you. Frozen beer is like uncured...er never mind. Just not much use.

oh get bloody real corny dusting of something for shits sake he's always busy on the bloody forums go on corn your turn That's why we have laptops and wireless routers my dear.

Natural Science , off the "Permanent waves " album released 1980 , now wheres my dollar ?, an dont try to send me one of those Mickey Mouse Disney Dollars either AAAANT. Disqualification. Album title: Permanent Waves. JK. I don't suppose 5 aol cds and a can of warm Budweiser'll do it? Very good though. Any one who knows that is a true Rush fan and thus a member of the brotherhood Don't know about you, but I breathed a sigh of relief when that bullshit case against Alex (and his son) in Florida fell apart making the Florida prosecutors look like total idiots; just like they did with Rush Limbaugh yesterday. The Left-Liberal media was having orgasms, "Rush Limbaugh arrested." Not what happened at all. Instead he beat them. But the gov't's got endless resources and time. Since he's worth $300M, I'm sure he thinks paying $30K to end this political persecution by an asshole prosecutor was well worth it. Besides, it's got to be cheaper than to keep paying Roy Black $500/hr! Cool famous people: 2. Choadswallowing Florida Prosecutors: 0. Alex has also filed a Federal lawsuit against the aforementioned facsist prick cops. 31 counts of violating his civil [human] rights, false arrest, false imprisonment, brutality, intentional infliction of emotional distress, etc, etc. Laughably the thug cops have counter-sued him! I didn't see any cops covered in blood with a broken nose. Nor did I see Alex holding any cops prisoner overnight. What a joke. I hope he wins $50M.

I have to part company with minty on Aronis TI. So far its been golden for me. Working just beautifully. (I'll have to sacrifice a DIMM to the software gods to insure I haven't invited Nemesis... ) It's this first-fatest-now-before-everyone else mentality. And even if the competition beats you to the punch and releases their latest and greatest before yours, then there's even more pressure to "go gold" and "shove it out the door." The motto seems to be, "Ship it now, patch it later!" But it's hardly confined to the computer or software industries. Its becoming endemic to all industries in all countries. While German stuff has always been overcomplicated, prone to breaking quickly and requiring expensive and extensive maintenance, even the vaunted Japanese obsession with quality is declining. (natrually they'll blame "lazy American workers" but the last time I check the cars are designed in Japan and Japanese managers run the plants...) EVerything's speed, speed, speed these days. In a market economy the customer gets exactly what he deserves. And we want our gratification now, now, NOW!! And woe to the company that actually thinks quality matters and would rather wait and get it right than throw it onto store shelves and hope the return rate is below the acceptable loss calculated by the bean-counters. (The exact logic Ford used with the infamous "exploding" Pinto; see Class Action for an excellent fictionalized account of this and the lawsuit that followed. That Mary Elizabeth Mastroantonio co-stars is another reason to watch...

i remember it... dont see many smokestacks around here anymore..it helps to live 10 miles from the beach.. a warm can of bud ill take..keep the aol cd's! Without the cds, where ya gonna sit your can of fizzy water? (Sorry, I much prefer Steinlager, the best lager, bar none, in the world. In fact, there's not much I prefer Budweiser----too 'cept maybe Coors , I don't know what they put in those cans, I have my theories and they involve mountain quadrapeds, but it certainly ain't beer.) God, Carlin was great before he turned into a sour, bitter, hateful old crank. That very first HBO special was so classic... ("Smoke a bong full of fruit loops and call your boss and tell him, 'Fuck you, I ain't coming into work today!'") "Bong full of fruit loops"? Well, we know what George's bong was not full of. I wonder if that special can be found on DVD? I've got a 20+ yr old VHS tape of it somewhere... I just looked at the clock. 8PM! My God, where did the time go?

It does quite, doesn't it? :& Too bad the pictures of J. Edgar and Clyde Tolson (sp?) allegedly engaging in some "good clean fun" is as much an Urban Legend as the "Celebrating Arabs" story. If it did exist, it would surely have surfaced by now. Imagine the price it would fetch at auction? And the little fascist is no longer around to take vengeance upon anyone. Funny anecdote... An aide once asked Johnson why he simply didn't fire Hoover. Johnson's response--a classic example of Texas wit-- "It's better to have [Hoover] pissing out of the tent that pissing into it." (Before Hoover was even cold, Congress passed a law limiting the tenure of future FBI directors to ten years.)