I only copy stuff that I already own, and in the case of software, has a license that allows it. The product being expensive is no excuse. For software, there are almost always free open source alternatives. If there isn't such an alternative, and you don't have or don't want to pony up the cash then you can do…

With all the loopholes, the do-not-call registry in the US is nearly useless. It reduced my volume of telemarketers by about 5%. I still get tons of calls from charity organizations seeking donations, even ones that I've never donated to before as well as political organizations. The most effective thing I've found…

Last virus I had came in via a shared floppy disk. There wasn't any such thing as AV software back then that a college freshman could afford. Only way to get rid of it was to do a low-level format of the hard drive (a whopping 20mb drive which seemed bottomless at the time).

A good real-time protection option like MSE is valuable in protecting against the occasional worm that rides in on an email and gets past whatever AV protection is on your mail server. The average user doesn't have any control over how up-to-date the AV is on their mail server because it comes from their ISP.

Hmmm... I read somewhere that MSE wouldn't run on XP. Maybe that was the 2.0 version that was released recently. I didn't dig into it to try and verify because the only XP machine I use is my work PC which is locked into using the Norton junk that my employer forces on us.

I don't know why anyone even bothers with 3rd party AV products for Windows anymore since the release of the very excellent Microsoft Security Essentials unless they're still running XP. All of the others bog the system down way too much and generally make a nuisance of themselves. MSE just sits quietly in the…

This might be a little disorienting when viewed from a different angle or position where the images don't line up correctly with the background.

I tried to get this working but I wouldn't connect to either of my google accounts. (I have two, a free one that I use mostly for google reader since it isn't yet available for google apps premier and my google apps premier account.)

@Arbron: But doesn't that basically amount to the same thing? The law allowing the gov't to order ISP's to shut down created the switch. Actually issuing that order is throwing that switch.

@bbutle01: Greetings back at ya. I'm originally from South AL. Escambia County High Class of '88 (Atmore Blue Devils)

@staircar: You may be right about that. :) Not everyone has the ability to relegate it to something they only do when there's literally nothing else to do. Someone with addictive tendencies would have a hard time not spending every waking hour playing it.

@RD Matt: First of all, my friend list isn't really all that big because I'm really hesitant to add friends for that very reason. I was merely pointing out that this will be a problem for avid FB gamers, particularly the various Zynga games. They operate almost like a multi-level marketing scheme. Advancement in…

@Amoliski: Well, the time's I've had this come up it was just an image. Nothing highlighted or anything. Maybe it was an early version that didn't care so much about a photo being tagged and just pulled a random photo from among the ones uploaded by the person in question? Another potential problem is when a person…

I've had this same thing come up but failed even with people I know because it was a photo of their brothers sister-in-laws grand parents. Or a picture of a new puppy they just got.

Many of the FB games such as Farmville and CafeWorld encourage you to "friend" lots of people so they can be neighbors. Players of those games amass huge friend lists the vast majority of which they've never even met, much less know well enough to recognize them in some random photo.

Here in central AL we have more problems with the INCOMING water pipes freezing than the drain pipes. Even if your home is unheated, it'll rarely get cold enough inside to freeze the small mount of water that would sit in the drain traps. What typically happens is the PVC water pipes suspended in open air in the…

None of the choices really fit my system. I typically do a few unimportant tasks first thing in the morning while I'm emerging from the morning haze and waiting for the caffeine to take effect. Then, I get real work done typically between 9:00am and 2:00pm after which I'm starting to get a little tired and it gets…

Checking my work email in the mornings and scanning through the various blogs on work-related topics that I follow helps me get my brain into gear. If I skip that process, not only might I miss a "this must be fixed right now" problem notification, but I find it harder to get into rhythm for my normal daily work.

Hmmm... That analogy falls a little short. All computers need a user. If the brain is a computer, whether it be PC, smartphone, PDA, or whatever, the user would be "self." Another name would be the soul.

I double space. Probably more out of habit than anything else. I'm old enough that in high school we had typewriters with the old ball type print head. Typing class was rather noisy. It's second nature to me to double space after a period at the end of a sentence. It's a practice that has served well for a long…