I was one of a handful of folks who trained microsoft techs to support the horrible OS windows ME back in the day.

One of the things ME touted was faster startup. This was accomplished by moving a heck of a lot of the processes that used to happen on boot to shutdown.

I don't use vista. I am typing this on a mac book pro. I do use XP at home for gaming. I like ubuntu.

My experience is that XP boots and shuts down very rapidly. My mac takes forever to do either but since it's a laptop generally I am only sleeping it. Also, my mac periodically gives me the pinwheel of death, where the machine becomes unresponsive apropos of nothing. This usually only lasts for a minute or less.

My conclusions:

1) Vista is utter crap. I built a few machines to test it out with and it always had massive driver issues and generally just was slow and sucky. Yes, Mac has less hardware to account for, but then why can I plug in a random printer and just print on my mac when I have to install drivers and such with windows for the exact same printer?

2) Mac people (by that I mean people who use mac products exclusively as opposed to someone like me who owns products from both MS and Apple) are irrational and don't evaluate things objectively. They tend to see Apple as this friendly entity and MS as a corporate bully, when the reality is both companies are pretty manipulative about getting money out of their customers.

Increases with:

"David Sirota, a progressive blogger, has suggested that white racist voting increases with the black proportion of the population of a state"

Suddenly equals "caused by:"

". If enough blacks moved into their states, then -- bang! -- they'd metamorphose into full-fledged Klansmen and vote for LBJ-praising bigots like the Clintons in a hurry."

Can we start hiring people at salon that went to college or maybe paid attention while they were there?

Either the summation of Sirota was inaccurate or the author just perpetrated a logical fallacy on us.

More sloppy thinking from a journalist. Color me un surprised.

It's hard to forget about it when sportswriters like you can't shut up about it.

When you publish an 'article' about something saying you're sick of hearing about it, aren't you part of the problem?

You could always write about hockey, but that would be sports writing and not personality driven.

The Faerie Queene is hardly a staple of Victorian Literature.

It "came out" 300 years or so before Queen Victoria was born.

It's never too late to admit what you've done and to beg for forgiveness and mercy for your crimes.

Trying to assume the moral high ground when there is documentary evidence of your wallowing in the sewer (a dark room, indeed) makes you look even worse.

I can only sympathize with how hard it must be to admit to yourself what you've done. However, an adult, even if he or she is a journalist, must do exactly that.

Just admit how wrong you were, even if it's only to yourself, and try to forgive yourself for what you helped enable.

Maybe after that we can try to forgive you.

"For Obama possesses something that most presidential Democrats (aside from Bill Clinton) have lacked for the last three decades -- a sense of ease and comfort with himself."

So...you're talking about who here, Carter? That makes it half, not most. Sorry.

You get paid to do better than this.

It's the worst thing you can do if you're a controlling egomaniac, because then the kids don't have to come to you begging for the names and you cease to be relevant.

Speaking of ceasing to be relevant....EO Wilson.

Remember girls, your choices about your own sexuality are only valid when they're approved by carol lloyd.

It would be nice to read some sex-positive feminists in this space.

If you're the lookout for people who burn down buildings to cause terror, you're a terrorist. It doesn't matter if you agree or disagree with the politics that prompt these actions.

What is the aim of burning down a building? To spread terror.

The evidence may have been flimsy, but that is no different than any other person who gets the shaft in our legal system, and no more or less unjust.

Nobody forces men to get their backs waxed and use hair product, but women have to be thin because of the evil magazines they seem to have to buy!

Being a man means taking responsibility for yourself and the outcomes of the choices you've made. That includes your choice to use expensive hair care products.

It takes a bigger man to laugh at that man...

Why not praise him for being the one candidate who comes out against corporate control and US Imperialism? Probably because salon is fed by the same tributaries as the establishment democratic party.

"old-time racial anger -- a surreal amalgam of legitimate social commentary, paranoid conspiracy theories and reflexive anti-white rhetoric"

This "perspective" disgusts me so thoroughly and is more evidence that you and yours are part of the problem.

I don't know what else to say.

How many lap dances happen without kicks to the face?

Have you ever had a lap dance from a professional stripper? Based on your description, I would guess no.

I have, and it never once involved being kicked in the face, regardless of shoe.

I think if I paid for a lap dance, and sustained injuries inflicted by the stripper that were not part of the intended outcome, I would take whatever recourse seemed appropriate.

How is this news, let alone women's news?

Come on Glenn, Barney Frank was chastised back when the Congress actually had a functioning ethics committee: in other words, ancient history my friend.

Spitzer is the worst kind of scum: the kind who prosecutes rich people and corporations for their corruption.