Being from Ohio (luckily one of the Democratic strongholds) I would say that this type of pandering will definitely fly with the Republican base there. Gay marriage got the vote out in Ohio and the best plan for Republicans to win Ohio is to get the vote out with the story of a gay illegal immigrant parolee burning down a church because it wouldn't let him marry his muslim tuberculosis carrying partner.

Cleveland, Columbus, Toledo, and Youngstown may be Democratic strongholds, but the rest of Ohio, particularly Cincinnatti is strongly Republican. Just note that Cincinnatti's county was one of only a handful of metropolitan cities to vote for Bush in 2000 and 2004 (Salt Lake City, Phoenix, and San Diego are the others that spring to mind).

My first thoughts on Turd Blossom's departure from the White House - he's needed on the campaign trail for 2008 and he just picked a horse (my money's on McCain).

My video camera came with DVD authoring software (ULead DVD Studio). Sure it's bundled with the camera so it's not really free, but it's not like I would have gotten a cheaper price without it.

I haven't made too many DVDs, but the times you give for making a 1-hour DVD sound about right using ULead (or Nero which is usually bundled with DVD+/-R drives). Just capture, select chapters, use a template to make the menus, test, then transcode the mpeg2 file to VOB and burn.

If you don't want to make a DVD, but a video for playback on your computer, WinXP comes with Movie Maker which does the above without chapters and transcoding for DVD burning. But I think you can make a DivX video for burning which some DVD players can play.

macfacts-

The gateway price I quoted from their website includes a 24" monitor.

As far as the advantages of iLife suite, I've never used iLife, but I'm not dying to use it. It's just another suite of applications like those included with WinXP or KDE or Gnome.

What evidence is there for Colin Powell being anything but a Republican hack? While the American public will forget his role in the Bush Administration in 5-10 years, the Republican party will remember that he didn't rat out his fellow party members and reward him (and his son) in 10-20 years. Just like Cheney and Rumsfeld from the Nixon Administration.

Apple already had their laptop-on-a-stand iMacs out, so the only thing new is the case and the drop in price. But Macs are still mroe expensive than PCs.

Here's a price I got from Apple's online store for the 2.4GHz 24" model with options selected to come closest to a 2.4GHz Gateway w/24" screen:

Summary

Subtotal $2,499.00

Estimated Ship:

3 weeks

Free Shipping

Click "Update Details" to reflect changes to system price and shipping.

Specifications

2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo

2GB 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM - 2x1GB

1TB Serial ATA Drive

SuperDrive 8x (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)

Apple Mighty Mouse

Apple Keyboard (English) + Mac OS X

Accessory kit

ATI Radeon HD 2600 PRO with 256MB memory

24-inch glossy widescreen LCD

AirPort Extreme

Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR

The Gateway FX530XV (The closest I could get easily, but I couldn't downgrade the processor cache from 8MB to 4MB and the FSB from 1066MHz to 800MHz) is $1999 (on sale for $1899).

So the iMac with the slower FSB and half the L2 cache is $500-$600 (25-30%) more expensive than the Gateway. Just because Apple is cutting their expensive prices does not mean that they have yet to get down to PC prices. And that's not even home-built barebones which would probably cut the price of the PC even further.

I'm sure there are those who would be willing to spend the $500-600 premium for Apple branding and styling, but I'd rather spend it on CPU, mobo, or memory. It is hardly obvious that it is the best home computer for the money. Depending on your tastes, it could be the prettiest home computer for the money.

As Harvey Kietel's character in from "Dusk 'til Dawn" asks George Clooney's character, "Are you so much of a fucking loser, you can't tell when you've won?"

She's with the LW now, so what she wanted in the past is irrelevant. She's been through a lot with the ex, so hopefully she's learned something from that and is a slightly different person now. He should grow a pair and stop projecting his insecurities on his soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend (if he keeps this up, that is).

A scientific reason people speak of being "carbon" neutral rather than CO2 neutral is because CO2 is the result of efficiently burning anything with carbon in it (gasoline, diesel, biodiesel, ethanol, etc.) On the simplest level, tracking carbon useage for energy production is synonymous with tracking CO2 - it's just whether you focus on the reactants or the products. In general it makes more sense to focus on the reactants that way you delineate the fuel from the utilization technology (IC engine, turbine, fuel cell).

If you choose to discuss CO2 only, you cannot do a life-cycle cost very easily. Fuels with carbon produce CO2 on burning, trees and other plants convert CO2 to carbohydrates, oceans absorb CO2 and convert it to carbonic acid (H2CO3). Because carbon is the common element, no pun intended, in all of these compounds, it is simplest to track the fate of carbon atoms rather than CO2 molecules. Basically, instead of listing all of the reactions which produce or consume CO2, you track the common element, carbon.

Any WM5/WM6 ppc can use google and live searches over the air. You didn't need an iPhone to look for the peppercorns. The internet (WWW not WAP) on a phone is nothing new nor unique to the iPhone.