"After just a year or two of use, a Windows machine gets so gummed up with spyware, viruses and other nasty stuff that it seems malicious to ask anybody for money for the thing.

Wild. I guess I must be tying this on an ~imaginary~ PC that I bought in 2003 with an Athlon XP1600+ processor which runs Windows 2000 Pro just seemlessly. (and WoW, too.)

My computer before that was a shiny iMac (snow) with MacOS 9.1. Then OSX came out, and my *new* iMac couldn't run it except under incredibly clunky (unusable) speeds. So I went back to 9.1. For which Apple made no other program upgrades ever. It was OSX or bust. And to run OSX, you needed - surprise - a new computer.

When I went to the store to upgrade my video card from it's (pathetic) 8g just one year later, I was told "sorry, that cannot be upgraded. ever."

I tried to salvage it by running Linux on it, but the two PPC linux distros were next to impossible to get on there. I had a lot of help from a friend to finally get it loaded only to discover that it ran into several problems which made it essentially a giant paperweight.

Apple has built in obsolescence, snazzy design, and marketing as it's foundations for profit. NOT long term usability.

MY PC can be upgraded. It can adapt. Eventually a new killer app will come along and compel me to buy a new motherboard and CPU which will necessitate a whole new box, but this thing will read email etc. for pretty much as long as I keep good care of it. (no spyware or viruses, here, thanks. I know what I'm doing.) Eventually, I'll probably donate it to a non-profit.

And the price? My box, with all the subsequent upgrades has totaled about $800. My iMac before that was $2000. My friend's new iMac that she bought last year was $2100. (Her design school practically forced her to get an Apple.) That's not a $100 difference. That's a ~world~ of difference.

But your computers are very pretty. I'll give you that.

I continue to be disappointed that Salon does not have any sex-positive balance in their feminist reporting.

Being pro-women and pro-civil rights in no way necessitates this type of phobic response to human sexuality. And it's really not just the tone of this single "oh no! A vagina puppet- gross!" entry. Rather, it goes throughout the blog, especially I've noticed in Ms. Price's entries. (Notably her astoundingly offensive mocking of men who masturbate in an October entry.)

Please, Salon. Hire someone who's not afraid of sex to discuss women's issues. Pretty please with sugar on top.

This is part of the American Right's attack on the Enlightenment. The Constitution, Darwin, science itself, rationality... we're in for the fight of the Eighteenth Century all over again. The other side wants the Modern American Fundy Church to govern us. Civil rights, democracy, scientific debate, & academia are all to be sacrificed on the alter of their god.

This guy complains that his wife cheats on him but he "finds solace" in the arms of other women (plural). She doesn't feel guilty about her affairs and he rationalizes his affairs to be *her* fault. He also snoops through her private email, which is none of his business and discovers things which are none of his business. Then he hounds and harasses his wife until he browbeats confessions out of her...

My advice to the wife: run like hell. DTMFA.

The Pats scored on their first seven possessions last night, the last of which ended right at the beginning of the 4th quarter. Brady didn't play after that. The 4th quarter was played by backups. The Pats played the entire fourth to run out the clock.

The third quarter drive in which the Pats went for it on 4th down inside the ten yard line poses the very legitimate question: what is the most disrespectful thing you can do in that moment? You've got three options: go for it, kick a gimmie field goal, or intentionally turn it over on downs. The most disrespectful thing they could have done is option three: take a knee. As for the other two, one was guaranteed three points, the other gave the Bills a legit chance of stopping them. I think it was reasonable to go for, even if you subscribe to "the Pats should be nice to their opponent" line of thinking.

Ultimately (and I'm not sure why so many people can't seem to grasp this) it's not the Pats' job to keep themselves from scoring points. And their efficiency on offense is so amazing, if they don't pursue every conceivable record to the best of their abilities this season, they'll be robbing football fans (especially their loyal Pats fans) the opportunity to see it happen.

Can you imagine a 100 meter race in which the favorite said "I'm trying to win the race, but I don't want to break any records, because that would be disrespectful to the other runners." Or if in March and April of 1996, Michael Jordan had said "well, we'd like to keep winning, but the 69-win Laker team should have that all-time win record, so we're going to lay down for our last ten games?"

No way. I'm no Pats fan, but this team owes it to us to play as well as possible over their last 7-9 games just so we can witness it.

And one more point just because I can't shut up: Don Shula is ~not~ a disinterested party here. The '72 Dolphins team has become a model of unsportsmanlike behavior in their desire to see everyone lose every year. Shula is presenting his hunger for Shadenfreude as some yearning for sportsmanship. It's bogus.

I think this is as close to tackling a somewhat sexually-charged issue that Ms. Price has come without sounding like a grossed-out adolescent.

Yay for progress!