Those people are impossible. I've tried telling them everything I have runs Linux, I've told them I know Windows does not report viruses to Microsoft, once I even posed as a Microsoft employee and tried to get him to tell me where they are. All of that gets the current caller to hang up, but it doesn't stop the next idiot from calling. Obviously there's no communication between the various people who run this scam.

Yeah, seriously guys, put the poll back in the sidebar where it belongs. This was not a good idea.

I don't really object to ads on a page as long as they are not obnoxious. My definition of obnoxious includes autostarting video ads that cannot be stopped, especially if the page contains more than one such video so that you get a blast of overlapping gabble that can't even be understood. There is also a truly evil small square box that plays a list of ads one after the other - and loads them constantly at a rate that causes the page to hang and jerk. (Remember the good old days of huge GIF animations that bogged down a page? Yeah, these are worse). And finally, I truly hate the trick of letting you read halfway through the first paragraph of a page, then turning the page dark and throwing an ad up. If you must do a popup, at least have the courtesy to DO it and let the user close it without blowing his whole train of thought. And for the edification of advertisers, I usually at least glance at a passive ad. The obnoxious popup types I close instantly. So in my case at least, that technique is not effective at getting your message across. On the contrary, if I notice the product at all, I'm inclined NOT to buy it just because they deliberately annoyed me.

I'm getting into the same boat because of progressing MS. I bought a fairly inexpensive gaming mouse by Etekcity. It's a bit bigger than average without being a hand-stretching monster, and it has a 3-position DPI selector that lets me adjust to my ability at any given moment. If I'm shakier, I can slow down the mouse response. Plus it has a pair of programmable side buttons which I have set for volume up/down. All this is not for gaming in my case, it's to help me use the mouse with a fair degree of comfort. Sometimes a product made for one purpose can do wonders for a completely different problem.

No, there should have been one that said LOL WUT?

Settled? The cruise line/political survey outfit is still at it. I got their call just a few days ago.

Neither will I. My eyes have gone bad with advancing age, and I can no longer see any difference between current definitions. :(

I don't know, I think the singing three-headed chipmunks from the planet Doodah clash with the wicked stepmother who sounds like Donald Duck having a mad fit.

Yep. I had a huge box of them from the 90s and one day I decided to copy anything useful from them while I still had a computer with a floppy drive. Total waste of time - not a single one was readable. Oddly enough, more than half showed as not even being present at all. No disc in drive. That's a pretty bad failure!

Yeah... when I can buy a terabyte drive for a hundred bucks or so, it might be interesting.

I live in Arizona where we don't fuck with it, but it makes me rethink local times vs times in other states when I need to call someone. It was a stupid idea that never made sense from the beginning. Let's drop it.

"What doctors don't want you to know" is true! Doctors absolutely HATE having their patients raving about some worthless (and possibly dangerous) bullshit they found on the Web! It means a lot of time has to be wasted trying to convince Mr. Jones that foofooweed extract will not cure his cancer.

Okay, I'm a geologist. It happens that I live in an intermontane basin filled with alluvium, and I know the water table is about 30 feet down at my location. If I were so inclined, I could take a couple of wires or a willow stick, walk around a bit for show, then "find" a place. I'd tell you to dig 30 feet and you'll find water - and I'd be right. The knowledge this takes is not that hard to acquire, especially if you want to work in a specific region. I suspect many of the "professional" water dowsers are simply doing that and making a buck from credulous buyers. That said, I have seen people do some freaky things with dowsing rods. As a scientist I have to doubt any mystical source, but I admit having had a few WTF moments courtesy of one old fellow I used to know. He would find ore veins - where I knew they actually were, and he couldn't have because I hadn't shared my survey findings. But guess what? Ore veins do affect both the magnetic and gravitational fields. I don't completely discount an ability by some people to detect that - after all, some birds apparently do.

The universe is a sphere only 20 meters across. It looks bigger, but that's an illusion. It's done with mirrors. Large objects like the Earth fit in it because the universe is bigger inside than it is outside.

Me too. Rachel is still a constant nuisance. Maybe it's a ghost...