Sip

Advantage of MAC is that it is more expensive and you can get more tax deductions if you claim it as a busniess expense. Ideally, right now, if you are not into playing any sort of crazy 3D games or need very sophistimicated multimedia stuff, a $500-$600 PC from Best Buy is mooooooooooore than enough. Monitor may be a separate issue as they can range from a $100-$3000 depending on how good you want it ... LCD or CRT etc. So if you are going to be surfing the web, doing homework, and chatting online, do not spend more than let's say $600 ... that should include a CD burner and maybe even DVD playback capabilities plus probably a ton of other stuff you'll never use. Stay away from el cheapo e-machines ... stick to Dell, HP, Compaq, Gateway and basically name brands ... For dell, best bet is to go to their site and see what kinds of specials they have.

Not by just "wanting" ... a lot of things have to be in place for a "dream" to come true. On a similar token I also believe just working hard won't land one success ( Working hard ... key to success?... skittles I know you've seen that ) I think both ways of thinking are not realistic.

Couple of possibilities come to mind: 1) One of two of the fans might be dead or clogged up and it is overheating. 2) Power supply is going bad and just cutting out. This is assuming it just turns off and not doing "shut down" through software. If windows goes through the shutdown process then it may be something else ... but if it just turns off, it could be overheating. And as Sasun said, the most obvious may also be the problem ... I had a friend with the same problem a couple of years ago and it turned out the power strip under his desk was pushing itself against the wall and that would cause the on/off switch to get pressed!!!

I don't know about men being pigs but I am sure just like pigs there are good ones and bad ones. Some will take advantage of you and use you for their ego like a piece of meat and some will actually care for you as a human being with emotions. Either way (or with anything in between), there is only one thing in life to rely on and that's one's own self. The rest all come and go and anything is possible.

I haven't had any contact at all with any friends from before college. I know how to get a hold of one or two from highschool but that's it. Middle school ones are left in Germany and other middle school elementary school ones are back in Iran.

Actually, I would have said you look like the one to the left of bin moderatorian

Azat you suck hehehehehe ... it's the 7-th time I've said that today and every time it feels good.

Happy Birthday!!!! May all troubles of the past be forgotten for much happier futures

MJ put it best I think

So Thoth you are saying Juggs should have pretended he is interested and led the girl on (even if for just one date)? Or should he have walked up and said he is not interested? Among all alternatives, I don't see how what jug did was wrong. If you are going to run, better do it when he did than later.

This seems to be a fairly standard one ... ANYTHING left over from 1985 and still being used has got to be good and really debugged. I just don't know if it is what you want or how much C programming knowledge it needs ... but worth a look http://www.ghg.net/clips/CLIPS.html

commercial ones I'm sure will be quite expensive. I don't know about shareware but your best bet is academia with experimental / student project types of software ... I don't know of any but now you know what to look for!

I just wanted to let you know what you seem to be talking about with creating a bot that answers denial/genocide questions is referred to as an "expert system".

"Artifical Intelligence" can be a lot of things. Anytime you have a system that can come up with correct answers to questions, you are creating artifical intelligence. How you do it, it's your busniess ... I'm just trying to tell you there is already a LOT done in this area so why not use it! You can probably find software packages that already exist and all you have to do is train them for what you want to do.

Fad, although AI branch of CS is not my strength, I would suggest you read a bit about "expert systems" ... probably best bet is to start with rule-based ones. Here's a link to give you an idea: http://www.cobblestoneconcepts.com/ucgis2s...2/choi/choi.htm

I just asked botizen if she liked Domino. She said she hadn't tried one before

To me, confidence is synonimous with being able to predict the future correctly. If it turns out you were right, that means you were confident. If it turns out you were wrong, that means you were a fool. Note that you can be confident of imminent failure too. But you will never learn whether that was confidence or foolishness in most such cases since most likely you'll alter your actions accordingly. Some do take chances though to find out for sure.

Plus, now that I think about it, it's really not right that the crown is in the hands of Miss Turkey right now ... but if memory serves me right, the candidates last year were very very very sub par. They left a lot to be desired. I am not talking just looks either ... their "bio"s we downright stupid.

Virginity is just as rediculous (if not more) than complete sexual promiscuity. I think by the time people decide to marry they should have experienced a few things in life ... this includes different people, different sexual partners if you will, living on their own, traveling if possible, supporting themselves, etc etc. Only then will they be able to make an informed and wise decision about who they want to spend the rest of their lives with and how.

But is having a "miss Armenia" the best way to spend those precious dollars? How about some new computers for the libraries and schools?

Nairi jan, when you see this thread, please only kill Azat for starting it and Domino for that comment. You will spare the rest of us, won't you?

No you can't. If you are downloading MP3 music files, there is no way for it to contain a virus that can harm anything. Just make sure the file you are getting is something.mp3 (i.e. has the mp3 extension). This also applies to many other media formats such as AVI and MPEG videos, JPG, GIF, etc etc pictures and a lots of other things. However, it is a good idea to check things carefully.

Wooo Hoooo ... happy birthday ..

Well, they can do it if they have control of the main arteries of information flow. They have that control since the communication infrastructure is probably not private or it is highly controlled. You can't do much about satellites but with wires and fiber optics, all they have to do is monitor and filter things at those main arteries that enter and leave the country. Now if someone dials out of the country into a foreign ISP, I don't know how they can restrict that but it probably will not be hard to detect. So that will scare off most regular people which is probably what they want to control anyway.

China is actively monitoring and restricting all internet access from and into that country. This is one of the methods people try to bypass automated restriction schemes: http://www.alltooflat.com/geeky/elgoog/ I don't know about cuba and N. Korea but Pakistan and now Iran are certainly playing this game as well. I know there is internet access in Iran but just recently they announced they were going to ban several thousand sites. China doesn't allow access to news sites such as CNN but I don't know all the details.