"I improve on misquotation." - Cary Grant

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Windows Vista Recovery Disc Download - "If you're like most PC users, you probably got Windows Vista with a new PC or laptop... they don't give you a real Windows Vista installation disc with your purchase. Instead, they bundle what they call a "recovery disc" (that's if you're lucky - otherwise you'll have a recovery partition instead) with your machine and leave it at that... Microsoft seems to have realized this problem, and have thankfully made a recovery disc for this purpose. It contains the contents of the Windows Vista DVD's "recovery center," as we've come to refer to it. It cannot be used to install or reinstall Windows Vista, and just serves as a Windows PE interface to recovering your PC."

Windows Music - "Music composed using only sounds from Windows XP and 98, with the free ModPlug Tracker music software."

Fighting Fantasy games find their way on to DS and PSP. Hack and slash without getting your fingers dirty - "Hoping to rekindle such interest, Livingstone and Jackson have decided to bring the concept to Sony and Nintendo's handhelds. "Fighting Fantasy built up a huge, worldwide fan base over the years," reasons Livingstone. "We believe that players will really enjoy the adventures in a new way on DS and PSP. Fighting Fantasy's interactive structure is ideal for bite-sized chunks of gameplay which is important for these devices.""

The Straight Dope: What is perfect pitch, and what good is it? - "Perfect pitch is a mixed blessing for musicians. On the plus side, some burble about the "immediate sensory pleasure" that "adventurous modulation" brings the lucky few who have it. Some claim it adds a new dimension to music, with each note having a character all its own. For just that reason, however, some with perfect pitch find transposing a piece to a different key disorienting--like "seeing purple grass," one writer says--because the feel of the new key is so different... as you age, your eardrums lose their elasticity and everything you hear goes a bit sharp. Most people don't notice the change, but for those with perfect pitch nothing sounds right anymore... Some have found other uses for perfect pitch. You may recall the "phone phreaks," the protohackers who used to delight in copping free calls from Ma Bell. One storied hacker was a blind kid named Joe Engressia. Most phreaks needed elaborate equipment to create the precisely pitched Touch-Tones necessary to operate the switching equipment. Not Engressia. Blessed with perfect pitch, he could whistle them."

Judge drops sex case as 'outrageous' - "A Lehigh County judge has dismissed the case against a woman who was charged with promoting prostitution at a North Whitehall Township spa, ruling that state police engaged in ''outrageous'' conduct when they paid an informant to have sex four times with employees. State police investigating the Shiatsu Spa on Route 309 paid the informant $180 for his ''time'' and gave him money to pay for sexual acts in the spa in June and July 2006."

Virtual terrorists - "On the darker side, there are also weapons armouries in SL where people can get access to guns, including automatic weapons and AK47s. Searches of the SL website show there are three jihadi terrorists registered and two elite jihadist terrorist groups. Once these groups take up residence in SL, it is easy to start spreading propaganda, recruiting and instructing like minds on how to start terrorist cells and carry out jihad. One radical group, called Second Life Liberation Army, has been responsible for some computer-coded atomic bombings of virtual world stores in the past six months."

Boycott 2008 Communist Olympics: Olympics-Taiwan torch relay to spotlight China 'abuses' - "China has lumped Falun Gong followers, Chinese defectors, pro-democracy activists, religious 'extremists and infiltrators', exiled Tibetans and Moslem Uighurs together with 'terrorists' on its persona non grata list, a spokeswoman for the coalition said... 'The government seems afraid that its own citizens will embarrass it by speaking out about political and social problems, but China's leaders apparently don't realise authoritarian crackdowns are even more embarrassing.'"
Hmm, the last bit sounds familiar.

Earthquakes are caused by gays - MP - "Shlomo Benizri of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish Shas Party said the only way to prevent the earthquakes was for parliament to stop liberalising laws concerning homosexuals, AP reported."
Maybe we can have the Arabs realising that earthquakes are caused by Jews!!!

The Revealer: The Intimacy of Killing - "What she encountered was not the stuff of military history, but accounts of killing accompanied by claims of pleasure derived from the act. Sometimes sexual, as for a soldier who compared killing to "getting screwed the first time." Sometimes religious, as for a soldier who called it "joy unspeakable." Sometimes even romantic, as for a soldier who wrote a sweetheart, "every one I gets under the ribs I thinks of you mi dear." As she realized that such sentiments were the rule rather than the exception, her brief against the worst of killers was transformed: It became a study of how society makes killing commendable... The first and last military-history seminar she attended was led by a man who interrupted 'a paper discussing Dismembering the Male with the declaration that "This is a gender-free zone!" The all-male audiences responded "Hear, hear!" and, according to Ms. Bourke, devoted a fair share of the Q-and-A session to "jokes about women's knickers."... "When fear becomes so strong, and you finally get to see the enemy, the man firing a rifle is at last in an exalted state-precisely because of his fear." Should he describe that exaltation as " `an ache as profound as orgasm,' " she adds, he is likely as not simply using the most intense words he has."

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