I have had Dell and HP. Both have their failings. For a whole lot less you can build your own. Go shop at Newegg.com for desktop combo's. Do your homework! Some MOBO manufacturers are better than others. You should be able to get yourself a nice little Intel i5 setup for about $400'ish sans monitor. If you are determined to buy a brand name unit give Lenovo a try.

Ahh thank for pointing that out to me. You will have to pardon me as I am wired to call BS when I see it regardless of left or right. Thanks again and have a nice day.

Call me crazy but looking at that chart reminds me of when my wife goes shopping and comes home with bag after bag of stuff and says "look at what I saved!" I have always replied, "Yes dear but look at what you have spent!"

The assertion that increase in immigrants translates to increase (or retention)of manufacturing jobs is ridiculous. Prove it. You may as well say that the ebb and flow of manufacturing jobs is tied to sunspot activity.

12000 scientists? How about 50 some odd million Americans thinking Obama was the better choice? TWICE! So much for numbers.

I'd be willing to give the scientists their due, except that I am an engineer which essentially means I have to make it actually work. Theories are nice but utility is where the money is. How many scientists were still clinging to the world is flat? geocentric vs heliocentric? History shows that the bulk of "scientists" go with the flow.

I have said it before and I'll say it again...a person can be very smart but people are stupid.

Ever hear of the Sahara sea? That's right, an inland sea where the Sahara is now. They have found the remains of whales deep in the Sahara desert. So why isn't it a sea anymore?

One theory is due to the Earths wobble. http://astro.wsu.edu/worthey/astro/html/lec-precession.html

This wobble definitely affects our climate and there isn't any of it that humans can affect.

I might be inclined to agree with you except that Al Gore made a silly amount of money associated with Global Warming and Carbon taxing. When you hail yourself as an "independent voice" but are conducting backdoor investments based on your message it hardly makes one impartial does it? Al Gore is and always will be a scam artist.

The global warming/cooling/warming/dimming/warming debate has been going on for years. I am inclined to agree with Heyrob that this has largely been a "solution in search of a problem" situation. Our government and others have proposed a Carbon tax to be levied based on a Carbon footprint. It's interesting that government isn't looking to reduce carbon, just tax it.

Just as interesting is the alternate fuels (corn based)fiasco perpetrated by the Obama administration. It seems that growing the extra corn required farmers to plow under many standing fields which released ridiculous amounts of carbon to grow corn for the purpose of turning into biofuels to reduce carbon. If we take that a step further.....that means the original plowing of the midwest released insane amounts of carbon. That is a little factoid left out in most of the "global warming due to CO2 (aka Al Gore's slideshow)" theories. You would have expected that the global warming due to human activity would have made it's impact over 100 years ago.

There have been reports that a single active volcano can send more CO2 into the atmosphere in one day than the entirety of humans on the planet can in a year. We don't make that much of a difference. To suggest that we do only confirms that some have a rather bloated ego.

Generally speaking that is a fairly accurate assessment. Human beings are as individuals fairly bright and intelligent. As a collective...not so much. History has recorded that people congregate in areas know for natural disasters. Mount Vesuvius buried Pompei and Hurculaneum. And yet 15 million people now live in its shadow. New Orleans is built at the transition of a flood plain of the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico below sea level. The state of Florida is an average of 11 feet above sea level and a natural target for Hurricanes. San Fransisco and L.A. are built along major fault lines. It's not a question of if. It's a question of when.

The Yellowstone Caldera was in the news recently. They discovered the magma chamber is roughly 100 times the size they thought it was. When will it go? Could be next month or 100,000 years from now, but it will go. And when it does, everything from the Mississippi to the west will be wiped out by either the blast or the ash. The rest of the planet would not do so well either.

As for Al Gore? He's sleazy like a used car salesman. He pushed his "slideshow" to make money and he's made a pile of it. There are always going to be theories of how the "end is near". It hasn't happened yet.

I did something like that when I was a kid. I was maybe 11 or 12 and used to cut through the neighbors yard on the way home. There was a rather large paper wasps nest (basketball sized) hanging on a branch near where I would cut through. I enlisted the help of my neighbors 8 year old and after dusk I set my aluminum disk (snow flyer) under the nest. He had the branch cutters. I doused it in lighter fluid and can still remember them climbing out of the hole to see what that was on their nest. I lit it, he cut the branch and it was death to hundreds of paper wasps. I lived in a suburb of Boston at the time. Can't say that anyone ever called me a hillbilly though.

There has to be an easier way to get rid of the ants. ; )

As a mechanical engineer I would read some of the various trade magazines especially earlier in my career. I can still remember CEO of GM Roger Smiths reply to the best value in the GM lineup......a 2 year old Buick.

My dad was big on GM, well after American Motors went out of business anyways. He owned Oldsmobiles and Buicks. I have owned one GM vehicle, a 1983 GMC Jimmy. I can honestly say that the Jimmy was the biggest POS vehicle I have ever had and I had owned A Triumph TR-6 before that. I wouldn't drive one of these if they were giving them away. The Jimmy never made it to 55k miles. That was quite something when you consider I bought it used (GM Pre-owned) at a local dealership at around 35k. The tranny went. I got it repaired. Ten months later it went again. Got it repaired at the dealership. 150 miles later (that is not a misprint) it went again. Dealership replaced the tranny and I got 5 more months out of it before the crank snapped.

Since then I have happily become a Toyota customer. I got 199.8k miles out of my first, 285k miles out of my second and I expect to get something similar out of the one I have now. I don't spend a lot of time or money at the dealership anymore and would not ever go back to GM if they were the last place on earth that sold cars. I'd rather walk.

Dodd and Frank....String em up!

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The real problem I have with the GM bailout is that it allowed them to drop $1.5 Billion on a factory remodel in Mexico and another $2Billion for a new plant in China. I seriously doubt that bit of business saved many Americans their jobs, which if I am not mistaken, was the goal of the bailout.

Add to that the fact that GM hasn't fundamentally changed their corporate culture which was the reason they were headed for bankruptcy in the first place.

So tell me, what did the American people exactly gain here? Are there more or less jobs for Americans from GM? Did GM reinvest in american plants? Has GM changed their top heavy corporate structure?

While I feel bad for the average Joe that works in the auto industry and their supply chain unless they fixed the sources of the problems within the corporation nothing has changed and nothing will prevent this from happening again. I think they should have let them go through bankruptcy. It would have forced out the clowns running the show. Same goes for the Banks. I mean it's been 5-6 years now and not one of them is in jail and that's not right...Not at all.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPeLSn6Y864

I don't think they have gotten the memo yet.

Wait a second...that's not a goat!