I learned C++ 5 years ago from Accelerated C++ by Koenig and Moo. It's pretty good, and gets you introduced to the language relatively quickly (it's not a really thick book).

A driver handles the abstraction of hardware to a software construct.

Operating systems handle allocation and management of other more abstract constructs (such as files, sockets, and processes),...

sk8ndestroy,

You said there were no benefits to smoking. I was just being the nitpicker that I am :)

Dave,

Yes, second hand smoke is bad.
No, I do not agree with you on 'supply and demand' for whether it should be allowed. It's downright harmful, and nonsmoking sections are never fully clear...

Soya3D kills vertex/normal layout, converting your mesh to polygons with individual verticies, then merging these verticies back together based on proximity, then computes the normals based on this. ...

Funny you should say that. This summer I'm working on a project called PySoy (http://www.pysoy.org/), a Python game module that uses blender meshes. It's not ready for release yet, but we're...

This isn't an issue on your computer, it's either with how your LAN is configured (unlikely) or your ISP has problems.

I would be thinking spyware or viruses, but you already check that... is this justi n IE or does it happen in other browsers too?

What error do you get when you attempt to access the sites?

Is it:
connection timed out
connection refused
could not resolve host