I would treat people like they were stupid if they can't handle facts. The fact is that living organisms are sensitive to very, very subtle changes in PH:

http://www.chemcraft.net/acidph2.html

But hey, if it's 0.1, or 0.01, that's a small number, and anyone who thinks thatz a big numberz iz gust trin 2 pul the wul over ur eyez.

> Personally I also think frameworks are silly. If you can lash up a site in 30 minutes, then the request simply isn't distinctive enough.

Let me first point out that I agree with most of what you say (which is essentially that the value of a programmer is in solving problems which have not already been solved), however:

The entire point of a framework is to give you the underlying repetitive parts so you can focus on coding the complicated domain specific pieces later.

Frameworks and libraries are everywhere. In fact, many people judge the quality of a language by the quality of the libraries they have.

What you're asking for is silly. Corporations aim to eliminate free markets. That's what they do.

Free markets != Perfect markets, but corporations seek to eliminate the major components of free markets:

* Freedom of Information - Fraudulent Marketing (do you really get 5mb/s at any time?), Confusing pricing schemes (more common in retail), elimination of product information (what is you bandwidth cap, are certain services restricted?)
* Freedom to Price - Comcast wants to make it more difficult for Netflix to sell content cheaply, so it is effectively using it's monopoly status over users to cause netflix to raise prices
* Few Barriers to Entry - Starting a cable company is obviously a non-trivial task - many regulations (we'll give communications companies a pass here)
* Equal Access to Production Technology - One result of the comcast/nbc merger is now other cable companies and content companies will have to come to them for their product.

Because we are the people, and it's *our* damn airspace and we get to dictate the terms of the contract. It's straight-forward - the people have spoken, don't sell our airspace to corporations who want to make it as difficult as possible to move freely between other options in the marketplace.

Only 30mpg? The TDI does well enough, no need to overstate things:

The TDI gets 30mpg in city. Diesel isn't as plentiful in the US, but I think your point still stands, it will take a long time to make up the actual cost assuming the Volt doesn't come with a boatload of incentives (but they do, and will)

http://www.vw.com/jetta/completespecs/en/us/

Better yet, give people the ability to simply "shoot" text messages to the person in the car ahead of you - "You !@$#$!$, stop cutting me off!"

I paid a lot less than that for a land-line in the early 90's. There was a more infrastructure to support and that infrastructure was a whole lot more expensive. And, as I think it's been pointed out a number of times, that the cell service you are happy to overpay $50 here is much more advanced outside of the US, though I can't vouch for that myself.

*groan* (yknow, being made of air and whatnot)

Correction. This will be a tax on the current generation of those countries who chose to adopt these regulations.

Actually, going bankrupt is what brought the wall down.

You may find the following threads helpful:

http://serverfault.com/questions/4331/crashed-hard-drive-data-retrieval

http://serverfault.com/questions/4482/hard-drive-data-rescue-services

If I had points, I'd mod this up. I've used this as well. It picked up some stuff for me that I had deleted, but I'm not going to complain about "too much" data recovered, and this sort of fits under the "nature of the beast" context.

Saved my bacon.

We watch the Matrix and say, WOW! This could all be a dream, that our entire perception is constructed through an external mechanism...

It is still very possible to hold the belief that the world is 6000 years old, and that all of the evidence and proof of evolution etc... is manufactured so to speak. (by this rule though, the age of the universe could be any arbitrary age, including just now*

* - que spaceballs "just missed it" bit

This was studied for two years before it was released, so it seems that they've done some due diligence to make sure this was NOT a hoax.

X-rays were taken taken of the internal structures (which are allegedly impossible to fake) and they proved out to be authentic.

You cannot investigate at the level of detail that is being discussed here. And even when a way is invented, another level of detail can be suggested. A God could influence anything from the spin of photons on a massive scale, to the thoughts that are running through the pilots head (or the mechanics). The question is the Universe completely knowable.

Once you're past that you cannot know the universe, then you can get into the philosophy of whether an all powerful God thinks as man does.