Belief is the psychological state in which an individual holds a proposition or premise to be true. If you believe in god, then to you it is a fact. No, it doesn't mean you believe that everyone else must believe it too or else they should be stoned to death, or burned at the stake, but it certainly places you in the theist "camp".

That makes no sense. You cannot "lack belief that there is no god" without believing in god unless you are atheist, or agnostic.

No, that is not correct, you're reading it wrong. Theism is belief in god, Atheism is not believing in god. It is exactly what I said. Just because you don't believe, doesn't mean you positively assert that there is no god. It just means that you don't believe. Why is it so hard to accept that maybe there are some questions we can't answer? There is no point in wild speculation... why wouldn't it make sense for some people to simply not care?

What are you talking about? I obviously can't speak for everyone but I don't think a lot of atheists (myself and every atheist I know) positively assert that there is no god or higher power. They merely lack belief in god/higher power. Not the same thing at all.

A macbook air doesn't weigh that much and it will play diablo 3 just fine (assuming I have an internet connection!). But yeah, if you take off in the woods for a couple weeks or more backpacking, it is nice to be able to have a laptop, what can I say. I could bring a lot more with me if I wanted to, I've carried as much as 100 pounds while backpacking before (which included transporting supplies to a remote cabin), but if you are in shape and have a nice pack it is very easy. Typically I probably carry about 30 - 40 pounds and I hardly notice it. My folding solar panel generates more than 80 watts on a nice day which is enough to power the laptop and charge it at the same time. Folds up to about 6 inches and only weighs a couple pounds. Its probably not for everyone, but I like it. I can even get work done while I camp in the wilderness if I find a spot with good cell reception.

Clearly as demonstrated by the stupid comments of the Microsoft employee, they are not targeting such uses. But you hardly need to haul a big diesel generator to use a computer while backpacking. There are excellent lightweight portable solar power options and a full charge (at least on my laptop) is good for 7 hours or so once the sun goes down.

I bring my laptop backpacking all the time. Solar power. Also, you might be surprised how far out into the wilderness you can go on expeditions with a fully equipped 4x4 like a Land Rover, Jeep, Hummer, etc, and you can carry a lot of battery power with you. Don't forget to bring lots of tools and spare parts too so you don't end up stranded in the middle of nowhere in canada hundreds of miles from the nearest town, not that this has ever happened to me :)

What's so hard to understand? I like to have a games on my laptop or other device which I can play on an airplane, on the commuter rail, on a camping trip, etc... there are many times where I play games and do not have reliable internet... not to mention the potential security flaws which may exist in the networking code of said games which could compromise my devices. Maybe some people don't want to be online all the time. No?

You might also be surprised to learn that in college, I refused to buy the "required" TI junk calculators which the professors insisted upon and instead used my trusty HP with RPN... But how did you get by when they used all the TI programs in class from the textbooks you might ask? Well, I made my own programs that did the same thing only better, generally wrote them during the lectures while there was nothing better to do :)

Yeah its pretty much impossible not to be familiar with eclipse and netbeans unless you live under a rock. That still doesn't mean that one has to use them once they get the job. I usually have one or both installed someplace because there are occasions when someone wants to pull something up on my machine, maybe during a demo or a meeting, or collaboration etc, and I know they would look at me like I had two heads if I pulled up VIM :)

Yeah, eclipse starts doing all that stuff without asking you, but if you want to change how it works it is still as much work as anything else, you either live with the fact that eclipse doesn't quite do what you'd like or you write your own plugin. I will admit I don't do hot code changes while the debugger is still running, but I have never really felt the urge to either (though I suppose it would be possible to add on if sufficient need was there). I mange all my vim configuration and modules/scripts with git, each time I add something for a new task I needed to do, I dont' need to do it again the next time... after 15 years, I'm pretty much to the point where I don't need to change it much unless I start using a new language but even then most of the stuff is pretty generic. I've worked on large teams, and indeed most people choose to "jump right in" with eclipse, and most have never met anyone like me who doesn't do that... but that doesn't mean it doesn't work, I can still work with those people and they would have no idea that I wasn't using eclipse if they didn't know it. The bottom line is that there is no one true editor... if you like using an IDE, use it. I'm just saying, that stories like this one where people assert that eclipse is some how "required" for productive java programming (or any other language for that matter) are absolutely wrong. There are alternatives which do not require quad core laptop with 16GB of RAM (though the actual product you are working on may use that much or perhaps far more depending on the scale, but I digress).

So you think you can't do all those things in vim or emacs? Interesting....

Out of the box? Not sure what you mean... But yeah with emacs and vi and basic command line tools/scripts you can do all that stuff... and you can customize it to work *better* than the way eclipse does it.

Me? I've used pretty much nothing else other than VIM and command line tools for the last 15 years to edit code for various programming languages, including very large projects in commercial environments. Works fine in windows too, although I rarely use it there. I am generally one of the few on the project who does this, but as long as the results adhere to all the same coding "standards" nobody cares.

Clearly, you have no idea what you are talking about. If you ever actually used vi or emacs for anything meaningful you would know they are just as powerful as any "IDE" you could point to. You don't need a big bloated "IDE" to write code, not even Java.

You mean kind of like getting eclipse to do what you want when you want? Not exactly a walk in the park either... all depends on which tool you have experience with. Eclipse is probably the worst of the widely used IDEs out there IMO. Not intuitive, buried/redundant configurations, buggy, unstable, ugly as hell... but I hate xcode and VS.NET too... I haven't met an "IDE" that I like yet. Once you know vi or emacs really well, nothing else seems to do what you want anymore.