I wish my back was re-usable, re-suable, or what have you. I use my back once and it's out for a week, and it makes me want to re-sue somebody.

But tap water? Really? Dude, they put fluoride and chlorine in that - drinking the stuff is just crazy.

Talk about not ending well. But then I said "That was well-done sir!" and he was so amused that he put his pinky up to his lips and gave me an evil laugh.

Believe me! I was there! That guy has like a Doctorate in Evil! Don't mess with any employers ever!

Oh hacker, please! A review of a new version of CIV? That's definitely "news" and that definitely "matters" you, you, script kiddie.

I rewired my brain for CIV. I need CIV like I need oxygen and Cheetos. Go back to your Halo 3.1 or your Mario GoKarts or WTF, the grownups here are trying to <reverb> Build an Empire to Stand the Test of Time!!!</reverb>

Sorry if you don't get it, kid...

That is a first-rate analogy - serious. But unfortunately the Earth is not a pot of water, it's a little more complicated. We don't really know what's going to happen.

I think all that one can say at this point is that we (humans) are obviously altering the climate, it will probably not be to our benefit as a species, and until we know what the hell we're doing we should throttle back on the fossil fuels.

What I get pissed about is some wonk with a model saying, in effect, at exactly 12:38 on Jan. 4th 2035 the seas will have risen 2.79836201 centimeters.

Really Spunkmeyer? You've got that all figured out do you? You know what every sea and lake and glacier and permafrost and forest and prairie and species are going to do _exactly_ as things change? Got all of those dynamically interacting variables all figured out, do ya?

I'd say the US is right about at the "Holy shit! Build more humanesque stone statues to appease the Gods!" phase of societal collapse. Calmly pointing out what we should _really_ be doing is going to be drowned out or get the speaker killed.

Build a bunker. Hitch a ride on a passing Vogon construction fleet. Know where the fuck your towel is at all times. And most importantly, Don't Panic!

You have to remember that most developers are, on the inside, insecure teenage girlie-men living in someone's basement.

The Java kiddies (circa 1999) would say things like -- "What, like C++? That is so five minutes ago. God, you are so, like, old!" And I believed them at the time.

And before the Java kiddies there were the UNIX kiddies knocking Fortran and COBOL, and before that assembler programmers made fun of the old guys that didn't code algorithms, they _built_ algorithms out of tubes and wires.

Every new generation makes fun of the previous. It's not unique to development, we just have really short generations. Today's cutting edge will be out of date in five years, laughable in ten years. Or cut those numbers in half - whatever.

So it goes. Carry on you young whipper-snappers, have fun with your VMs and GCs and DSLs. Get all XP and Agile and whatever-the-hell with your not-so-bad-selves, just remember to use SOAP and don't play with your WSDLs (I'm looking at you, Kumar).

I'm going back to my PL/SQL, coding transactions the way real men should, tightly coupled to the database. try{catch} this you punks, you ASP-holes! Hah!

In case you aren't, you've just tried to critique a concise, insightful summary of what's wrong with Israeli policy (and US) with a bunch of meaningless fluff.

Please, allow me to give you some _real_ anti-Zionist sentiment. Fuck Israel! Fuck those shit-for-brains hardcore fundamentalist asswipes who are still stealing land, shooting protesters, starving children, and crying in public "poor us, poor us." I'm gonna Godwin-by-proxy, but you-know-who with the armbands and the 'stache was a long fucking time ago - there's a lotta dead Palestinians on the roadside leading from now to way back when - that old check has been cashed, spent, shredded, and long forgotten.

So fuck you. Fuck Israel. Fuck sending them money. Fuck sending them military hardware. Fuck backing them at all. Any Arabs wanna invade? Fucking go for it! Not our problem, any more than whenever any random shithole country Alpha invades another random shithole country Zeta. Who gives a fuck? Really?

You know who does deserve our backing? Canada! Heck of a place. Damn decent country. Hardly ever invades anyone. If they do, you know they're gonna say sorry. Not perfect, but who is? We could learn something from them. Like manners.

But Israel? Not so much. Israel, not so friendly. Awfully self-righteous. Smug. Sanctimonious. They don't deserve to be wiped off the map, but still, helping them beat up their snot-nosed neighbors isn't really doing anything for our own interests. Let's bring back Realpolitik, at least it made sense of a sort...

Police in the USA are mainly supposed to protect property, and mainly the property of the most wealthy at that. Golden rules indeed.

Police in the USA have no obligation to protect citizens. None.

Looters, even people just looking for water, after Hurricane Katrina hit were shot at, a few murdered by police.

Contrast Goldman-Sachs shysters steal millions from a bunch of not-so-big investors and they just have to say sorry. They can keep the money.

Fucked up way to run a country... Not that I'm bitter...

They don't need a month for testing. I'm sure engineers replicated the issue fifteen minutes after they first heard about it, then figured out why it didn't show up in pre-launch testing about 15 seconds after that.

What took a month was meetings, consultations, coordination, marketing spin, legal input and legal review...

Anyone here not seen that drunken dance of the pointy-haired, parasitic elite at their own place of work?

Anyone work someplace where engineers are allowed to decide how to rectify high-profile issues? No?

If you're a Hollywood exec, illegals mow the lawn, clean the house, clean the pool, service the wife - all good things. Those illegals are not going home, brother, not going home.

Meat processing plants use immigration as part of the HR process. They feed names of activists, malcontents, injured workers to the immigration office and then the roundups begin. Immigration gets to pretend publicly that they're doing something and the meat plants maintain a well-behaved slave-labor force.

And because slave labor helps keep prices low, you can afford meat sometimes on your Wal-Mart salary.

Everybody wins!

As in the more you use the more you pay? Sounds like an acceptable way to ration a limited resource.

Please don't imagine supply is being artificially limited by greenies - there are real economic forces at work.

Or did you think that electrical power was infinite? The demand is close to inifinite, the supply not so much. What would you propose for allocating this or any other resource?

Coming sooner or later to your local power grid, you can expect higher prices overall, tiered prices, peak time prices and rolling blackouts - all means of lowering demand for a fixed supply of power.

I believe most utilities operating where demand has outstripped supply will do blackouts because that's dead simple. If we had an option to do something more intelligent, would we choose that?

A community may choose blacked-out TVs versus blacked-out neighborhoods, if shutting off TVs was technically possible and economically viable.

Personally I'd rather lose TV for a day or a week versus lose aircon for an hour on a hot day.

Exempli gratia, mon Dieu, what a shmendrik Schweinehund

Or, I see your four languages and raise one, with allotta alliteration thrown in. Top that, ya polyglot.

They're a family-friendly business, they wouldn't want to use a word like "petabyte" - that sounds kind of dirty.

As in: at the furry parties Ms. Petabyte was always the most popular; no one could keep their paws off of her.

When I buy Apple, I buy an experience. I feel like I'm getting good value for money. They charge a premium for that Apple experience, which translates into higher per-unit profits.

I look at it as a win-win.

Clearly, it doesn't work for you. There are still plenty of commodity configs and components for you to choose from, so have at it.

But please, spare us "you are getting reamed" as if we don't know better. We do know better, that's why we buy Apple.

I could say "enjoy being a bottom-feeder and boasting about it" but I'm just too super-cool for that sort of condescension (that big word means talking down to you).