So I suppose dominating the world with Windows for all those years was worth it?

Absolutely. Any decent cleric can plane shift, but meeting their God (other than by the usual means) requires a very friendly DM.

I don't know why you guys keep doing this. It's not religion, its ideology. Ideology is the prime mover. Religion is just its handmaiden. Just compare the terms islam and islamism. The former is the religion, the latter is the ideology. Ideology doesn't need religion, by the way, Pol Pot and Stalin, killed millions without religion's help, but they sure needed ideology.

dammit, just got all the generic stuff slashdotted out of my last comment, what a shame. I'll try again...

List<GenericClassYoureAfter> list = new ArrayList<GenericClassYoureAfter>();

how 'bout

List list = new ArrayList();

ArrayList is an array-backed List

take that! .NET fanboy!

It's not necessarily 1800s thinking to strongly associate mass and gravity. Your post while good, doesn't address the real issue that the OP was asking about.

Essentially, if there's literally nothing, then there is nothing from which to build a stress-energy tensor. So how did that stress-energy tensor appear? from what? nothing? The OP associated it with mass, but replace mass with energy, and I think we still have the final cause issue he was on about.

well...not from me, obviously, as I'm commenting.

I too have found his works increasingly indulgent. The Baroque Cycle was sufferable because (1) it didn't push any idealogical barrows and (2) it was a deep immersion into times and places I've never been. Anathem though, pushed some barrows, i found myself being lead by the nose into Stephenson's point of view, and the book failed to be interesting enough to be worth the effort.

bloody hell...what a rant.
Look Neal Stevenson's interest in the 17th and 18th Centuries with the Baroque Cycle is unlikely to have any thing to do with him wishing he was there, or that he is primitivist, that he harps after religion, or wants to live in a cave. You've obviously got some axe to grind, if you think its reasonable to suggest such a thing. If you're so offended by his abandonment of Sci Fi (if that was really his primary interest in the first place), head off to the hard science paradise that is Greg Bear, Greg Egan or Ian Banks.
By the way, I'm a techie, and I enjoyed the baroque cycle, so you can drop the 'we' stuff as well please.

I know, I know, TDD is talked about ad nauseum, but I often find that when I've just written some logic, and I'm writing some tests for it, that I pick up quite a few bugs, and actually learn more about what I'm really writing.

Even so, some parts can still be boring, but at least, if you break it up and do it test-driven then you're not faced with writing 47-odd tests in one big lump, after you've written heaps of logic.

Granted that it's a valid concern, but it ought to be noted that the reason apple prevent OSX from running on any other hardware is that it would be corporate suicide if they did. Apple survives on it's hardware sales not OS X. If OS X got unbundled for the masses, it'd be the end of their laptop business.

...and this is aiding and abetting terrorists how? c'mon concrete examples please...

Venus' lack of plate tectonics is most likely due to its lack of water. Water acts as a lubricant (through hydrolsing various minerals and allows for greater slippage. On venus most of the original water boiled, ended up in the upper atmosphere, got disassociated by ultraviolet light and the hydrogen escaped into space.

well I don't know about MTV and CSPN, but MONSTERS? definately! sign me up!

...is possibly the best description of the physical universe I've ever heard...thanks

in Australia, it's called academic misconduct, and would usually result in automatic failure in the subject for that year, but can be taken all the way to expulsion from the institution.