+1!

I was going to post exactly the same thing. I volunteered for Habitat through my employer's philanthropy scheme. I learned a lot of useful homebuilding stuff. In addition to the skills you've mentioned I learned how to install hardwood flooring and exterior wall insulation.

There're plenty of geeking opportunities: in addition to the enormous number of extremely dangerous power tools you may use, there're hundreds of hand tools, lots of Pythagorean mathematics, different materials' properties, stress/strain etc. You'll be physically active, be maintaining the discipline of turning up at a work site and meet a different set of people.

Plus there's the added bonus that you get to practice all your new skills on somebody else's house while under the tutelage of someone who knows what they're doing.

Finally: if you ever need work done on your own home you can have an educated idea about the cost/effort required to, say, frame and finish your basement yourself. You may be able to weed out unscrupulous contractors, or even undertake the work yourself.

Other commenters have noted that while this is not as glamourous as a trip to a developing nation (BTW which African nation???) it is probably more practical in the short time you have. Your own community needs your help too.

I believe NetFlix uses Silverlight for their streaming service. (I suspect it's because Silverlight has DRM support and NetFlix probably couldn't get permission to stream DRM-less media.) But Silverlight is also one of the major platforms for Windows Phone 7. So I doubt Silverlight is going anywhere. Plus - as other commenters have noted: we shouldn't bash MSFT for moving towards standards-based solutions, we should applaud!

...we already have FreshDirect http://www.freshdirect.com/ Their model is to streamline the delivery from growers to consumers. The model works well in a highly urbanized area like NYC; especially when the competition is WholeFoods and their overpriced, crowded, inconvenient ilk.

Windows has some unsavory habits. Windows 2000 or later systems will store NTLM hashes for backwards compatibility. Many administrators do not know this; and fail to disable this "feature". cf href="http://support.microsoft.com/kb/299656">How to prevent Windows from storing a LAN manager hash of your password in Active Directory and local SAM databases

I'm a Brit living in NYC so I find it even more absurd.

$100 is just the beginning. Throw in some premium movie channels, HBO, or sports channels (usually they're bundled weirdly so you'd have to buy two or three bundles to get all the movie channels) and suddenly you're not far from $200 per month. You end up with 1000 channels of shit; and 3 channels from 3 separate bundles that you actually watch.

I ditched cable TV about 5 years ago and haven't looked back. I use iTunes, NetFlix and the usual Hulu/web channels (and, once or twice while they existed, BlockBuster!) and don't feel like I'm missing out. My 2006 Mac Mini makes an awesome HTPC - I replaced the HDD with an SSD, upgraded RAM - and it's been quietly rendering streaming video on my TV for just over 5 years.

I'm a Time Warner Cable "customer" (I have no choice!) - the only concession I made was to upgrade my cable modem bandwidth. (I often telecommute or connect to my employer's VPN for out-of-hours support so it wasn't a big deal anyway.)

The biggest drawbacks are probably: delayed access to some new releases (not a big deal for me), occasional weird holes in the catalogs eg no Disney movies, limited access to new TV shows (I just watch old shows...)

The other drawback is due to my specific combination of hardware - my TV doesn't correctly identify it's resolution, front porch, etc to my Mini so the desktop is actually cropped. I could have fixed this using third party tools eg DisplayConfigX (http://www.3dexpress.de/) but I'm lazy.

They'll continue trying to take down Isohunt because they're a much smaller target and their pockets are not as deep. Then they can start working their way up the food chain, using the results of smaller cases as precedent.

The question is "How many Slashdot polls did you respond to last year?" - so the responder could answer "None" truthfully. IE In 2010 or the previous lunar year they responded to no polls. But in 2011 they've responded to at least one.

Also - citizens might have been born abroad but became US citizens after immigration. So - valid entrants may be denied based on the "city of birth" criterion.

He's *not* right. He's comparing dissimilar products. I have both an XBox 360 and an iPhone. I do not expect the same experience on my iPhone as on my Xbox. On my 360 I'm playing Kinect games or games such as Call of Duty and Gears of War. They are in no way comparable. I see the intricate HD 3d worlds modelled on my Xbox, hear the 3d sound effects, spend many many hours going through varying terrains/landscapes/scenarios with multiple characters, realtime interaction over the 'net etc.... On my iPhone I play Scrabble, sudoku, dominos, rail shooters (which basically suck but I keep trying), Lego Harry Potter (which is awesome but a premium game). I don't expect the Xbox experience at the $1-$2 price point. I doubt any other gamer (casual or otherwise) does.

I think you invented a neologism yourself: neoacademic.

But in this case the higher salary is being paid to attract a recruit with the right skill set. It's nothing to do with seniority or age. It's simple supply/demand - there are probably more programmers with the same skills as the older dev, and fewer with the new, hot skills.

This just reminded me of the South Park episode: http://www.southparkstudios.com/full-episodes/s11e13-guitar-queer-o

As long as the Chinese govt keeps its citizens segregated from the Internet as a whole I don't see how "Chinese" (Mandarin? Cantonese? Shanghainese? etc etc) can become its dominant language. Maybe Arabic (on the back of Islam) is more likely to become the dominant language?

Soap is a detergent which is a class of surfactant which is a class of emulsifier. You're being a little too general in classing egg yolks with soap.

Soap helps you remove bacteria embedded in the grease on your skin. Washing with soap and water removes most of the harmful bacteria that might cause nasty stomach issues or serious infections while leaving behind the generally "beneficial" bacteria.

This is exactly what I was going to say. If you're using Windows workstations in an Active Directory domain this is a fairly straightforward piece of work. Create your own CA. Add the CA's cert to the Trusted Root store on workstations using GPOs. Done. We actually have this configuration - it automates a lot of cert management processes. I can't imagine that it's much harder in a Linux/Unix/Mac OS X environment.