> "You've got to spend a lot of time there to get the ability to answer a question or upgrade/downgrade answers."

You really don't. You need 15 rep to vote up an answer, which entails posting one good question or one good answer (you need more rep, 125, to vote down, but you also lose rep by voting down answers, so people worried about their rep don't do that very often anyway). Anyway, just downvoting isn't very useful - a much more useful contribution, if you see an answer that's incorrect, would be to post your own, more correct answer and/or post a comment on the incorrect answer indicating why it's incorrect. Of course, you do need 50 rep to comment, which is sort of annoying, as commenting is very useful (though not *essential*), and 50 rep isn't that much, but it's not nothing.

You don't need any rep to post answers, as that's sort of the whole point of the site, and the main way to *acquire* rep in the first place.

Yes, I absolutely agree that as SO got increasingly popular, it also got increasingly deluged with terrible questions, but you can absolutely help with that once you have just a little bit of rep (downvoting them and/or, if they don't follow the rules of the site, flagging them for closure). (I like taking short breaks at work to clear my head by looking through the front page for such questions - there's almost invariably at least one such.) The existence of crap questions does not make it any less invaluable a resource for *good* questions, though - I remember the awful days when you had to find answers on *shiver* ExpertsExchange. Ugh.

I'm super allergic to cats, you insensitive clod. (Seriously, I'd love a cat, but I am legitimately super allergic, which is sadmaking. Can't quite justify spending upwards of a thousand bucks on a hypoallergenic cat this time, though it is occasionally tempting.)

p.s. Why would I want to keep The Doctor away? I'd love to meet him!

Southwest never has, which is nice of them. When we flew international on SWISS last year, they absolutely did enforce it strictly (a little too strictly, I didn't even agree with them that it was too large according to their own specifications). However, they also checked our bag that they claimed was too big, for free, so that was nice of them too.

I'd be ok with standardization, but it would be ridiculous to standardize at way worse than the current kinda-sorta-standard.

Hard for silverlight to be "on the decline" - it was always crap. It was crap when it was first unveiled, it stayed crap, it's still crap. Nobody gives a crap about it, cause it's crap. When I see sites using silverlight, I know the site is gonna be crap, too, even more so than flash (which is also mostly crap).

C# in general, though, is amazingly pretty. So is the winforms API, and so is asp.net MVC (not webforms, webforms was super crap). I'm absolutely happy to have a job that's built on C# programming (didn't plan it that way, just sort of happened), and I've started using C# for little scripts and stuff I need at home, too. I don't think it's on the decline at all.

More than that, what I can't imagine people trusting is that there aren't feds on that site happy for the free busts. I know the *money* is supposedly untraceable, but even if that's true, a physical product is being sold, and the seller knows exactly where it's being delivered to. That just seems like a recipe for possible disaster. I know there are reviews, but... reviews can be faked, or names can be taken over. I'd have to be pretty desperate for illegal substances to trust a system like that. No thanks.

Easy. Just 3d print your phone, then install a 3d printing app on it so you can use it to 3d print more phones to install the app onto. (I herd you like 3d printing...)

No, because it's not even remotely new. I inherited a stack of vintage Mad magazines going back to the earliest days of that magazine from my grandfather a while back, and I remember it poking fun at that sort of nonapology. That said, I'd be surprised if you couldn't find evidence of the same type of nonapology going back basically as far as language itself.

The more puzzling thing is that they apparently want "achievement" to "not be predictable" on the basis of "special needs". How can you possibly ask that the "achievement" of a literally retarded student not be "predictable", unless you're not actually even measuring anything and are just rolling a die?

I prefer laptops (of the 17in "desktop replacement" monstrosity type) because I enjoy the portability and flexibility, and am happy to pay more for that convenience, both in cost and in upgradeability. However, because of that, I tend not to upgrade very often - generally not until my primary laptop has completely bitten the dust in a way where replacing it is more financially smart than trying to repair it. My primary personal computer wasn't quite top of the line 4 1/2 years ago, but wasn't too shabby, either - at the time, it could do *almost* anything any of my friends could do on a desktop.

Incidentally, this is actually the longest I've had a laptop last - I've only had to replace the keyboard once, which was thankfully a 10 dollar part and easy to swap in. My previous laptop, ~4 years in, the GPU ate it. Previous one, the AC, fan, and USB ports were all starting to get flaky about 3.5 years in.

So basically what I'm saying is: MSI is pretty solid, apparently! (This was my first purchase of an MSI machine.)

Specs:
i7-720QM, 1.60-2.80GHz
ATI Mobility Radeonâ HD5870 1024MB PCI-Express GDDR5
500GB 7200RPM (next laptop I buy is absolutely going to have one HDD and one SSD, now that that configuration is more affordable)
4GB RAM (I keep thinking of upgrading to 8GB, but it's getting to a point where I'm also thinking of upgrading to a new machine eventually)
17" 1680x1050 screen (this is the main reason I *haven't* upgraded yet, as I will *really* miss 16x10, even if I can get 1920x1080 as a "compromise".)

Right. They're not really putting any pressure on Comcast or any other terrestrial ISP, crap as they may all be. They *are*, however, hopefully going to be putting some pretty strong pressure on the one segment of the internet-providing market that currently has an even stronger monopoly than any of them: cruise ships. Even Comcast doesn't feel like it can charge you per minute of connectivity, a la early 80s AOL - and generally for early 80s AOL speeds, too! Cruise ships do.

There are very few cities *less* like the US than NYC.

Granted, I'm sure the bikes *will* get trashed and vandalized, it is after all NYC, but not because people like cars and hate bikes. You have to be *mad* to drive a car in NYC (well, Manhattan anyway, that mostly where I've been in NYC), and even madder to drive a large one, unless by large you mean basically a tank, which would be pretty much the only way to get pedestrians not to walk right in front of you whenever they want.

No...? Managers *are* important, coming from a software developer who has absolutely 0 desire to be one (actually, that's optimistic, I have a strongly negative desire to be one). There are certainly managers out there who spend way too much time appearing to look busy, and all the best managers I've had have been technical people who managed part time and *also* got their hands dirty in the development of the project they were managing, but it is *absolutely* important to have someone in a managerial capacity, for things like:
  * Knowing whether the project is headed for being on time, or if it's likely to be behind schedule, and if so, why?
  * Dealing with clients/users' demands, whether reasonable (perhaps a particular feature was more important than it seemed at first?) or not (perhaps they want something technically impossible or at least far more difficult than they realize - do you, as the developer, want to spend your time arguing with them on it, or would you rather be doing your actual job?)
  * Dealing with the demands of sales/marketing/etc.
  * Making sure you have access to whatever resources *you* need (hardware, software, access to specific environments, etc.)
  * Dealing with the demands of the guys at the top, who are going to be juggling resources needed by your project with resources also needed on *other* projects at the same time... don't tell me you don't want anybody at the top, either, I'm not even sure what that would look like. Chaos, probably.

A good PM is essential to the success of a project. I know, I've been on plenty of projects that had one, and plenty of projects that didn't. I was also on one smaller project once where the PM left near the end of the project, and I was told to just finish it without one, it's almost done anyway, we don't need to dedicate a PM for closeout... of course something (not technical) came up I was entirely unprepared to deal with, and it was a bit of a mess. Having a good PM on a project is essential.

I'm happy paying 12-15 bucks a month (depending whether I send any texts that month, or I've been spammed with any, which is annoying but not the end of the world), for which I get the ability to use data when I need to (which is infrequently but not never). I enjoy that ability enough that I would not be willing to sacrifice it to save 7 bucks a month. Having data anywhere your phone works, is super nice. I get it down that low because I don't use *much* not-wifi data, because there is *often* wifi available.

Ting is awesome. They absolutely do let you bring any phone you want (well, any phone that is either compatible with Sprint, or now that they also support GSM, any number of phones compatible with their GSM service). You are also totally allowed to not pay for data, though it's only 3 bucks cheaper if you use some data but less than 100MB, which I usually do. Have I mentioned Ting is awesome?

If he can get reasonable bandwidth at cheap cost, I would absolutely love it. I wouldn't want to use it for daily internetting - not only would it be slower, I also imagine any satellite-based internet would be, entirely reasonably, "pay as you go" rather than unlimited. I *would*, however, love to have the ability to know that I *could* connect to a satellite service anywhere on the planet, when I was traveling internationally (if it were just "pay for what you use" rather than "pay for what you use and *also* some amount every month even if you aren't using it). I'd especially love it if it worked literally anywhere, for instance, in the middle of the Atlantic ocean. Cruise ships wouldn't be very happy with that, but I certainly would. They could charge a fair bit and still be way cheaper than cruise ship internet prices.

Honestly, I thought it'd be Google getting into that market first, but it isn't totally out of line for Musk to get into that, either.

Which is highly appropriate, given that Windows is itself a POS.