16:10 again? Yes please very much.

None of those things sound like 1992... I don't think there even *were* widescreen laptops in 1992? I certainly never saw them, at least - was all 4:3 back then. I don't remember seeing too many 16:10 laptop screens until the mid-2000s?

16:10 is definitely my preferred aspect ratio, so if this were to happen, and I could get it with everything else I would want in a laptop (17" screen, decent graphics card, SSD primary and large HDD secondary drive) for a reasonable price, I would absolutely jump on that. My laptop is getting kinda old, but I haven't upgraded in years because we're stuck on 16:9.

Title: "Put Your Enterprise Financial Data In my Butt? Sure, Why Not"

The tag-line to the dullest porn *ever*.

I agree, the HP machine I had years back was decent. Their tech support, on the other hand, is hilariously incompetent to the point of negligence, by which I mean, something broke under warranty, I called them, they insisted not only that I didn't have a warranty, but that the machine (which I purchased directly from them not a year earlier) didn't exist and never had. Took hours on calls (mostly on hold) to get them to admit otherwise. Never buying an HP consumer machine ever again. (And the machine wasn't even amazing, just decent, given as mentioned, something broke and required repair about a year in, and it finally died permanently after about 4 years. My new machine, an MSI, is going strong almost 5 years after purchase; the only thing I've had to replace was a keyboard, which was a 10 buck self-install.)

Check how long your warranty is good for. It'll fail about a week after that.

I read the title, I imagined them doing experiments where they had bowls of cereal lined up, then they took various artificial ingredients and dropped them into the bowls to see what would happen. So basically, research for their next cereal, what additional artificial crap can we add that we haven't already tried?

I'm glad to see exactly the opposite was actually the case (supposedly. I'll believe it when it actually happens.)

> "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.