Why do people always lump notepad/vi/emacs together? Notepad.exe is one of the more basic text editors you'll find with almost no functionality. vim/emacs on the other hand are enormously powerful text editors which are on par with any "IDE" you can come up with. highlighting? yup. braces? yup. automatic formatting/indentation, etc, etc.? yup. code generation/completion? yup. easily find your files in large complicated projects? yup. open/edit multiple files at once and jump around between them? yup. jump to class/method/variable definitions? yup. integrated help/documentation? yup. integrated source control for svn/git/whatever you use? yup. code folding? yup. scriptable? yup. error/warning highlighting? yup. integrated debugging? yup. I could continue for a while... but all that stuff which people tend to say you "need" an "IDE" like eclipse for... yeah you can do all that stuff without eclipse.

The idea that Eclipse is needed for Java development is ridiculous. I have been using Java for 15 years on projects big and small... vim and tmux are all I need.

All cars can be stolen in a matter of seconds. The key programming things are just a way for the dealers to rip people off charging $500+ for a new key which actually costs only a few dollars. There are reverse engineered or sometimes even authentic programming devices available for pretty much all but the newest cars (just wait a year or two and those will be available too).

And I might add, that Gentoo should work just as well on Itanium, and there are lots of them dirt cheap on ebay, I've been tempted to pick some up to replace some of my older alpha machines... I can't bear to turn them off though, so maybe just add them to my collection. They seriously use a lot of electricity though. My electric bill is probably at least double what it would be without them running all the time, but I rationalize it by saving gas on my heating bill in the winter :)

Personally, I would go with linux on Alpha, then you can use all the same modern versions of everything that you are used to. I've been running Gentoo on my Alpha boxes for the better part of a decade (2003). These days, I can even run Java if I want to, although compiling icedtea from scratch takes a long time. It does work though.

Looking around while driving and trying to read road signs seems much worse to me, especially here in MA where we have such crappy signs, you never know where the street signs will be because they are never in predictable places, you can never see signs for what street you are actually on, and they are all different sizes and colors. Not to mention you can't just glance at signs, you have to spend some time reading and comprehending them. GPS is way more intuitive and should result in much less distraction. Also can be very frustrating to see signs at night because depending on placement they may not be illuminated by your headlights.

If you are shooting from great distances wouldn't you still need to actually keep the laser on the target if the target moves?

A deer is not an immovable object, they only weigh something like 100 or 200 pounds depending on age/size. Some of the biggest ones may be a little over 300 pounds. That is not enough to instantly stop a vehicle which was traveling at highway speeds.

Seriously, everyone keeps shouting and yelling about all these "free" online services tracking their users but nobody ever mentions the ISP. Your ISP really does track your every move, they can see every site you visit, etc, etc... much worse that google, or anyone else. All that data is available for sale, they won't admit it if you ask them... because it is "collected anonymously" but really, it boggles my mind that they get a free pass in all of this mess.

Begun, the clone war has.

Don't worry, I'm sure the shiny new $150 million replacement facility will be able to keep up the search.

Actually, you can get a pci-e video card on a mac mini... but you need to open the case and relocate to a bigger case and get an adapter.

TiVo is fantastic, I've used other DVR from the cable company, etc and they all suck... they crash, they fail to record properly, the menus suck, the controls suck, TiVo (even a series 1 if you ignore the lack of HD) totally pwns every other DVR I've ever used.

That said, I have five TiVos and they are all sitting out in my garage gathering dust because I grew disgusted with the cable company (poor service, price increases, stupid fees, morons for technicians). Now I have AppleTVs in all my rooms and a central media server which hosts all my content. I can easily purchase/rent and watch virtually any TV show or movie I want anytime and it doesn't even begin to approach the cost of paying $100+ per month for cable packages. It is much better to just pay for what I actually want to watch instead of shelling out over a thousand dollars a year for a bunch of content I never watch.

In short, TiVo is failing mainly because the industry is changing and their product is not in a great position to survive those changes. The days of broadcast are numbered IMO.

FYI: AltaVista == Yahoo! They were aquired by Y! along with Overture.

It won't matter which one you take, whatever job you end up doing, you will be solving specific types of problems based on the type of work. If you are smart you will become skilled at those types of problems just by working with it all the time. College is not there to teach you everything you need for your future job, it just isn't possible and employers know this. Companies look for smart people who have the aptitude to learn as both technology and your job requirements evolve.

Trust me, I barely passed my high level/advanced math course, but when it comes time to put it in practice in real life rather being stuck in an academic/testing environment, it suddenly makes a lot more sense when you actually know what it is useful for. The grades you get in classes typically have little to do with how you will perform in real life unless there are other reasons such as irresponsible/self destructive behavior which could make you difficult to employ. The most important thing is that you "get" programming. I can't tell you how many otherwise intelligent people there are out there who just don't "get" programming, it almost seems like it is a genetic trait.