Try holding some blind tastings. I have. Among casual wine drinkers, there's no correlation between the price of the bottle and the prefernce for what's inside. At my own tasting parties (where I do blind taste testings), the Trader Joes Coastal Zinfandel continues to crush the competition for $6/bottle. Despite what people claim to like, clean, fruity zinfandels are reliable winners.

I've started growing grapes and making my own wines, so I'm looking forward to see how my own vintage fares at my next wine party.

The obvious solution is to have everyone in the potential class opt in at the start of the lawsuit. If the lawyers needed actual clients before proceeding, these suits would almost never happen (and probably be settled much more quickly).

Buttload is imperial, shitload is metric. What are they teaching the kids in school these days? The conversion is negligable in most cases, however. Much like the difference between a standard ton and a metric tonne.

Kids have a thousand times more options for learning to program these days. And iPads aren't displacing general-purpose home computers. Not even close. Tablets are mostly for watching video, facebook, and games. It's quite handy to have the Wikipedia in your living room. Serious work is still done on a proper computer. My kid doesn't do writing assignments on her Nexus 7. She types them up in Word. In any event, if kids want to program, there's no shortage of options and free compilers. There are free versions of Visual Studio, there's Javascript, Java, Ruby, Python, Perl, etc. All free.

There are learning resources available today that I couldn't even imagine when I was 8 (in 1984). I learned by typing in a program listing (Applesoft Basic) and then experimenting to see what changing different statements did. In some cases, I just guessed as to what other statements might even exist. When I was 13, I was able to get enrolled in an actual programming class at my local community college. Up unti that point, I had no books, no instruction, no place to ask questions, but I was programming every day.

Quite the contrary. Employers are able to find good workers for a reasonable price and the government is saying no. So meanwhile some guy's new business is struggling to get going and some other guy who had the misfortune of being born somewhere else can't find work. Free trade, by definition, is mutually beneficial to both parties. Meanwhile, people on H1B visas are getting treated like indentured servants, because that's what they are. If you just let workers come over and work for market wages, you'll quickly get equilibrium and not have to deal with this nonsense.

The whole netbook thing came and went already. The biggest problem with the Chromebook is it's got a tiny 12" screen. At that size, I'd rather just use a tablet. For doing any actual work, a 15" screen is pretty much the minimum. I know, I've been using a netbook for occasional travel and configuring IT equipment at the office for the last 4 years. While not terrible, it's hard to type on the shrunken keyboard and the screen is frequently too small to view the window I'm trying to work in without stuff being cut off at the bottom. And the weak Atom CPU can barely play movies while I'm on the plane. I don't need a desktop replacement, but the 12" screen just isn't getting the job done. Put ChromeOS on a decent laptop and then see how it compares to Windows units.

When I'm hiring, I usually just advertise on Craigslist. 90% of the interview is just being able to complete a freshman level programming assignment. But I usually am hiring entry-level developers. It's depressing to see just how few applicants can pass the test, even guys with 5 years experiance. I was beginning to think my test was unreasonable util I had a prospect pass both tests (FizzBuzz and sort a text file of numbers) in 15 minutes dispite never having used C#, .NET or Visual Studio before. His sense of engineering needs a lot of work and supervision, but he does do good UI work.

Graduates expecting to get a job without training in technology de jour is a disturbing trend. Graduates need to have both abstract and concrete skills. You're setting yourself back $15k/year if your education did not include currently in demand skills. Students need to demand this. And most of it is as simple as just teaching the abstract principles on current technologies. I do not personally know anyone who has ever had a job programming in Scheme or Lisp, but academics still seem to love that shit. That's one of the major resons I dropped out. As a customer (and that's how students should be viewed), I was not satisfied with what I was getting for my tens of thousands of dollars.

The last round of hiring I did, none of the new grads I interviewed had ever even used Visual Studio. This is simply inexcuseable. Only one had apparently ever written a program outside of class. He was also the only one to pass the FizzBuzz test and got the job. And technically, he hasn't graduated yet; he's still taking night classes, but he's only got one left.

Blackberry makes business devices, and as a business device, tablets aren't doing much. Tablets are doing great in the consumer space. My wife and kid have their own tablets and use them all the time - Facebook, email, web surfing, games. It gets them away from their main computers and lets them communicate with the world anywhere in the hosue. Meanwhile, no one in my office uses a tablet for work. I don't really see that changing in the next few years, either. They're fine for viewing things, and while there are exceptions, they don't seem to be very good for actual work tasks.

That's what we do. Corporate credit cards are a real pain in the ass to get if you're a small company. We (small business) use personal cards and have the bill sent to the office. The employee gets to keep the airline miles or whatever bonus is attached to the card. Given that I have about $4k/month in expenses that flow through there, it adds up fast and it's a win/win all around.

What do you think people will be doing on an interstellar voyage? Maybe someday we'll have a breakthrough on interstellar travel, but I think the 1000 year spaceship seems much more probable. And that's 1000 years without anywhere to go on vacation. 1000 years where nothing new ever happens. I can tell ya, whoever gets off that ship and arrives on a new planet is going to be damn good at Tetris.

I had a similar idea for streaming movies. I just don't have the time or the resources to try and do it.

Put together a server room filled with DVD towers and literally stream the discs directly to the customer in real time. I'm actually surprised that no one is doing this right now. Or, for all I know, someone is doing this and I just don't know about it.

I specifically prohibit my developers from looking at the user agent string. Heck, I use IE9 as a browswer, and I've changed the user agent string to 'null'. Anyway, if it doesn't render correctly in Chrome, Firefox and IE, then we find a new way of doing things. Browswer specific code is never allowed. Not even for detecting mobile browsers. There's already a link to the mobile version. If they want to use the main site, that's their business.

Have the app phone home at startup to nominally check for new versions. Any serial number that checks in from more than a dozen different IPs in a day can be presumed to be pirated. Give them a little nag screen that says, "$10 to register this program is a lot cheaper than a $5000 copyright infringement lawsuit. Don't be a dick, this is how I feed my family."

The goal, of course, is to have your software widely used and then convert as many pirates into paying customers as possible.

You are correct, sir. There was also no shortage of public opposition because the Bush administration was clearly full of shit. However, post 9/11, everyone in Washington was too afraid of the sky falling to say anything. There was also substantial neo-con support for the war. Even without Twitter, there was substantial activity on forums, chat boards, IM, email, etc both for and against the war. It changed nothing. To stop anything in DC, you need massive unanimous public support as was the case with SOPA and even that isn't 100% dead yet.