...VB was, before Java, extraordinarily successful. There's no reason to believe that if MySQL went away, mindshare would go to more powerful or more capable solutions, when ease and speed were what sold people on MySQL. People would more likely end up with SQLite then with PostgreSQL.

Dear god, I got to "where'd my skin go" and nearly spat 7-Up all over my monitor, you bastard!

Both of them, but particularly Hellboy 2, are excellent. Don't let alphabet-number boy turn you away from some really gorgeous comic book action.

Bay's latest crapfest made enough money to buy a country. If there was a Bay for 3D, there'd be a bigger drive for 3D. I'm not happy about that, but it's the reality. (I like 3D, on occasion, such as with the Pixar films, and Coraline... I'd much, MUCH prefer higher frame rates, though.)

Paper only works when you have two simultaneous images and they're polarized differently. That's unlikely to be in any home 3d system, 'cause it basically requires two tvs be built into one unit: it's expensive. It'll be shutter-type glasses, or nothing, till they figure out some entirely other tech.

As a fan of many black and white films, I don't disagree. But my impression of the 20-30 year olds out there is that if it's b/w, they won't watch it. Ever. No really. They'd watch the colorized version of Captain Blood but never, ever the original.

...is the way to go, in general. Monoprice has dirt cheap, excellent cables in any color you could want. They're the anti-Monster cable. That Amazon link to a four-cent cable is a company making money on the shipping cost, though still cheap compared to an HDMI cable you'd buy at a store.

...in other words, even if it's been pulled down 1,000 times, there's a good chance nobody wanted your specific book.

I really believe there's nothing, ultimately, to be done about the masses distributing copies of, well, everything. On the other hand, freely distributed doesn't mean not paid for: plenty of folks who saw Dr. Horrible's Sing-a-long blog did so where there was advertising, or bought the DVD (I did). The last Harry Potter book was available online before release, and did that really affect sales in any way?

Some folks won't pay. Wouldn't have. Some would have, but they won't if they can avoid it. In any case, there's no way to stop them. Stopping the search engines assumes that a solution could be found that wouldn't be worked around: don't be silly. This is the way it is.

"No, you cannot. Just like you need permission to make a copy, you need a version to make a derivative work. This is true even if you use one copy to produce one derivative copy."

Take a book you've bought, write notes in it, highlight it, cross some things out. You have every legal right to do those things to the copy you own.

Or...

PHP:
$myarray[] = $myvalue;

Java running applets sucked, 'cause of lots of reasons, not the least of which being Sun could write quick UI code to save its life. Java on the server side is alive and well and fast.

That being said, a web-centric language that uses the VM from llvm.org would be excellent. Server side. I don't expect to see anything client-side now except JavaScript.

Yeah, you're panicking. That's not helpful. It's already in 11 states at least: it'll be in all of them, borders closed or no.

If you or yours are at risk, keep in mind that regular flu kills 36,000 a year: if that didn't scare you into staying home, why should this, where the survival rate is still unknown? Take a deep breath, away from others :) and make sure your family is retentive about hand sanitizer and staying out of closed public spaces. For as long as they're at risk.

You can find numbers on the net, from 45,000 films (US) to millions (may include foreign). Depends on how and what you count.

While you're correct about the portable media device, you can test people on tap water versus non-tap water and find some that clearly know when they're drinking tap water. (Chicago, for instance, has enough chlorine in the water that I'd be stunned if you couldn't tell.) Now, bottled water that was from a tap but has the chlorine filtered out, versus some heavily mineral-laden water? That's tougher. But claiming bullshit because you don't (or maybe can! but haven't tried) taste any difference between tap and well water is assuming more about other people than is justified.

I did this. And then close Firefox. Then Reopen. THEY'RE BACK.