... and for the places where people actually live much longer. Though Vermont might (and probably was) a larger portion of the population at the time. The UK was either early or late to the party depending on how you count the Magna Carta. But after their abolishment in 1833 they did more over the next few decades, by far, to irradiate slavery by making it an issue of Treaty with pretty much every country they dealt with, creating a large part of the navy specifically for anti-slavery operations etc. As much as they were dicks to the colonies they at least were very active in freeing/preventing slavery once they set their mind to it.

In my mind that is the problem with a federalist system: it takes an act of God to get a consistent law across the country. I don't think fundamental human rights (quality and standards of healthcare and education included) or what is a criminal act should depend on which state of a country you happen to belong to.

Yeah that is the worse bit. I like fireworks I go more times than not to see them (on a different day than the yanks though). What sucks is the drunken idiots with $5 of fireworks to set off every night for a week on either side. They always seem to wait until 12-2am and set off one or two. Could call the cops but who knows where they are coming from? It isn't like they are doing a whole show or anything: just enough to wake you up and scare your dog.

It was a long time later before the idea of getting rid of slavery came up. The funny thing with the 4th of July: declaration of independence: yeah and how long did it actually take to get it? I can declare myself boss at my work it might take a while before others agree though.

You got to do something so you can damn the people that don't believe even after all the evidence. You got to do very little so those that believe you did it look crazy and you give people a reason not to believe in you.

Assuming they fit in the fixture I really like putting 100W equivalent CFLs into fixtures too. I had a bunch of ceiling lights rated at 40W. The room was quite dimly lit with incadenant (more of a mood light than a reading light). Replace those with 25W CFLs and the room is nice and bright, I save power and I'm well within the quoted rating for the fixture (how much of a safety factor that is I don't know but it also helps the fixtures not be so hot to the touch).

Yeah but we had dreamweaver and the like back in the day. It still took a designer and a lot of luck to have anything that looked decent on the couple of browsers we had. Now you have 3-4 major browsers each with several versions in use on everything from a crappy 320X480 low end phone to a multi-mon 4k setup. I haven't seen very many html conversions that were better than "readable" including written by otherwise technical physicists/computer scientists in LaTex (already a pseudo programming language) that look fantastic in pdf.

I like the ribbon but I agree fat toolbar plus crappy wide screen 9/16 didn't help. Not sure if having the toolbar on the side would have helped. Perhaps failure of focus groups but I heard talks about this choice. Essentially all that MS usage collection told them people were asking them to add features that have existed for a decade. They added the ribbon to force people to see the features that they might not have bothered seeing if it was a couple levels down a nested menu.

Wrath of Khan?

It was $40 for the upgrade from 7 - 8. It was free for 8.1 from 8. So I think MS is more likely to go the Apple model: cheap OS, allow the new shinny gadgets to sell the full (ish) price versions. Tablets and phones are likely going to be free because people are much more likely to drop a couple dollars per app for a half dozen mobile apps than they are for desktop apps (at least that has been my experience).

Creative works are one of the few remaining products where the US leads. Any wonder they are crazily protective of them?

My understanding is Aereo uses antennas inside of the US to capture the content. This has been found to violate US copyright laws. I'd agree with you if they were using attennas located in Canada/Mexico to pickup signals originating in the US and then only selling in those countries. Still there probably is reciprocal agreements between those countries to respect each others copyrights. Its a similar thing with any large industry. For example healthcare: you don't need FDA approval in Canada but Health Canada almost always waits until something is legal in the US before allowing it in Canada even if it originates from a 3rd country. Similar airport security etc. Lots of industries the US is either the dominant customer or a bully that will force you to obey their rules even in your country or be punished.

UnNintendo Consequences?

Perhaps VS users don't have the baggage of trying to save the world via their tech choices and instead realize it is just an enjoyable well paying job. Life's much easier when you aren't fighting to get all your tools to like one another. Perhaps you aren't being driven crazy when you first start trying to do something (because of canned templates that are somewhat reasonable to get you started with): you get the crap in smaller portion sizes not in an all weekend: why won't this damn git repo build shitfest you get with a lot/most projects built by vi/Emacs zealots that think it is normal the have to know where every dll lives and what version it is on your OS before you can get a Solitaire app to compile.

I agree. VS needs lots of resources. Our last boxes were 3 year old machines with 16GB of RAM. VS opening took about 40s. Compile took oh 2 min or so. New hardware (probably mostly the SSD but we do go over 16GB of ram used routinely (web service, VS, SQL Server etc all running on all our dev boxes) so having 32GB helps). Anyways, you need hardware that is less than 2 years old IMO to be thrilled with VS, but I don't want to work for any company that won't invest 2k every couple years for my tools anyways so it is a non-issue to me (I'll leave when I don't like my tools).

I do agree with some of his complaints though: how VS determines what needs to be rebuilt is a mystery to me. I've literally had the solution fully up to date and run a unit test. It starts right away. Run the next test in the list (in the same class/dll and with no code changes) all of a sudden VS decides it needs to spend 40s building a bunch of stuff before it can run. Still navigate too, find all references, intellisense etc all save me much more time and especially context switching throughout the day that I'll never go back to my make/vi|emacs days.

Make them spend months and millions to compel you to decrypt it. Then ... oh crap I thought that was the password. But I guess it might be something else.