It's treatable now. People rarely die of it if they can get treatment. It was mostly fatal 100 years ago. It doesn't fit as well as some of the others, but Malaria is much less scary than it once was, even if it isn't "defeated".

Yeah: Polio, Smallpox, Scarlet Fever, Malaria, Plague, Anthrax; all of those have historically been defeated by "exercise and vitamins and good food". That's why hardly anyone dies from them anymore. No, wait, sorry, my bad. It's because of vaccines, antibiotics, and sanitation. I always get those mixed up too.

Probably make your arm sore for four or five days? It's not like they're going to be any bigger, it's just changing the composition of the payload.

People do have natural skills and weaknesses though. You can (sometimes) overcome your limits, but somethings will always be easier for you than other things. Just like some people are naturally better endurance athletes, or naturally stronger or more coordinated; some people are naturally better at math and logic type skills, and others are naturally better at "people skills". Still others are exceptionally gifted and 'good' at all of it. Again, that isn't to say you can't overcome natural tendencies, just as I've made myself in a halfway decent distance runner despite not having the build or lungs for it. It will still always be easier for me to do pure strength work, and I'll improve more and faster when I play to my strengths. I just happen to like running so I do it despite not being naturally inclined to it.

While his willingness to commit bodily injury is perhaps a bit greater than average, how is he being self centered? Unless the traffic laws in Belgium have changed in the 15 years since I lived there, and are now completely different than in the rest of the Western World, cyclist who ride on the sidewalk/footpath are the ones being self centered. They're supposed to be on the bike path if available or the street if not. There's good reasons for that. Of course no one actually followed that rule when I was there either... Once I saw a guy riding his motor scooter on the sidewalk. The bike thing is pretty common a lot of places (certainly here in the US it is), the motor scooter made me a bit nervous.

It's a matter of politeness. One does not, normally, ask for a week of vacation on short notice (as is normally the case for job interviews). A day or two, I could see as "recharge" time on short notice, but a week of vacation is normally something one plans and asks for in advance out of respect for the rest of the team. If I were asking for that much time off, on that short of a time frame, my boss and most other people would assume it was an emergency. They'd want to know what was wrong, that I was taking nearly a third of my annual leave on a moment's notice.

So I go into my boss' office and say "So I need a week off next week to go down to Florida and do the world's most insane interview. Do you mind?" I mean, it's not like this is the sort of thing you can plan for months in advance and come up with a reasonable reason that you need the week off. If I ask my boss for a week off next month without any details, he might go for it without questions, but next week? He'll want to know who died. This is ignoring the fact that I like to use my vacation time for... ya know... vacation?

I think there's value in both honestly. If I'm traveling to Germany and I'm sitting in the middle of Munich looking for a quick and decent bite to eat near The Residenz, something like Yelp! has a lot of value. Even if the reviews are in German I can piece together enough of the language, and use the "Star" system well enough, to find someplace decent. I get to eat a fair to good lunch and everyone wins. If I want to find a nice restaurant to take my wife later that evening, something more like Zagat's or Fromer's would be more appropriate. Munich is a big city, the ability find and read reviews of particularly well know or popular restaurants, in my own native language, is useful.

Now back home, I'd be inclined to use Yelp! for either situation. After all, I know enough about my own city to give me a starting point for finding good places. When I'm traveling though, particularly when I'm traveling somewhere that English isn't the native tongue, editorial reviews have a very real place in my planning. Hell, even here at home I use a certain amount of editorial content. I watch the The Phantom Gourmet I've been known to check out restaurants they recommend.

Well ya see, it's like this. The carriers had been selling smartphones with data plans for years before the iPhone, and it was a great deal. People spent $20-30 extra every month, but rarely went out the of 10s of megabytes for traffic. Because those phones pretty much sucked for everything other than e-mail, contacts and calendaring. The browsers were terrible, and network aware apps were a rarity or so hard to use that no one did (I remember trying to do ssh on my Treo, it was awful). Then those damned iPhones came out, and shortly thereafter those stupid Android phones. Suddenly networking on phones actually worked. The browsers could deal intelligently with websites, networked apps actually worked, people were using smartphones to actually access the data plans they had paid for. The nerve! They actually used what they bought instead of just paying for it and passively consuming a small part of their purchase.

So you can totally see how it's all the iPhone's fault. Those assholes at Apple and Google made tools that people actually wanted to use. Why couldn't they just follow the status quo and network aware crap that allows the carrier to charge more, but not spend anything?

Oh, and also from the article:

Apple beat its own estimates (actual earnings were $9.32 a share). So who, exactly, needs to learn the basics of how this works before they comment? Granted Apple is well known for low balling their own estimates so they can always beat them; but the fact remains that random guys on Wall Street, not Apple, are the ones whose projections were missed.

No, from the article:

Note: Apple made a lot of money. Apple made even more money than it did in this quarter of last year (not typical of a company getting it's "lunch eaten". Apple did not make quite as much money as Wall Street forecast. Not Apple, Wall Street.

This isn't really a "problem", except in the eyes on a market focused on quarterly earnings. They make most of their money in the quarters they release a new phone or a new tablet. That doesn't mean they make less money overall, it just focuses when the majority of that money comes in. What's really insane is that not only did they make a shit pot of money this quarter, it's a much bigger shit pot than the same quarter last year. For some reason it's a "problem" that the shit pot is slightly smaller than some random guys who don't even work for the company sort of though it might be. This is rather like you winning a gold medal at the Olympics and me being upset with you because you didn't also set a world record in the process.

No Ordinary Family That one had real promise, but it never really got going. Shows like Grimm and Once Upon a Time are showing a willingness to drop a few extra bucks on special effects in TV Dramas again, maybe we can start to see something other than Reality TV and Cop Dramas again in the next few years. Don't get me wrong, I like Cop Dramas, but like Superhero Movies they're getting a tad overdone.

For that matter, the Superman cartoon of the same period (and I assume the same production team, it had a similar look and feel) was pretty good. Not quite on the level of Batman, but much better than many Superman adaptions. Supes has always been a weaker character to me though; two efforts of similar quality, one with each character, I'll usually like the Batman better.

I agree. I was pretty much useless at handy man activities until I bought a house. It's amazing how much contractor bills can convince you to learn. I can fix/build most simple stuff now if I have a need, but I also know that for anything complicated a contractor will probably do a better job and do it faster. Depending on the required tool investment he might even do it cheaper. I think that most home owners who aren't either rich or stupid pick up the basics if they didn't learn them from a father or uncle (these days possibly a mother or aunt). Anything more than the basics tends to quickly get beyond the point of diminishing returns.