Well, that's my point. That is the case. Anything else in unfairly promoting specific religions, which is constitutionally prohibited.

So, either prevent all religions from having tax exempt status, or accept that anything can be a religion and grant any organization (as long as it is a non-profit organization), tax-exempt status. I don't care which one you pick, but I think only those two options can be fair.

Which is the same amount of credibility any religion has, considering what makes something a religion is the taking of certain axiomatic principles on faith rather than evidence.

Which I don't have any problem whatsoever with, mind you. I just don't like people using age of a religion as a way to discriminate against others. "My religion says the reason humans die is because they allowed themselves to be fooled by a talking snake" sounds exactly as weird to me as, "My religion says we were brought here from intergalactic worlds on DC-10's and were trapped in volcanoes where they set off atomic bombs." You want to believe either of those, I'm going to defend your right to do it.

Now, I know Scientology has done some pretty illegal stuff, and I'm fine with us going after them for that. I don't like that anyone would want to define what gets to be an acceptable religion and what doesn't though. I'm sure plenty of people really and truly believe in the Scientology stuff, and as far as I'm concerned they have the right to do so. I will, in fact, defend their right to do so, even though I don't believe any of it. Same as I would defend the right of anyone to be a Christian even though I'm not one.

The problem is that most phone applications are typically 95%+ UI code. If you do that, you're not exactly going to save much time and effort.

Actually, they've been pushing Cordova. Xamarin is an option, but the free starter edition that will work with the Community Edition of visual studio still looks far too limited for seriously development, while the business edition is unreasonably expensive.

The visual studio 2015 preview includes cordova projects targeting android, though.

Except that modern manufacturing process can beat a skilled craftman any day. People buy expensive watches because they're expensive. It's a status symbol. They have something that other people can't afford.

For that reason, the $10k edition of the apple watch will sell plenty. Like the old "I Am Rich" app

No, personally I always thought that the BlackBerry sucked so much that any alternative at all that would let people have mobile e-mail would instantly replace it, no matter how much it sucked. BlackBerry was the phone you went, "goddamnit, I need to replace my nokia or motoralla with this shit, because of my need to send and receive e-mail anywhere!"

That one I'll cop to. In fact, I still don't understand it. The ipod is the worst music player I've ever seen. Back when it came out, I had a Windows PDA, and I thought that worked better.

Actually, no. Satire can use humor, but it's not a requirement. It can use any other tools available, as long it is used to criticize a topic:

In a reddit AMA, Khan explained what he wanted to show was the nature of how society finds violence acceptable in a kids show versus what they consider adult themed. He said the major difference between his short and the original power rangers cartoon was that when characters get shot, red liquid spurts out. Plus he showed titties. Other than that, it's the same type of fighting, with people hurting or killing others. But one is a kid's show and the other is "gritty".

It absolutely fits as satire and valid commentary.

You don't know much about Isaac Asimov. He has stated in several occasions and at the foreword of many of his books that he created the three laws as a response to all the evil robots of science fiction. That it is insane to assume they would turn against us, that we'd have safeguards which would keep us safe, and that we should absolutely build artificially intelligence once we had the technology to do so. Here's one quote on the subject: "One of the stock plots of science fiction was that of the invention of a robot--usually pictured as a creature of metal without soul or emotion. Under the influence of the well-known deeds and ultimate fate of Frankenstein and Rossum, there seemed only one change to be rung on this plot.--Robots were created and destroyed their creator; robots were created and destroyed their creator: robots were created and destroyed their creator-- In the 1930's I became a science-fiction reader and I quickly grew tired of this dull hundred-times-told tale. As a person interested in science, I resented the purely faustian interpretation of science."

The three laws were written with ambiguity not because he wanted to show rules didn't work and our ego of thinking that we could create such rules would be our downfall (the Faustian interpretation he decried above), but because he wanted to make sure there would be some sort of conflict for his stories. However, the rules worked. Most of the time the conflict was a result of the imperfection of humanity: the robots were doing the right things, but we wanted to do something stupid/selfish/prejudiced.

At no point were robots meant to be feared. When their three laws appeared to fail, the moral of the story was always that they hadn't and were working perfectly well. That there was method behind the apparent madness. When a robot appear to lie, despite being ordered to tell the truth (thus apparently disobeying the second law), it lied because it determined the truth would be emotionally harmful to you, and it couldn't disobey the first law.

Why use gpg instead of s/mime, which has native support in most e-mail programs, with no need for plugins? Thunderbird included.

That's not lock in. You described a company doing what it takes to extend the market in which they can compete in. That's fantastic. Of course they have a plan to make money out of this move, but that's a perfectly legitimate and ethical way of doing so.

Well, they don't want to support it, and I don't blame them. Plus some idiot is going to try running mission critical software on it.

The truth of the matter is that if it runs games, it runs other things. I run Windows 3.11 on it. I run several applications both DOS and 16-bit Windows on it. Works great for me.

That said, don't take that as me disagreeing with you. I also often find things that catastrophically don't work. As in, they can corrupt the files they're opening/saving to. If you can't afford trying stuff out (and keeping backups of anything your software will interact with), then don't. If you can, it's worth a shot. Just don't go crying to the developers if something goes wrong, and all is good.