I beg to differ.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

I've been a keyboard jockey for many years. It's been my experience that holding any single position for hours at a stretch hurts something -- back, shoulders, wrist, spine, or all of the above. The "best position" is usually "something other than the one I've been in for the past 60 minutes".

To address this, I recently got a sit-stand workstation. I love being able to stand up occasionally while I work. Standing relieves the pressure from my sit bones and legs, and since standing takes more energy I feel more awake and alive. I find I stand for an hour or two of every eight hour day. I don't like to sit all day, and I can't imagine standing all day.

The particular product I linked to above has its drawbacks. I love the ease of the transition between sitting and standing. I hate the mouse tray. It's too small for a regular mouse so I switched to a trackball. But regardless of which I use, my arm receives no support while using it. Holding my arm in the air so much stresses my shoulder. The only time I'm completely comfortable using a mouse is when all of my arm from the elbow forward is resting on a flat surface. The mouse tray on this product demands the exact opposite. My shoulder hurts enough that I know I can't continue using this, but I plan to work out something so that I can easily swap between sitting and standing. They offer similar products that might work better for me.

I'm also lucky enough to work from home, so I have six positions in which I regularly work: 1) sitting at the desk, 2) standing at the desk, 3) sitting at the kitchen table, 4) sitting in the living room, 5) sitting on the table on the porch, and 6) here in the hammock. (I have a Mayan style hammock hung on my screened-in porch.) I spend most of my time at 1, 2, and 6. When I'm away from the desk, I have to use the laptop keyboard which isn't great for my wrists. But the tradeoff is worth it. The hammock supports my back beautifully.

In short, I find that the best position for me to be in is a new one. We weren't made to work at a keyboard for 6-12 hours/day, and the best way to make your body forgive you while you do this is to spread the abuse around to different body parts. And after work, make it up to your body -- do yoga, go for a swim, run, or ride a bike.

Modeless editing.

And the last thing heard in that previous universe was a scientist saying "Hey guys, watch this!"

Amazingly enough (getting way OT now), broccoli, kale, collard greens, cauliflower and cabbage are all the same species. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Brassica oleracea.

I would argue that porn destroys children. My definition of childhood includes a period of innocence, or a freedom from some knowledge that's usually difficult for people to make sense of. For instance, we don't confront children with knowledge of death (if we can avoid doing so), because death is difficult even for adults. Why burden a child with something that many adults can't bear? Children exposed to enough "adult" concepts (death, sex, violence, etc.) aren't children for long.

Porn, specifically, is even harder for kids to make sense of since it is about sex and kids (I assume we're talking about prepubsecents here) have yet to undergo the hormonal change that will radically shift their opinion about sex. How in the world to do expect a prepubsecent to understand sex, let alone the stylized sex frequently depicted in porn?

Trying to learn about sex from porn is like trying to learn about personal interaction from "reality" TV. It's true that kids need to learn about sex eventually, but if they learn about it from porn they're going to have some pretty screwed up ideas about sex.

For an eloquent argument about how knowledge and childhood are intimately related, have a look at Neil Postman's "The Disappearance of Childhood".

And yet good mass transit encourages dense cities. Modern sprawl in the USA is largely a result of public policy decisions, not geography or destiny. We can change that.

It's not 40 below and icy anywhere in the USA for six months out of the year, and when it is that cold, the rest of the country is no longer "too hot" for cycling. You can't reject the idea just because it doesn't work for everyone 365 days of the year.

There is so much in your post that's incorrect that it's hard to know where to start making corrections. I'll just choose a few items.

As to the idea that a vegan eschewing supplements would "[die] from the most basic of food diseases, scurvy, after 2-3 months" -- scurvy a deficiency of vitamin C which is abundant in certain fruits and vegetables. Someone eating a plant-based diet would be pretty much the last person to get scurvy.

That's false. Quoth Wikipedia, "Nearly all foods contain all twenty amino acids in some quantity." Plant foods often don't supply a lot of the essential amino acids (esp. lysine) but they provide some. Citing Wikipedia again, "...amaranth,...buckwheat, hempseed, meat, poultry, Salvia hispanica, soybeans, quinoa, seafood, and spirulina also are complete protein foods".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complete_protein

In fact, tempeh (soybeans + mushroom) does pretty well at supplying essential amino acids.

This dramatically oversimplifies human nutritional requirements. You get to work on that 100% raw meat diet and let us know how that works for you.

Maybe the $5.1B in revenue (17.8% of total revenue) they got from their desktop/laptop lines in the most recent quarter has something to do with it too. Or the 14% YoY growth in units sold. Especially when the industry as a whole grew at just 2.6%.

Note that the $5.1B in revenue is just for Q3 desktop/laptop sales, which almost equal to the entire company's annual revenue 10 years ago.

I wish I could be as sure. Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed does a nice job of documenting societies that, when faced with the same choice, picked collapse. Granted, they didn't have Jared Diamond's book to read beforehand, but neither did they have our capacity for self-immolation.

I keep hearing this, and it doesn't make sense to me. What works for the iPhone & iPad doesn't necessarily work for the Mac, and vice versa. That's why Apple developed iOS instead of just slapping OS X on the iDevices. There's no guarantee that the Mac and iDevices are headed for the same destination.

Have they acquired some similar features? And will they acquire more? Sure. For one, that boosts the halo effect since anyone who has used an iThing will feel right at home using a Mac and vice versa. And the more similar that Apple can make iOS and OS X (while still retaining the features that make each appropriate for their respective platforms), the less code they have to maintain. This is just sensible business, it doesn't have to be about lockdown and control.

What's more, the Mac is a popular tool for non-Windows developers. It's a certified Unix and has all the command line goodies one would expect, like grep, sed, awk, ssh, etc. not to mention more complex tools like Apache, gcc, gdb, sqlite, Python, Perl and Ruby. Apple is raking in cash from the iProducts line of business but the Mac was still nearly 20% of Q1 revenue. If they lock down OS X, then they can kiss goodbye to the Unix certification and all the developers who want access to a command line (which would be about 95% I'd think).

Those developers might only make up a small chunk of the $5.4b in Mac sales but if Apple alienates its 3rd party developers, then who is going to create all of the content for the App Store? And how are those devs going to write code if Macs morph into iPads with built-in keyboards?

Apple has more to lose than to gain by making the Mac into another iDevice. I just don't see it happening anytime soon. I have no doubt they'd do it in a heartbeat if they thought it was to their benefit. I just don't think it is.

One would expect that the attendees of a software developer conference would be rife with early adopters of all things digital. Well, at PyCon this year, old school, dead tree business cards were alive and well. I don't think anyone there would have had the reaction described in the summary -- "A business card. How precious." If they're on the way out, it was not evident there.