Longer answer: IDE? No thanks. At least, I've used Eclipse variants and various Visual Studios, but they map onto how I think about writing and managing software. I want a blank screen with lots of keyboard shortcuts, some basic autocompletion, perfect syntax highlighting, maybe some Git support, etc. I don't want code generation or any refactor-all-the-things functions; I won't be using them.

I used Emacs for years and years, only eventually switching to Sublime Text. ST was beautiful and fast but didn't have nearly the ecosystem of Emacs, plus its non-Freeness started showing when it went many months without an update. Life's too short for a proprietary editor, which is where I spent approximately 60% of my work life. I dependent on it more than any other tool and the prospect of my chosen tool dying on the vine wasn't appealing. I tried Atom for about a week, but it was slower than ST2, lacked a broad ecosystem, and, well... JavaScript.

So one day I decided to revisit Emacs. Hey! It grew a package manager! Since that afternoon, I've had zero desire to look back. Emacs will outlive me and my children, will support every new language and tool that comes along, and will always be Free. There's nothing out there good enough to make me consider switching.

PS, in concession: I could make the same cases for Vim and its grandchildren. Once you've learned them, if they do what you need then there's very little compelling reason to change.

Emacs. Next question.

LOLWUT? Starbucks in cheaper than most of the local coffee ships near me. I love love LOVE the Philz Coffee downstairs but I'm not kidding myself about the price: that Ecstatic Iced isn't gonna pay for itself. Coffee Bar was better (and more expensive) yet. Around SF, at least, people buy Starbucks for the same reasons they buy McDonald's: it's a known quality and not expensive. It won't be the best you've had, but it'll be exactly like the last cup you bought and it won't break the bank.

On my block, Starbucks is the opposite of conspicuous consumption. It's what you get when you're in a hurry or aren't from around here.

I bought and use an Apple TV all the time. It's how my kids watch Netflix, and how we rent movies 99% of the time. I love it. I would never buy an Apple television, though, because 1) I like my Vizio, 2) I don't want to have to upgrade my display just because an input device broke or became obsolete, and 3) there literally zero advantage to that arrangement instead of an external box connected via HDMI.

Lots of devices have built-in screens and it makes sense for them. I wouldn't buy a separate screen for a display-less laptop, for instance; making CPU + display into a single unit is perfectly reasonable. There is no reason at all for that to be true in the living room, though. How many sizes should they make? Does everyone get a 60" Apple Television even if they have a tiny living room, or will I be squinting at a 30" Apple Television from across the room? Which pixel technology will they choose? Eh, no thanks. Component systems still have their place, and the living room entertainment system is probably the perfect example of that.

I love my cheap little Apple TV and will probably upgrade it to the next model when that comes out. I don't love it so much that I'd throw out a perfectly usable display panel as part of the deal.

Ever since they changed it so I have a goddamned horizontal scroll (are they on crack?) I've only come by occasionally to look at journals.

Look, Dumbass Holdings Idiots, there's no reason whatever short of GROSS incompetence to introduce a horizontal scroll on a widescreen format notebook!! I'm all for hiring the handicapped, but you don't hire Ray Charles to be a bus driver and you don't hire the educationally handicapped to code...

Although I suspect it may be retarded PHBs than retarded coders. Someone is obviously VERY stupid. The idiotic mistakes I see should NOT happen at a so-called "nerd" site.

I use Putty plenty, but I haven't had a time yet where I have needed to use it on a new system and needed root access on the system I am logging in to. If I'm using it on a new box, I am logging in with my usual non-root account on my remote system. How exactly would they use that to gain root access?

What they advocated for, and what they actually did, were two very different things. I'm talking about the budget proposals that they actually signed into law (in the case of Obama) or voted for (in the case of Pelosi). These were really not even close to reflections of what they said they were campaigning for. Even more so, they resulted in higher government handouts to wall street and the military-industrial complex than the GOP presidents had ever dared dream for, and larger tax cuts to the wealthy as well. The cherry on the sundae comes in the continued dismantling of workers' rights.

Another way to put it in perspective is to look for any bill that Obama signed that Reagan, Bush, or Bush Jr. would not have signed. I can't find a single one.

Really? Obama has signed into law - including during the time when Pelosi was leading the house - bills that Reagan and both Presidents Bush could have only dreamed of. Under Obama - regardless of who controlled either chamber of congress - we saw huge tax cuts to the wealthy, and continued marginalization of the middle and lower classes.

Essentially, while the GOP was marching further to the right, the democrats decided it would be a good idea to follow.

... you buy a gun, and you become a republican. That's been the cycle for a long time. Yeah, lots of republicans have croaked lately but they're being replaced by democrats shifting over.

Besides, as we've seen the last 6 years there isn't much difference between the two. One party is right-wing, and the other is 1 order of magnitude further to the right. Either way the republicans and their supporters win.

And how exactly do you propose to lock a dish onto a single satellite when they're moving around like that? Or is the idea to have enough of them out there that you don't need to lock onto a single bird, just have one in range?

Either way, it sounds expensive. Launching 7000 satellites isn't cheap, plus you have to have them reboosted constantly (500 mi is not a very high orbit, though it's better than the ISS) somehow. Unless they think they're going to get a ton of subscribers (and their system will actually be able to handle them all), it's not going to be economically feasible. Remember, they tried almost exactly this not that long ago with the Iridium satellite-phone system. It was a complete failure, and while it's still in use, the company that built and launched the satellites went out of business and it all had to be sold to another company for pennies on the dollar; they kept it going because their start-up costs were so low and they didn't have much of an investment to recoup. That doesn't sound like a good business plan to me. The only commercial satellite services that have been successful have been ones using GEO satellites, like DirecTV, since you can just launch one or two satellites and get coverage of the whole USA and not have to worry about boosting or replacing it frequently. GPS has been successful, but it wasn't commercial at all (the government does it for military purposes; we're just all benefiting from it), and even it only has a few dozen satellites.

Not a surprise that I raise an actual concern and you reply with a conspiracy. Obviously the constant flow of time in this corner of the universe is not important in the context of trying to banish people with the wrong consonant after their name from Washington.

You will likely claim I am being pedantic about an unimportant detail, but this does matter in this case. The first attack started a bit before 4am Washington time. Hillary gave her response the following day. The question then is how much time elapsed between when she would have received this information and when she gave her speech to the press.

Had she waited longer to give that speech, you would be bitching that she was waffling and ineffective. Instead she took what she thought to be the most credible intelligence at the time and spoke about it.

And hell, it's not like we wasted 6 trillion dollars and over three thousand American lives on the mistake.

We've learned from other bridge collapses in the past that it is more important to place - or relieve - blame after the collapse than it is to actually do something about it. Will the satellites speed up that process as well?

We already have satellite internet. Go to hughesnet.com and check it out for yourself.

The problem with it is that the ping times are terrible. There's nothing that can be done about that unless you figure out how to communicate faster-than-light, because radio waves take a certain amount of time to travel to a geosynchronous satellite and back. You could stick satellites in lower orbits, but then they won't stay there long without boosting, and more importantly, you can't fix a satellite dish on them because they're constantly moving across the sky, just like the ISS does. Only GEO orbits allow you to fix a dish on a satellite and not need to move it.