Citation? On Slashdot? Are you new here or something?

Actually, I was talking to a C++ programmer who told me that she was seeing growth in the tablet area in her business.

A lot of the growth in C++ is for tablets. As much as it is easier to write code in a garbage collected language, that garbage collection background process is constantly running, eating up battery life and cycles on lower powered ARM processors. C and C++ don't have all of that overhead.

But the real question is why did you buy a new TV? Was it because your old one wore out and it was time to replace it or was it because some advertising convinced you that without the new whiz-bang 1000000p display with 4D something-or-other you life would be a meaningless shell and you would never get laid and probably get cancer?

Of course Facebook (and Google) sell your information. The only difference between them and other companies that are gathering and selling information about you is that Facebook and Google are selling your information retail instead of wholesale. The information is still being used to do the same thing: target advertising at you to convince you to act in ways that you would not have otherwise and might well be detrimental to your own interests.

According to Wikipedia, Tennessee is 41st in median household income in the US. How long are they going to hold on to even that position when all of the educated people in the state (doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc.) start moving elsewhere so that their children will get a proper education? I think we can write off Tennessee for the near future.

Maybe the AMA and various other professional bodies should start reviewing the status of education in Tennessee to see if a child educated in such a system will ever qualify for med school. I'm pretty sure that I don't want a doctor who doesn't understand basic biology

Actually, I would think that CAD/CAM would be a perfect use case for a touch screen. The iPad might be a little small for most people (although I know a kitchen designer who uses an iPad) but for really industrial uses how about a Microsoft Surface?

The assumption that tablets will outsell PCs within a decade is based on current growth rates remaining steady. That's a pretty big assumption.

Because tablets are a relatively new device they are currently in a growth market phase of their life cycle. Once the market has reached a saturation point (and we don't know where that saturation point is), then it will enter the same type of market that PCs are in: where people are buying replacements when their old one wears out.

Of course you might be right in that all you have to do with a tablet is hook it up to a keyboard and mouse (whether bluetooth or something else) and you've got a useful, but if that's the case why not just hook up your phone to a bluetooth keyboard, mouse and display and have something even more portable?

But is getting rid of the problems in D.C. (assuming that it's not just another empty promise by a self proclaimed non-politician whose been in politics for 36 years) really worth the collateral damage that Ron Paul would do to the economy and foreign relations?

Actually, I'm from Canada and that chart makes us look pretty good.

Don't knock the Euro. It won't be long before those bills will be rare and valuable collector's items.

Actually, they're paying by the hour, so they want to make sure that the hour is productive.

And here on my other computer ... anything that I want

I don't know what it's like where you are or in whatever technology you work in, but when I was feeling like you are a few years ago I started getting involved in the local programmer community. There are a lot of user groups out there that get together, usually about once a month, to talk about technology. I've found that a couple nights out a month with motivated peers does wonders for my morale. The format of most of the meetings I've been to is a lecture by someone knowledgeable about a specific topic preceded and followed by opportunities to network. The later networking is usually done at a nearby pub.

HINT: make sure to go to the pub afterwards: that's usually the best place to talk about whatever technology you're really passionate about.

But what you consider unnecessary might be vital to me. How do you decide what to cut?

First thing that comes to mind is: so what? This whole argument that smaller is better is crap. The reason that software is bigger these days is that it does more for you. How productive was the GUI for Turbo Pascal (it sucked), how good were the other tools that came with it (nonexistent), how fast were the release cycles (about the same as today). So with what people call bloat we get better tools that make us more productive thereby driving down the cost of software development.

Or to put it another way: if you really don't like bloat, when are you going to trade in your car and start driving to work in a hot wheels?