It's how most people insure themselves in the short term in case the airline loses their main luggage.

Leave that person their construct that allows them to believe as they like - you know, the cartoon-like image of big business lighting cigars with $100 bills while Uncle Sam pats them on the back. All of the companies must be incompetent. I mean, it couldn't be because running airlines in America is actually difficult, could it? Or that flights in America tend to be longer and therefore costlier?

No, no. Corporate greed must be it!

I was a developer for 15 years. My talent is in G2, making me tough to replace. I made the switch to leadership 3 years ago. I've watched the company undergo a disastrous reorganization and outsourcing attempt this past year. I saw my very best programmers opt out and seek employment elsewhere.

And somehow, some way, business is still getting done. Even with the relatively mediocre staff who remain, we're meeting the clients' needs. We're struggling with the 2 percent of our applications that need strong logistics and optimization people, but we'll get it under control.

Very few businesses need great programmers, and they only need them for very narrow slices of their organizational needs. For most things, average is sufficient, especially if your business is not producing software.

You just need to start with a need and a purpose, rather than blindly scanning the horizon for some reason to justify the cost of your phone.

I need an for X reason... I google "best app for X of 2014", pick a reasonable site, and usually I do just fine.

Seriously? You just browse categories at random?

It doesn't mean the whole Web Dev "Ecosystem" is broken. It's working fine. People just have unreasonable expectations of it.

It has changed, and may no longer support the way you want to engage it... if you don't adapt, it's you that's broken.

"One Hundred BILLION dollars!"

It just occurred to me that when the movie came out a hundred billion was a lot of dollars.

How quaint.

"What it does do is raise the question of where the intelligent designer came from and how it evolved."

Just define away the problem. The designer doesn't exist in the framework of the universe. It has no need of an origin because time and space are meaningless to it.

Problem solved.

"I have personal revelation of god and do not consider it delusional."

Well of course you don't.

You gotta disconnect from the tech every once in a while.

My 2009 Santa Fe might have a crummy monochromatic display and obtuse choices for button functions, but it reads MP3 files off standard USB sticks, nests the folders properly, and doesn't accuse me of DRM violations. I'm set.

Look what happened to polio culture. Not cool, man. Not cool.

For most people their youth is generally spent without major health issues. Attributing that to homeopathy is rather unnecessary.

All you can do with somebody like that is just look them over, wince, be perplexed for a moment, and then move on. They aren't interested, nor would they listen to any attempt to aid their understanding.

It's not a winnable battle, so don't start the fight.

I bought Diablo 3 and I got about what I expected from it - 60-ish fun hours. I expect I'll get about the same from the expansion pack. At under a buck and hour it's cheap entertainment. That's how video games worked for most of my life.

What got me was seeing people putting in hundreds of hours, and then complaining on the forums about how some aspect of the game annoys them. "Blizzard better fix this or I'm done with Diablo!" I don't want to come off like an aging hater. You know, "Kids today with their..." But it sure feels like the stereotyped sense of entitlement we ascribe to millenials.

I like hiring new grads for some things, experienced folks for others. In this case I needed a Java guy for an app dating all the way back to 1999. I preferred somebody who had lived Java in those years.