But, really, there has to be a degree of cognitive dissonance between the hope you'll do well and be super rich ... and the actual reality that, it's a tough slog, you might not get there, and you might have to trade away some equity to someone else to get there ... in which case your payout might not be as big as you hoped.

The difference between con-man and entrepreneur can be a thin line.

I've known a few people who fancied themselves the latter, but had worked themselves into such a feverish pitch trying to get there ended up as the former.

Sometimes people convince themselves things really are going to work out OK, even when completely unfounded. The human brain doesn't always like lying to itself.

Yes, that's exactly what I want on my phone. I can use whatever I want on my desktop. On my phone, I want a reduced email client.

MS-DOS never had folders. It had directories, the brain-dead relabelling by Microsoft didn't come until Windows 95.

In Live Free of Die, humanity buys a replication device and some older weapon plans from some advanced aliens for war against other, less-advanced aliens.

They divide its time between producing cool stuff and cloning itself. Very RTS-like strategizing.

Of course with enough replications, you can have an army of replicators spitting out ships like the Starforge, no Force assist needed.

One needs to "starve the beast" the beast being our own tendencies to vote to lavish on ourselves, with disproportionately wasteful government super-markup.

It is voracious, and always spends as much as it can get, and is always chronically short, needing to borrow. Actually, most borrowing is viewed as income to spend -- they can get away with borrowing X percent of GDP. It has nothing to do with need and everything to do with more money to spend.

Starve that beast. Shut off new inventions of income.

Can we have some BBWs in there as well?

Is it educational? "Go visit here and get points!"

I'd also be proactive about Mecca.

But that would have resulted in a strange number of bits of addressing, and actually made everything much more complicated, so they skipped it. It really had to be a multiple of 32 bits, and obviously, they went big.

They keep boning the interface for maps, someone could seriously make a buck just skinning it and giving easy access to the offline caching feature and so on. And googles, why for you no have keywords? I just wind up going to the web interface for image searches. So there's an extra step.

Inbox is pretty nice, I guess. I didn't get the impression that there was much competition in that space. Am I wrong?

Yes.

I haven't worked there for years and years, and I didn't even work for IBM proper; I worked for Tivoli, which hadn't yet been fully subsumed into the IBM culture. I did, however, have access to the 9 net, and there really is a whole little world in there. It's part of how IBM keeps people on the reservation.

And should I also put the bigger screen, full size keyboard and mouse in my bag and carry it with me every time I visit a client on-site?

Taking a portable computer with a big screen with me is better than taking a portable computer with a small screen with me, for exactly the same reasons that having a big screen (or more than one) on my desktop is better than having a small screen on my desktop. Yes, it's balanced out modestly by weight and power issues, but carrying a bag that weighs an extra pound from the train/car to the client's office/facility is hardly a burden for any reasonably fit adult.

Yes and no. Yes, they're going to convert your license, so the original license will be invalidated. No, you will still be able to install Windows 7. What you won't be able to do is legally re-validate it. But seriously, if you use an activation tool to go back to Windows 7, you think Microsoft will knock on your door and sue you?