I would rather pay more than have ads.

Yikes, that's expensive. If all the Pro features were available in the base version, then maybe... but, sheesh.

Samsung t139. It costs about $15 to $20 brand new (unsubsidized). I spend $5 to $10 per month on minutes (T-Mobile).

Comparing X terminals to the web was a shitty analogy the first time someone uttered it, and it's still a shitty analogy. The shitty analogy keeps getting modded up to the moon, while I'm sure my correction will be ignored (or downvoted) AGAIN.

Properly written web apps can push A LOT of the work client side. Web apps can be very client/server, with emphasis on client, if written properly!

X apps display on your workstation but run almost entirely on the server. Even to the point that mouse movement and every keystroke is traversing the Internet. Are my keystokes, as I'm typing this comment, traversing the Internet right now? NO, they are NOT. I'm getting very low latency on every key press because the client side is handling all my comment typing.

The web is far better than X apps ever were, because they allow the developer to balance the client vs. server as desired.

That's a mighty big "if". I like watching all the armchair physicists around here assume they know the answer with a religious-like fervor.

For all we know, the Big Bang had a cause. What caused it may exist in a "lower level" time that we don't knowingly experience. We might just experience our local time.

It's not meaningless.

The time we experience may have started with the Big Bang, but there may be a lower level time component to the greater universe. For example, one theory is that two Branes colliding caused the Big Bang we know and love. In order for two Branes to collide, they must exist in their own time, lower level than our time.

There's nothing to think about. There's no such width, height, or depth as infinite. Infinite isn't a number.

The universe isn't infinite. It's nonsensical.

It's pretty easy to create bootable USB flash drives with the Linux distro of your choice these days.

Having to wrap small utilities with an installer and a big JRE stinks. Plus there are licensing considerations when redistributing the JRE. No?

A lack of good, free Java compilers that produce native binaries (with no additional dependencies!) is the Achilles' Heel of Java. I'm convinced languages like Google Go would never have been invented if Java's ecosystem wasn't missing such an important piece of the puzzle.

I say this as someone who thinks Java struck the right compromises in most design decisions.

How come there are never any reports on the fact that elementary and middle school teachers are overwhelmingly female? How come there are never any reports on the fact that nurses such as LPNs and RNs are overwhelmingly female?

What's being done to close these gender gaps? Why is it never reported? Why is it not important? Wouldn't it be good for kids, who spend a lot of their life in school, to also have male teachers as role models?

What about college admissions? Female admissions have been much higher than male admissions for quite a while now. Why isn't this being reported? Shouldn't we be discussing what to do about that?

Forgive me, but I've seen this "gender gap in technology" thing reported over, and over, and over and over and over and over and over and over ad nauseum, the last few years. It's a discussion that's worth having, to be sure, but it astonishes me how gender gaps in other, probably much more important areas, are completely ignored.

Why is that?

The application domains for which C is an appropriate choice has been shrinking for a few decades now. For example, C is not memory safe and pretty error prone. For those application domains where security and/or reliability trump maximum performance and/or low resource usage, languages other than C are probably appropriate.

I'm not a climate change denier or anything, just trying to stress the (probably insurmountable) scope of the problem. Kudos to people who care, and do the right thing, but I don't think there's enough of them, sadly enough.