Well I guess its a contradiction from a certain point of view.

I gotta disagree with you on Hamill. Every person I personally know who tried acting got a comercial or a traveling stage show or something a few times but ended up quitting after 5 years or less and now has a different job.

Mark Hamill did a lot better than just sign autographs. He had a good number of small roles in the 80s and 90s (check imdb) and most actors would kill to have a bit part on a few shows. He is also a pretty successful voice actor.

His career is in the top 1% of people who try to be actors. Harrison Ford's career is in the top 0.00001%. That's the difference, in my opinion.

No, not too harsh at all. He made Ewan McGregor look like a high-school drama geek. "Wooden Talentless Hack" is a great way to put it. Those scenes on Kamino were so bad I actually hurt for poor Ewan. He must cringe whenever anyone brings up Star Wars. For God's Sake, this is Ewan McGregor we're talking about. Ever see him in Trainspotting? He was absolutely brilliant.

To my mind, the difference is clear. It's Lucas.

It's not a contradiction at all. The agent works for the agent's benefit primarily. The vast, vast majority of actors never land a role where the agent can take a significant cut. So, to them, it's like a "bird in the hand vs. two in the bush" type of thing. They can get a few bucks out of the actor, who cares if their long-term prospects are stunted. Fact is, they most likely wouldn't get anywhere anyway. Remember, the agent works for the agent. There is always another good-looking young actor coming along to represent.

To say Mark Hamill (for instance) would have been more successful without being in Star Wars is ridiculous. While he didn't hit it big like Harrison Ford, he certainly had a career that was more successful than 99% of people who try to act.

The micro-USB thing is huge. It is such a pain in the ass that I can't mix and match connectors with my ipod and other devices. I'm glad MS isn't going for nonstandard (read: lucrative) connectors (yet).

If the battery life pans out to be real (and video consumption is second only to wifi as a battery killer in my experience) this might be my next tablet...

That's only true if you see education's function as solely to prepare you for a specific vocation.

#4: There's massive amounts of stuff to do backups for UNIX.

That's odd.. I use Linux Mint/ddrescue to backup/restore images of Win OS partitions/disks all the time. WIndose doesn't have anything even close. I can even mount those NTFS file images as partitions and modify the contents as needed. Have you tried to mount a Ext-3/4 FS on windows lately?

M$ has a nasty habit stripping out long established features, obfuscates, cripples/breaks, and/or removes them, then monetizes it as a paid feature. I.E. Network users(>10,>20), Backups, SQL, Exchange, etc.. Meanwhile Linux/Open source rarely removes features and incorporates new features all the time.

No I don't. I agree there are cold, hard things in the world, but *you* choose to focus on that.

Oh, him. After I donated in 2008 he kept sending me emails. It does occasionally come in handy, like when my wife tells to mow the grass. "Not right now, honey, Barack Obama just sent me an email."

It is your choice to make your eventual obliteration the focus of your life. That's something you can either try to change (good luck with that), or it's something you can choose to accept. But choosing to accept that doesn't mean you have to sit around being miserable and resentful while you wait for the Grim Reaper. The world is only as cold and hard as the things in it you choose to focus on. There's also more wondrous and amazing and even funny things in the world than you an get around to thinking about in a lifetime.

It's like summer vacation when you're in school. You only get ten weeks or so of it, not nearly enough to get to all the things you want to do. And there are some people who will react to that by spending the whole time from day 1 unhappy about going back to school. What a waste of existence! But that's definitely a choice open to you.

Imagine your last few seconds of consciousness before you die. How would you like to spend them? Being angry? Sad? I think that's a waste of precious time. I'd like to have someone I love very much tell me a very funny joke.

No, we all make the choice of the kind of world we want -- or maybe it'd be better to say the kind of world we can live with. It just so happens that some people can live with a world that they don't like very much, so long as that doesn't demand very much of them.

Anyone can by choice have an immense effect on the world around them. Maybe they can't change the *whole* world very noticeably, but they can transform their own neighborhood.

Yeah it makes no sense. They have separate categories for Software Engineer, Programmer, and Software Developer. They are the same job, although often they have slightly different connotations in that in some organizations the word engineer has more prestige than programmer but it varies.

Pretty much useless... a distinction that makes no different at best. Even if some pedant comes along and says "a software engineer has XX degree and a programmer has YY degree" it is still meaningless because these types of distinctions are not generally agreed upon.

And so it goes.

Yet another step to insert a system to mediate and "facilitate" peer-to-peer transactions. I can almost feel the middle class getting poorer as more and more middlemen scrape off their percentage.

The technology that so many people thought would set us free is being applied to bring us back 100 years when most labor was casual and few people knew if they'd have a job next year.

Car sharing, house sharing, "free" content generation, task rabbit type casual labor.... no wonder the middle class in the USA is hurting. This might be more effect than cause but we're in an undiscovered country, that's for sure.

The world is cold and hard as we allow it to be. It is a *choice*, albeit one made by default for people who think like you.