BTW: There was some research done a while back that did show that using spell and grammar checkers improved the bad english-skills people, but actually made the people who were already good english-skills people worse!

Offhand, yes, you are a less effective programmer if you rely on the IDE. I've seen many "programmers" that get completely lost if the IDE doesn't autocomplete everything for them. They have no sense as to how the program as a whole hangs together. (Note the specific phrasing of "rely on the IDE". Not the same as "uses an IDE". Not using the tool is silly. Requiring the tool is the problem.)

Does it do some task that you feel is worth $1500, then yes.

Incentive to pressure your ISP to support a well over a decade old technology, going on two decades.

IPv6.

There's this really interesting service out there that converts from a human-friendly (well, friendlier anyway) form to the IP address. Perhaps you've heard of it. It's called DNS. (and BTW, you just quoted a link-local IPv6 address... so the guy who wants to talk to Joe probably can't use it anyway...)

Or... did $DIETY place those fossils so that we get hints as to how things will work?

Why is this a surprise? Company releases current version, starts to work on the next version. Heck, in many cases work on the next version starts even before the current version is released.

Yes, but your teeth don't flex like your heart muscle does...

Give me a choice between the touch-screen keyboard and a physical, I will pick the physical almost every time. (It would have to be a pretty bad physical keyboard for me to pick the touch-screen one...) I've used the Blackberry keyboards since the beginning of Blackberry. They've always been better than the touch-screen versions (Blackberry, Android, iOS, all of them). (Of course, this is all IMHO)

Just to ruin your streak... beta.slashdot.org is _way_ faster on my iPad than m.slashdot.org ....

Eh, Sure there is. Less than 5 seconds searching on Google turned up multiple Thunderbolt to 10GbE interfaces.

Augh! A mirrored folder to the cloud is _not_ backup! If you delete a file from the folder, that gets mirrored into the cloud so it's gone there too. If you overwrite a file in the mirrored folder, that gets mirrored to the cloud and it's changed there too. This is the same story as RAID drives. That's adding redundancy/resiliency. In the event of a failure of your local drive, yes, there's a second copy elsewhere. But in the event of "oops, I accidentally deleted a file I wanted to keep" you're out of luck.

Don't give the 4th parameter a name. You can just specify the type.

Yep... and highlights why I don't even try to use an assignment in that area (both that a certain complier will still warn about it, and that it even gives rise to this problem. Just write the assignment before the test and be done with it.). Whether RVCT should or should not complain about it is a QoI (Quality of Implementation) issue.