If you are not planning on moving/working abroad, you're not going to learn any second language well enough to be very useful. People with technology skills are rather mobile and the largest tech firms have foreign subsidiaries. So the big employers have no shortage of native speakers of the most commonly spoken languages. In the meantime, machine translation is getting better all the time and while it may never do poetry or literature very well, it will certainly be good enough for most business purposes in the not very distant future. I wouldn't expect adding a new language to change your employment potential much, but there are many other good reasons to do so.

Manipulation--whether in the darkroom or with a computer--is only one of the ways images can mislead. Scenes may be staged. Even when they are not, framing an image in the viewfinder and deciding when to release the shutter determine what small bit of reality is rendered. It may or may not be an honest, representative sample. Every photographer knows that you don't need Photoshop to lie with a camera.

Their coolness reduces global warming.

Selling sock puppets, maybe?

I second jet_silver's recommendation that you look at the dissertation, which discusses the tradeoffs and is quite well written. You are correct that to achieving professional quality with this technology requires a huge number of pixels, though the cells themselves do not need to be very large. Such sensors are possible today but until now, there hasn't been much reason to produce them. If the company finds some success in the consumer market, perhaps it can then invest in the additional development needed to satisfy pros. While most of the talk has been about changing the focal point and DOF in post-processing, as a photographer I am most intrigued by the claim that it can correct for lens diffraction as well. That would be a much more than a gimmick, IMO.

Never mind...I forgot that the app store is for iPhones, iPods, and and iWhatevers. Save your flames for more important things.

OK, let's do some very, very rough calculations here: assume that there are six billion people on the planet and that a third of them own a computer with Internet access. That's two billion. Assume that Mac users are 10% of that group. that's 200 million. In order to account for 10 billion apps, the mean downloads/person would be 50. Really? Since the vast majority of Mac users already had the apps they needed before the store opened, I find this very hard to believe.

I like Skype and use it often, but I have never once used it from within FF. They gave me a dollar credit a few weeks ago in apology for the big outage they had, which honestly didn't affect me in the least. I thought that was a lot nicer than the usual corporate stonewalling of "some of our users may be experiencing minor difficulties..." But I don't or trust toolbars from anyone, and I always disable them.

I'm a what is called a serious amateur photographer. I probably take around 25,000 pics a year and keep maybe 3% of them. I always have two copies of everything I value on separate media--at the moment, DVDs and an external hard drive, but I expect that to change in the future as storage technology evolves. In addition, all of my best work is stored as high quality JPGs on an online photo site. I consider this a minimal scheme. If I were a pro, I would have additional off-site copies of everything, but if my house burns down, my pics will be the least of my worries. How much you invest (time and money) should be a function of how important the photos are to you. Another thing to consider is how you will find photos years from now, especially if you accumulate thousands of them. Besides a solid backup scheme you should consider investing (time and maybe money) in some catalog software that will help you locate photos by keyword, location, date, whatever.

Yes, I remember reading you in the 80s. A new incarnation of Byte cannot be the same. We aren't the same either. The ads in the 80s were a lot more interesting than many feature articles today. So it goes.

Smarter and smarter vehicles for dumber and dumber wars.

To celebrate, Google will change their logo to one which crashes your machine when you click on it.

Yes, that's right. Photoshop is a terrible choice for casual users, not only because of the UI but because the power and sophistication make it difficult to learn. The UI is actually not a problem at all for experienced, professional users.