Yes! $99USD, right?

I've studied the Bible... The morality is repulsive. The theology is degrading...

[citation needed] That was pretty vague, unfortunately. Toss me an example or two to illustrate.

I'm not the grandparent you were responding to, but here are some examples.

Start with Hosea 13:16 which speaks for itself: "The people of Samaria must bear their guilt, because they have rebelled against their God. They will fall by the sword; their little ones will be dashed to the ground, their pregnant women ripped open."

1 Corinthians 11: 2-16 says that women should cover their heads with a doiley in Church or when praying, to avoid disgracing God. Like many other anti-women scriptures, modern Christians have spent a great deal of time and mental power explaining this away.

1 Corinthians 14: 34-36 says that women should STFU in church, should not be allowed to speak. If they have a question, they should be good and talk to their man privately at home. Again, much time and energy has been spent by Christians explaining away this segment of the Word of God.

It's actually too easy, with regard to women, to bag on the bible. From putting women to death for prostitition, to cutting off the hand of a women who tries to help her husband in a fight and showing her no pity... to put it mildly, the Bible takes an unkind and unenlightened view of the role of women in the world.

Ephesians 5:22-24 says that women should submit absolutely to their husbands in everything, just like a husband should ultimately submit to God. "For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Saviour."

Go read the Bible, cover to cover. It's disturbing in parts. But don't worry too much, very few Christians actually read it for themselves except for the happy parts. Alternatively, look at Dark Bible for a very unkind look at other things that are in the Bible.

These Chinese pirates did.

Perhaps so-- the new crop of smartphones do require more manual messing around and is less polished than the Apple versions. But that doesn't mean they are not real contenders, or that they won't get better.

Back in the day, if you wanted a GUI, you needed to buy a Mac or use an expensive Unix workstation. Windows came out. But it required a lot of fiddling with autoexec.bat and config.sys to make it work. Meanwhile with Macs you could just plug right in to Appletalk and get things like networking and printers to work automagically and wonderfully. But to discount Windows as a contender because of this would have been a mistake.

Hardware that no one has adopted with software which no one has written is not a replacement for social networking sites.

You raise a good point, but this is a chicken and egg issue. Back in the day, near the dawn of the personal computer, user's personal machines were generally not networked. You could get a network card, but there wasn't much point for most users. This is because there were not generally useful network-aware applications, there was a lack of lots of other machines to communicate with, and a lack of generally useful information to share on the network. Each of those kinds of problems posed a barrier to solving the others.

Facebook, dating sites, and other social network sites in general have the same kind of chicken and egg problem when starting up-- there is no real value for the early adopters because nobody else is there yet.

So your statement that hardware that no one has adopted with software which no one has written is not a replacement for social networking sites is completely true, obviously. But at the same time, there has to be a way to make the statement false. Otherwise, we must say that today's existing social networking sites can never be replaced. Because whatever replaces them will, at the time of their birth, have zero people using them.

It may well not work out or not catch on, but somehow, some day, today's existing status quo will fall and be replaced by something else. And something else has to be built before it can be used.

You and the some other ancestors are not understanding the distributed/shared nature of memcached, and how it needs to be accessed from more than one host except in the most trivial use cases.

Personally I'm gathering courage to try this out on my hero

A great way to turn a Hero into an Hero!

But kidding aside, sounds like a fun project.

Perhaps you don't remember 1980 as well as you think. Seriously, you wouldn't have been impressed in 1980 if I were to tell you that pretty much everybody would have their own personal phone number, and be able to use it anywhere? That the same device would act as a personal music collection with enough cassette tapes and records stuffed in there to fill several refrigerators, with fantastic audio quality? And that you could touch a couple of buttons and get just about any music in the world in a few seconds? And that record stores as we know them, would essentially cease to exist as a result of this game changing technology?

And games. Seriously the lowliest game on a phone today pretty much blows Atari 2600 out of the water. Oh plus they're multi player now over the net.

In 1980, if I wanted to send an email, I used CompuServe for $5/hr to connect on a 300 baud modem, and my system wasn't advanced enough to compose it online. And I was pretty advanced-- nearly nobody else around at the time had even heard of email.

Also you used to have to read a manual to be able to use pretty much any piece of software. The whole idea of an intuitive GUI that you could figure out how to use by just looking at it didn't really exist yet.

If you wouldn't be impressed in 1980 with the state of computers today, perhaps you don't remember 1980 very well. Maybe this list of the top songs of 1980 will help you remember 1980 better.

You can't get away from the fact that it takes time to physically move the heads and then wait an average of half a rotation for the data to be under them.

You can, sometimes... this is one of the central ideas that MapReduce and Hadoop are all about: removing disk seek times from the equation and getting the data streaming non stop. Things get a lot faster when the application is designed start to finish to stream as much as possible.

I'm sorry if this is a really dumb question, but how can a black hole emit much of anything? I thought they couldn't emit light, any anything else, not even information.

Frankly, if you dont have $2K for an Enterprise MSDN licensing, you really have no business doing a start up, do you?

Ok pop quiz, people. Is the above person a young hip developer, or a douchebag?

The tools may not be quite as good in some cases, but running cross platform makes up for it in my book. And it's getting better all the time. And I agree with you fully-- I might still be a MS developer today if they didn't ask for $1000 USD for developer tools at a critical juncture where I didn't have that kind of money for something that might not work out.

Microsoft Word? Excel? MS Project? Visio? Visual Basic? Visual Studio? Visual Studio became the standard against which all subsequent IDE's are compared. It's hard to argue that, isn't it?

In fairness, that is a pretty cool program. You've got 3 years to develop your software, and you're liable for $100 USD if you don't make it happen. Seems fair, and especially enticing for people not willing to step up to the plate and learn something they're not familiar with. I probably would have used this program if they offered it a few years ago. Instead I bit the bullet and weaned myself off Microsoft. I'm glad I did. Now all my stuff runs cross platform, and on cheaper machines (cheaper hosting because of lower memory requirements and no MS software licensing for OS, DB, and webserver).

That's pretty cool. Personally I'd rather not enroll in somebody's program and have them breathe down my neck. Instead, I'd go to ubuntu.com, burn a cd, do some sudo apt-get install commands. There's your database, development environment, webserver, ui tools, the whole schmear. And the agonizing phase of wondering if you're going to be on the hook for $100 if your job sends you on some six month death march on the other side of the country, or something else comes up. Just say no!