Agreed. I've always just gone out, bought a new phone outright, and whacked my existing SIM card in it when I got home. None of this contract crap. But from what I can tell it is very hard/impossible to do that in the US? Which sucks ... I hate being tied to a particular carrier (and besides I have several SIM cards floating around that I tend to use in different situations).

Even worse, the US phones I've seen actually brand the phone hardware/firmware itself with the carriers logo and stuff. Wtf?! The phone should have NOTHING to do with the carrier. The analogy you made with brand X Wifi cards only working with brand X hotspots is a good one.

I used to make my own pizza too - actually making the dough myself and starting with home grown tomatoes.

While the product turned out perfectly edible (even relatively enjoyable), after about a dozen attempts I just accepted that my homemade pizza tasted about like a decent frozen pizza and I gave up on doing it anymore. Just not my thing I guess.

Now some Thai Fried Rice on the other hand I can cook up pretty good :).

I can make perfectly readable jpgs of book pages with a Ricoh GX100, handheld, at 400 ISO. Soft edges? If my eyes don't see them when I'm zoomed in x16 I doubt it'd be a problem for any OCR software that can cope with normal quality printing.

Kit snob much?

Profits are not declining, they only want to make you think that they are. Look up Hollywood Accounting in wiki. Essentially, it's a sneaky technique that "hides" profits and allows you to pay less taxes while complaining that you're not making any money.

Yeah... but if not for looking at my GPS, plus listening to it's voice prompts, plus hitting the traffic map button, plus texting from my iPhone, and using the camera to snap a picture of the traffic to send to my buddy to explain why I'm late and using my bluetooth speakerphone, and drinking my Starbucks and eating that Big Mac... what else am I going to do while in the car?

When I read that, it jumped out as the ultimate symbol of what is wrong in that part of the world.

In most countries, she gets the house, some money, maybe a car, and the kids.

In Somalia, she gets an RPG round.

WTF?

Some insurance companies will not insure ships that have armed personnel aboard. They believe that it gives an incentive to fight, which may increase the damage to the vessel and result in additional (insured) lives being lost, increasing the payouts required if the ship escapes the pirates.

Until it starts leaking. Then you have cold, and mold.

Anyway - addressing the more important part of your post: I think there will always be manned fighter and attack craft, for the same reasons that there will always be grunts on the ground. The machines and the technology are cool, but they can't occupy a territory, they can't impose their will on the occupants of a territory, and in fact, they lack any will to be imposed.

That doesn't seem something terribly important in the air. You'll always need grunts on the ground, sure, but I can easily see a future where the only combat aircraft are unmanned drones - mostly fighting other unmanned drones, and supporting the grunts on the ground.

Hmm... my CS curriculum must be pretty weird, then. In neither high school nor university have I taken any class that even suggested Visual Studio. I can and have used it on some of my assignments, but I've also used kate, gvim, netbeans, eclipse (OK, this one was for work; I prefer NB for my Java coding), and even Monodevelop (which is sadly inferior to VS, but gets the job done for C# and can even use VS project files). I think the only major code editor I've never used is Xcode, although I'm not personally a fan of emacs.

As for using a makefile... makefiles are easy; the basic knowledge required is the material of a single 50-minute lesson at worst. Learning the intricacies of GNU make vs. bmake vs. cmake vs. nmake is an irritating, but not difficult, exercise in use of a search engine. On the other hand, I've not found much where a makefile is actually the best possible way to do something. Sometimes it's the best solution easily available, but I'd really rather let my development tools take care fo that for me, so I can focus on writing and testing code.

As for high-cost, you do realize the "Express" editions of Visual Studio (which are basically the same as the normal editions, except each one provides support for only one language) are free of charge, don't you?

Joss Whedon is a derivative hack who can't help be defile every thing he touches with some sort of adolescent fantasy involving shitty, super-powered, little girls. Then his shows get canceled and the fucker throws a tantrum a 7 year old would envy, killing off all the likable characters and pile driving what little story there was face first into the fucking ground.