Wow. Sounds like someone who is out of touch with the modern university experience. There are filler classes, and the closer you get to state school, the more there are, less so at more expensive schools. Usually in the US, they're there to meet state mandated education requirements / accreditation requirements. Basic grammar, any subject you may have encountered in high school, etc - these are 'filler'. Find me a course catalog and I will find you filler.

Just started using f.lux two weeks ago, love it. I no longer feel like I'm staring into a flashlight!

A private company does what they want with their store. You don't like it and demand that they change. Your demands matter *why*? Any argument demonstrating why Apple should care about your demands would be an incredibly fascinating one to hear.

It lists synonyms, but where's a decent online thesaurus when you need one? I've tried a few and most of them are useless, or hopelessly ad-cluttered or both :/

if it was a fun, well-made game... Tons of people would buy it. The news might make a fuss, but then even more people would buy it. In fact, if someone made a snuff film simulator... Er.. Wait, they already did.

Not to belittle the achievement, but how hard can it be to make something that won't crumple? Does every bit of equipment need to be at 1 atmosphere for it to function? Are there no solid-state components?

Innovation at the cost of a sane healthcare system is worth less than nothing.

Large format film is ridiculously expensive in terms of processing costs, though if you're loaded like some hobbyist photographers, you *could* shoot everything in 8x10 and blow portions of it up as needed.

Or get a Hasselblad H3D.

All these things you want to do are quite possible with digital cameras, though you'll have to get a digital SLR.

Some compacts do have exposure compensation settings, and high shutter speeds, for silhouettes and stopping waterfalls. For making them blurry, well, even digital photographers still use ND filters.

Film or digital, it's the person behind the camera that makes the difference, not the technology.

A short list is worth what you get out of it. If it is indistinguishable from empty promises that every other employer makes to the second place candidate for a position, why should *anyone* do as you request? Basically, you are under the impression that you're holding a large carrot while the rest of the world sees you holding absolutely nothing on the end of that string, and your requests are given weight accordingly.

That you should even ask such a question highlights the depths of your ignorance. Slashdot requiring analogies, you're asking why someone would want a desktop running linux instead of a simple calculator. I mean, what can't you do with a simple calculator? That sudden flood of answers that comes to your mind? Very akin to flood of answers that come to mind given your question about P&S cameras.

LED tail lights definitely have a noticeable effect, and the first word I'd use to describe it is 'strobing'. While driving, looking straight on, I might not notice that a car has LED tail lights vs. regular bulbs, but when I turn my head, the LED tail lights stick out in the sea of red generated by other cars because they seem to flicker very rapidly. It's most definitely not psychosomatic, and certainly reproducible in blind tests. What *causes* the apparent strobing is up for grabs, sure, but the fact that it exists is not.

Having used computers for a little more than two decades, it's given me a bit of perspective.

One. Users generally aren't stupid, but they're often ignorant. There's a big difference between the two, and it would be wise for the average geek to understand this.

Two. The 'usefulness:frustration' ratio for your average human being is very lopsided.

If the competing product is less frustrating than your favored product, no matter how much better your product is on paper, in reality, it's the functional equivalent of having the better gadget that happens to only work while inside steaming pile of excrement.

I see people rail on and on as to how linux is perfect, so the high return rate must just be due to users 'not getting it' or 'being stupid'.

It's a very 'not seeing the forest for the trees' problem.

How smart can you be if you fail to understand why people don't find linux to be a better choice than windows?

Ready for the desktop? HA! Ready for the hobbyist desktop, maybe. The desktop of a standard human being? Not even close.

And 'close' is the functional equivalent 'complete fail' in this situation.