All those statements could also explain the emergence of men who can get their sexual gratification from other men instead.

Almost makes one envy their ability to do so.

Wouldn't any company that using tracking cookies be guilty under this definition of wiretapping?

"you have to accept the reality that large programs take some time to start."

The is a difference between taking a long time to start, and taking a long time to completely load. I notice that most programs that take a long time to start are loading tons of plugins, or external dynamic libraries. In Adobe's case, each seems to load rather instantly, but the sheer amount of them adds up to a long start time.

They should be able to get a usable interface a lot more quickly than they do. They can load functionality burried under menus in the background, even bringing functionality to the front of the load queue if the user requests it to keep a partially loaded application responsive.

I think it would help if you told us what kind of projects you would like to contribute or to learn more about. Are you into OS kernels, IDEs, Ray Tracing, sound editing, etc. Then people might be able to suggest a manageable open source project to your liking (one which you will be more likely to brave through the learning curve), and resources for that specific project.

While I understand the caveat that texts go directly to the cell phone (ie, purely "push"), what is wrong with using e-mail for IP based messaging? Or Skype?

Since IP is so generic, and you can just download an app for a new protocol (I use the term loosely), isn't it more of an issue of getting your group of friends to agree than it is for there to be a single industry wide standard?

Personally, I think the expectation by someone that others always be accessible by whatever form they want (texting, cell, e-mail) is more selfish than not having a text plan simply to accommodate said expectation.

Can you name me a movie that would not have been made if it were not for the paid product placement? Also, the absence of paid placement does not mean an absence of real products.

So what stops them from using variety of real products without the paid placement to keep things realistic?

Having a disproportionate amount of a single company's products filing a scene, or in use by characters throughout the show, is also quite noticeable. Outside of going in a company store, can you give me an example of going somewhere and having a brand image being a noticeable part of of the experience? I can't even say going into my school's computer labs, filled with desktops from a single brand of would have qualified, and that was over a course of four years.

Yet something about the camera angles, prevalence in the world, choice of local contrast, etc. makes you notice Dell in V for Vendetta, for example.

Haven't experienced this with my 2009 unibody with an nVidia card on Lion, but it does not seem like I should be expecting to either.

In any case, I have Windows on bootcamp if bugs in Lion ever become an issue. Unlike Lion which only has partial OpenGL 3.2 support, I get full OpenGL 3.3 support on the windows side, so I'm on there for my graphics coding projects anyway.

If there is a need to justify use of Adblock, I'll use the same justification the advertisers themselves use: because I can and because it benefits me.