I believe OP was using the car vs. house thing to illustrate income disparity within the US. The further implication is that those who are wealthier (the person with the pricey car in his example) are those who the police do not bother. This happens not as a result of differences in crime rates, but because of differences in power within society.

Either that or he was talking about Chaucer's Endless Summer.

Betteridge has an answer to your subject line: no.

More important, are your hot grits naked and petrified? What is Natalie Portman up to?

Well, Nemesis sucked, so there are exceptions to these rules.

No, he said that quality was orthogonal to the issue. It simply did not factor in.

Are you being purposefully obtuse, or did you just read GP comment too quickly?

You're right, I've been around long enough to have used a Blackberry when it wasn't even a phone. It was revolutionary at the time, but it's clearly outived its usefulness or sense of innovation (which was always more about having portable email than the quality of the email).

I don't quite understand why people consider it so great for email. I suppose the physical keyboard might be faster for typing, although even I'm amazed at how good I and others are on an on-screen keyboard. The interface seems less convenient than an iPhone, which I find useful but not terribly feature-rich.

But let's face it, the Blackberry is a joke for *any* application as user interface compared to IOS or Android. The marketplace knows it and the company knows it, or they wouldn't be desperate with BB 10.

Stick a fork in it, it's done.

AP used to mean associated press, you didn't need to think about it at all. 'wireless access point' or WAP is where the psudo-knowledge of some slashdotters failed this poll. a cable modem is not an 'access point' it is a modem. dsl isn't an access point if they offer wireless they are WAPs if they only support ethernet they are either a bridge or a router (which opens another can of worms, as to what is a bridge and what is a router).

if we are mincing words here an 'access point' can be anything. from a thin client, to any kind of computer that pushes data, including offline devices, since they offer offline 'access' to a point. eg: my mp3 player offers an 'access point' to my mp3 library.

Here's an idea, rather than letting the manufacturers get away with making the dick waving contest be about screen resolution, why not force them to fix the fucking smartphone battery life problem?

I don't know where you work but I haven't printed more than a handful of pages in the last 5 years which were actually necessary to do my job.

In the two places I speak of, there's a culture of sharing information via e-mail/PDF or, in my current role, via Google Docs.

I can't imagine going to a job which didn't act that way.

It's fairly common, especially in MS-only shops. Even my employer, which uses a mixture (although sadly mostly PHP on the GNU/Linux side, urgh) has their entire back-end in .NET, mostly VB.NET.

Don't underestimate the influence of VB. There's lots of business logic coded in VB, originally glued to Crystal Reports libraries and Access databases, which has been migrated to more centralized, sane, infrastructure thanks to VB.NET. And because small portions got ported in that way, the end result has been massive .NET apps, using SQL Server, all written in VB. It's seen as easier and safer for many businesses, especially the types of business that wouldn't touch a *ix box in a million years.