My biggest complaint about IDE's and why I don't use them often is that I have to program all over. My home environment is not the same at work, is not the same 'on location' is not the same 'on the road,' etc.

I program in the leanest way possible. I use the tools that will be available (or be made available) wherever. That means I use text-editors. I use 'vi' in Linux/Unix shells and I use Notepad++/Sublime on Windows. That way, where ever I am, I always have my 'tools' with me.

If I had the luxury of a more stable 'situation' for programming...meaning I knew I'd always be at the same desk, using the same IDE every time I wanted to do something, then I'd definitely learn it and use it. However, constantly switching platforms, languages, desktops, operating system makes it a bad idea to 'get used to' or 'rely on' any tool that can't be expected to exist in the next situation.

Call me naive, but why is Google so protective of the Play Store? Don't they get a cut of every sale there? I can understand why they'd want to block the side-loading of apps onto other OS devices, but wouldn't they want EVERYONE to use the store?

What I see, is that they should work towards eliminating other stores. So the Amazon App Store is more of a threat than Microsoft making a phone that can point at Google's store.

Maybe not in his mind, but definitely in mine. The 'thought-path' that ends up in a certification is not something I want to encourage. Perhaps if it were more like an RPG, and a certain amount of 'XP' resulted in a new certification rank.

Rule 1: On the frontier.
Rule 2: Old (well, at least broken) Not 'squeaky clean.'
Rule 3: The force is mysterious?
Rule 4: It's not cute.

All of those perfectly describe Firefly, (except the Force thing, and that's not really applicable.)

In fact, Malcolm Reynolds is a pretty accurate analogue for Han Solo, as Serenity is to the Millennium Falcon.

Who knew we liked Firefly for the same reasons we originally liked Star Wars?

Neither one of your meanings matches how I've always heard it. A poor worker will try to place the blame on someone else. "It couldn't have been my fault, they must have been bad tools." So the tools were the constant rather than the variable.

I would love to say I was just a geek. However the fact that I care about the difference means that I'm a nerd as well. I had to mark both.

I will say that I find positive affirmation in both titles. It's just that nerd contains a whole lot that I personally find negative as well.

Superfluous

The summary says that we should 'spring forward' without 'falling back.' However the end of the summary says that 'springing forward' increases risk of heart attack, so wouldn't it be better to wait till we 'fall back?' Picking the wrong one would mean a 2-hour shift (or maybe an overlap) between zones (somewhere over an ocean.)

I think he meant 'after' the impact. As in to 'see what happened.' I think your Snark was a little premature.

I still prefer Paint Shop Pro to what I've seen with PhotoShop.

PSP has a mix of vector and raster manipulation that I haven't seen in any other program. I'm always surprised when my 'real artist' buddy is constantly moving back and forth between Illustrator and PhotoShop. It's the same confusion I get when I fire-up InkScape and half my tools are mission. PSP has both of them and they work together well.

I'm definitely not a professional though, and I barely use a small percentage of what even PSP offers. However the fact that I haven't seen another 'dual nature' graphics program really confuses me.

This is my thing. If I was going to subscribe to a movie theater, I'd get to go as many times as I wanted. I wouldn't be locked into seeing the good shows only once. It would probably end up with more 'day pass' customers since you'd likely bring new friends with you on the subsequent visits.

Regardless on whether it's a good ideas for the theater though, it's the only way I'd ever even consider 'subscribing' to a theater. Make it like a bus-pass (unlimited rides) or forget about it.

I did the same thing, but TWO degrees, (my wife and mine, both on one income.) Now I was going to a State University and not some fancy place that gets a lot of press, but still I've never understood why my experience was so much different from all the stories that you hear, (and headlines like this.)

I see your, 'fixed width web content' rant, and raise you a 'running browser full-screen' rant. There's no useful purpose (as you've so elegantly pointed out) to running your browser the entire width of your monitor. In fact, the entire point of a wide screen monitor is so you can get more done (ie, more done at once.) So, have your browser as a nice window on the side, that's in a size and shape that's useful for the content, and use the rest of your widescreen monitor for something else. Save 'full-screen' for those times when the content dictates that you use full-screen.

I find it interesting that 'zooming' was one of your proffered solutions, but scrolling isn't. You realize that even if you did zoom, you'd still have to scroll?

Ad block isn't illegal in any way (unless you played up a copyright angle where it was modifying the contents of the webpage...) so I wouldn't see litigation and legislation in the future. However, as Ad-Block gets more prevalent the price if internet ads will continue to decline. After a while it simply won't be feasible to support your content delivery simply by running ads along side it.

I expect paywalls and subscription sites to increase as the result of Ad-Block usage increasing.

(Then again, commercial skip on DVR's seems to be the same thing and that definitely is going the 'litigation/legislation' route.)

We used to buy Magnetix. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetix

They were great fun...simple...self assembling, but you could do some fun things. It seemed like a great toy for kids. After we had gathered a sizable collection, we heard about the warning of swallowing the magnets. Coincidentally we also started noticing the magnets falling out of their plastic housings.

So, we heavily increased the supervision as the kids were playing with them. Made sure to keep everything glued in tight and or disposed of. Basically I guess that means I'm a responsible parent.

In the end though, we stopped buying them and switch to a toy that was less hazardous. That means the warning effectively became a ban ...for my house...

I think that's how it should work with pretty much everything.