This is pretty much it. Laptops for me are a way to distract myself through mandatory lectures, but still pay a little more attention than sleeping.

Pools can easily cause neighbors problems. It's stupid to say we should let people do anything with property even if it has a high likelihood of affecting others. Sure, maybe you could sue them for damages, but that is a ridiculous, complex and uncertain burden on everyone, won't stop damages in the first place, and ultimately the owners are less likely to be the real problem than builders who ignore responsibilities. It makes much more sense to impose reasonable regulation.

Plus, pools incur other issues. Many communities set rules for how much land can be developed on any given home property, because people don't want to live surrounded by concrete. Minor and predetermined restrictions on property rights allow other people to enjoy their property rights in the real world. Just because something doesn't "physically" affect other properties doesn't mean it doesn't affect them in such a way that it needs to be regulated.

And again, many things you can't fix once they are broken, even if you can collect monetary compensation.

None of that justifies unreasonable regulation or red tape that is just a pain, of course.

Communities are allowed to develop rules about how land can be used. Not doing so would hurt everyone. Obviously, there's a scale between basic stuff like creating a giant fire hazard and HOA crap like painting your mailbox the wrong shade of gray, and different levels of authority that govern this stuff. Get involved if you want your voice to be heard. And live somewhere where your desires are compatible with the neighbors (or where you have no neighbors). If everyone around you wants to preseve the trees as much as possible, and you want to cut them all, tough luck, you don't get to ruin everyone else's scenery.

Personally, I don't like a committee deciding whether any minute aesthetic feature of a home is allowed based on how it affects property values, but I also don't want my neighbors to be able to totally trash their property or cut down all the trees or build right up to the property line.

With that said, this looks more like a tax than a restriction on pools. Which is fine, they do use a lot of water among other things, and so is enforcement. Eyes in the sky are rather creepy, though, but I don't really know if this is worse than Google Earth in general, and it's not really that big a deal to me, and is rather useful and neat.

HDD is already affordable at 2TB, the best deal being about $150. 200GB SSDs are, on the other hand, $900. 7 cents per gigabyte or 4 dollars. They aren't remotely comparable. SSD has to come a loooong way to even compete, and it's not as if they have huge advantages over hard drives anyway.

Macs are deficient in a lot of software besides games. AutoCAD, just for example. Expose is just UI eye candy. The command line can be useful, but its presence in os x doesn't really offer an advantage over windows for most things, and it's not close to "all you need" for nearly anyone.

Do you know that that was paid for by public funds? Even a lot of normal athletic programs where I am rely on fundraising. Someone might have just donated it to the school.

Paper currency is printed by the government, specifically the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. Both paper currency and coins are distributed to the federal reserve banks. People just haven't really used the coins, but they are trying the president ones now.

Do most meters actually take dollar coins?

Honestly, though, quarters aren't that tough to use. And they often don't actually want you staying very long anyway.

The 7" ones just wasted a bunch of space around the screen. 9" (actually 8.9, I guess) ones were about the same size, so I think they were really the happy medium. I'd really like the cheapest 8.9" netbook with a good screen and keyboard and decent construction. Battery life is always a big plus. Thickness, OS, storage wouldn't really matter.

It'd be nice to have something to use working on stuff, cooking, etc and, my 17" MacBook Pro being too large and at risk of damage in messier environments (but far better for doing anything even remotely computer intensive).

I think it's misguided to start out focusing on any one language. Using different languages helps you understand what's going on in the larger picture. I think once you can grasp the fundamentals of programming, and you can generally understand a variety of languages, then you might want to try getting more heavily acquainted with whatever language you like. C and Python are both very accessible, and they can help you learn things about each other. C gets you bare metal memory/pointer stuff and static typing, and Python allows you to branch out and do more complicated things more easily. Neither are necessarily my favorite language, but they are very common and reasonable.

Java might also be a good idea, to focus on OO concepts. It's not as easily accessible, though.

Another issue is the amount of flexibility in a lot of languages. C++ especially incorporates so many concepts in complicated in differing ways.

I do think the syntax differences help in grasping what the syntax actually means.

You're obviously a parody. Next time, try to pick a bizzarre complaint that could at least be real. It's just not believable that someone cares that much about shaving a few bytes off a hosts file, or seriously proposes using such a gigantor one.

80.5 actually