Well put.

After reading your thoughtful and well-considered comment, I'm abashed. I just went ballistic on an AC who suggested knowledge of Amelia Earhart was merely the product of her being American. : P

That's right, bitch, USians only care about Amelia Earhart because she's Amuhrican, not because she's the FIRST WOMAN TO SOLO ACROSS THE ATLANTIC.

Make sure you KEEP your sexist, ethnocentric, xenophobic ass in that backwater you call a country and stay the hell away from us.

(I'm going to make my reply here as it's about midway on the page and I haven't seen anyone make this very obvious point.)

You can teach just about anyone to write usable Python, PHP, or Ruby. Fast. You can teach people with high school diplomas how to code in these languages especially if you have a framework in place.

Java not so much.

If you want to get started fast and have access to potential talent, go with the more accessible skill set. If you want to do it *just* right (and have, imo, a needlessly complicated code base) you can go with Java, C++, or PERL.

If you paid $1200 for your bike, you probably should stay in the ghetto with the other chumps.</sarcasm>

Spending is out of control among the wealthy and, in particular, Silicon Valley yuppies. One fairly popular bike store here in the Bay Area/SF has a dozen "bikes on sale" none of which are priced lower $5000 and, believe it or not, these bicycles are priced to move.

Take a stroll in the Marina any day of the week, but Sundays are especially good. You'll see dozens of spandex-clad superheroes riding these carbon-frame bicycles that cost more than some automobiles. The population of super-cyclists is much higher in places like Sausalito.

In short, the GP actually underestimates the cost of pricey biking by an order of exponent.

I am not in the least advocating the use of nuclear weapons anywhere. I am just pointing out the hypocrisy of the people who somehow think they are exceptional. I'm mostly pointing out it doesn't matter how you do it, once you start killing civilians, and rationalizing it, you are pretty seriously fucked up and you don't deserve a free pass no matter who you are or how righteous you think you are.

I'm pretty down with what you've stated here. Thanks for putting it so directly and succinctly.

I do still think that you underestimate how much collective regret Americans have about Hiroshima and Nagasaki but it's not like I have concrete data either.

Free speech doesn't mean you are able to say anything you want in any way you want

Actually, it does.

However, in practice there are limitations on free speech which most reasonable (and some unreasonable) people would agree are necessary to a functioning civil society, limitations that prevail even in countries that claim to be committed to freedom of expression.

It's the limitations most people feel are unacceptable that cause the problem. Right here, right now, right in what many of us consider to be "the free world", such unacceptable limitations exist, and many of us are pretty pissed about it.

I don't have any more to add right now.

I'll take a stab (re: your challenge to AC) at what's wrong with your thinking.

Killing 50,000 people is a tragedy any way you cut it. Killing 50K people inside of a week is horrible. Killing that many people in less than 5 seconds exceeds our human capacities for moral understanding. I think any human being whose sense of empathy is intact instinctively recoils from the idea of instantaneously annihilating, say, 2,000,000 people.

I believe the US has suffered great psycho-social repercussions for detonating nuclear weapons over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Have you ever watched the opening of Gojira or Akira and not felt pain knowing the historical source of these holocaust scenarios?

I think the collective guilt Americans feel about how the US treated some Japanese during WW II (internment, nuclear detonations) is one of the reasons Japanese and Japanese culture are so well-loved by people many Americans. Not only are Japanese people as various and beautiful as we imagine them to be--which imagining makes the instantaneous loss of so many people painful to contemplate--but many of us are deeply regretful our country chose to use nuclear weapons on fellow human beings, however despicable the actions of its government. I personally hope neither we nor anyone else ever does such a thing again.

But given there are people who actually believe as you do, I'd lay better than even odds my hopes will one day be crushed by the news that the US has deployed a nuclear warhead over a Middle Eastern peoples.

$299? I'm guessing your computer won't even last the time it takes for this thread to be archived.

They want to offer a super-cheap model so that the people who will simply buy the cheapest thing they can will have something to buy, but they don't want you to know what's wrong with their cheapo laptop. They want to offer a super expensive laptop, but they don't want you to know that there's a cheaper laptop available that will still do everything that you want. Instead they want you to buy something more expensive than what you need for fear that you're missing something.

This series of sentences taken together make no sense at all. How can a company that sells low-quality inexpensive laptops "want you to buy something more expensive than what you need for fear that you're missing something"?

Maybe computer manufacturers don't have so cynical and paradoxical an attitude towards their customers. Maybe manufacturers are merely trying to capture as much of the market as possible, both low- and high-end, and their strategy with the high-end doesn't work because people shopping in the high-end buy Apple. So the computer manufacturers (except Apple) end up fighting each other for the market's low-profit low-end (which counterintuitively comprises about 80% of the entire PC market).