There is nothing lucky about having good public transportation infrastructure. It requires sensible public policy, a populace willing to pay taxes and an electorate that votes for it. Perhaps after a few thousand people lose their drivers license they may be inclined to support it.

developers who are nice to each other, write to spec, comment appropriately, and write code that anyone can understand and maintain.

This is pretty much the textbook definition of a good programmer, not a mediocre one.

The cost of non billiable hours are built into what you pay for parts and labor. Ever wonder why list prices for construction materials and auto parts are so high and the contractor and mechanics get discounts? It's to pay for overhead costs. If the people doing micro work have built this into their rates, than there is no difference. However, the nature of these sites makes it difficult to include that cost, so people accepting the work are enabling self exploitation.

Let's exterminate ourselves

Don't you worry. That's more or less exactly what is going to happen if we do nothing about climate change. It's a problem that solves itself!

Real work involves using a copy/paste function and multiple windows. I like my Nexus 7 as much as the next person, but it's not a pc. Not even when I carry it with it's blue tooth keyboard.

Technology is providing the ability to exploit unequal labor markets and avoid the regulations that force capitalism to provide broad based benefits. A middle class doesn't happen by accident. It requires government policy to enforce and making work location independent through tech has done much to destroy the middle class.

I remember the digitizers. My school had some Koala Pads. I had a //c and though the computer is long gone, I still have a box of floppies for the nostalgia.

All relationships take work. When the cost of replacement is low, you are not committed to putting in the effort to make a relationship work and instead find someone else that you refuse to commit to because thee might be someone better out there and you don't want to feel like you "settled".

Ummm... the B-1B is Mach 1.25.

You are assuming you will never have a significant medical need. This is a very poor assumption and it is obvious that you are not capable of doing the necessary risk/cost calculations. Bear in mind that one hospitalization will run you $10k, if you need to have a major procedure done that will likely cost you $25k or more. These are just for one time events. If you get a chronic condition, these numbers can go way up.

The reason insurance is required under the new plan is that people are stupid and short sighted.

Not really. I didn't (and basically still don't) care about streaming video and other high bandwidth activities, I just wanted the damn browser to display things properly. These were all issues that existed for BB in the 3G era and hitching it to the roll out of 4G is a bit of revisionist history.

It was a 9700. I really liked many of the devices features, particularly the keyboard and battery life. WRT the browser, there were lots of sites that wouldn't display properly and the small screen made surfing for anything but the most basic of information an exercise in frustration. Speed was never an issue for me. I was considering getting a Torch, but a number of my coworkers had them and the reviews were uniformly bad.

When my BB broke last year I ended up replacing it with an iPhone 4. There are many things about the iPhone that annoy the piss out of me. The UI is far less intuitive than the apple fan-base would have you believe and there is no unified contact management and messaging as there is on a BB.

The browser on the iPhone works perfectly and I can even read the NY Times on it without too much trouble when the situation calls for it.

I was mostly happy with my BlackBerry Bold, but the real issue for me wasn't apps, it was the shitty web browser and small screen. The killer app for smart phones is the Web. If they managed to get that to work seamlessly, they would have kept their customer base and app developers. What did them in was that the Torch was a buggy piece of crap. The UI for email and contacts and all the other communication functions is already superior to the the iPhone.

Nonsense! There are quite a few games where I would love to have a separate screen. With FPS's you could put the map, more detailed injury status, inventory and all sorts of things that might make for new and interesting game play. RPG's would derive a huge benefit as well in that you wouldn't need to waste game real estate on status, configuration or other information.

Your issue is that you are imagining today's game elements moved onto a second screen. I agree that this would merely be a marginal improvement, though one which I would welcome. Instead consider how the second screen and all that lovely space can be used to improve the game in various ways.