The a/an rule of thumb is to use "a" if the next word sounds like it starts with a consonant, and "an" if it sounds like it starts with a vowel.

To English ears, a German speaker says "ooh ess bay", while an English speaker says "you ess bee". The y sound in this case is a consonant, so a native English speaker will say "a you ess bee stick".

All bets are off when the word following a/an starts with an h, since the letter can be silent or verbalized depending on the word and where you grew up.

Avatar's 3D was far from awesome. There were dozens of frames in the movie where post-production, or CGI, or something, left objects out of either the left eye or right eye frame. The object was usually replaced with a white blob the same shape as the missing object. Every time this happened it was as if someone stuck their thumb into my eye.

I'm one of those people who had to crank old style monitor refresh speed up to around 90 Hz to avoid flicker induced headaches. Apparently I have low persistence eyeballs. Oddly the 24 Hz of film has never been a problem for me (until 3D). I don't know why the two technologies affect me so differently.

After watching two 3D movies, Up (which irritated me because most scenes had infinite depth of focus) and then Avatar, I am not prepared to repeat the experience. If a movie is only available in 3D, I won't be buying a ticket.

Opera is also proprietary; users give up their software freedom, something all computer users deserve. As a practical matter you apparently can't get the better addon system or the rich addon library Firefox enjoys without also having software freedom. I'll take the free software and the verifiable level of trust I enjoy with Firefox knowing lots of skilled hackers work on that program in a way where hackers can vet each other's work (including me, should I so decide to engage in that way).

Hopefully not, as a competent administrator knows that data integrity is far more important that a fractional improvement in performance.

Exactly. A competent admin would have tested the config on identical hardware as what is running in production. That you consider a laptop to be sufficient testing demonstrates either a lack of funding for your "the CEO and I share DNA" company or that you suffer from a lack of training.

Had you properly designed your system for redundancy, you wouldn't have experienced those issues. Or if you weren't dicking around with kernels that should not be used in production, you similarly would not have experienced the outages. I take it you're going to be running the latest Windows Server alpha and beta releases from Microsoft in order to get maximum performance?

Windows reached version 3.0 some 20 years ago...

The population are by and large, a bunch of morons.

Choose your poison carefully.

They are open, anyone can buy them.

Open does not mean 0 cost contrary to how its been warped by GPL zealots.

Not legally.

What if the person you try to return it to refuses to claim it's theirs?

"People who've had valuable items stolen from them are not deserving of the police investigating?
not when someone who has the item is willing to give it back if the person they are tlaking to won't say it's theirs.

oh, and FUCK your morality.

Your morality says it's ok to not confirm something is yours and then waste tax payers money going after the people who tried to give the item back to you.

I think apple is paying people to astroturf this issue. in ANY other situation, this would be a no brainer. say it's your and take your property back. out know, this is Apple so you don't claim it's your and then destroy peoples lives.

really fucking awesome, dickwad