Where I live, if I call a plumber, I pay his bill, and federal and provincial taxes. Ditto for painter, electrician, I have to pay sales taxes. So what is the difference if the programmer works to build a website. Do you pay his invoice without paying sales taxes?

Sales tax is payable on goods, not services. Building a website is a service. You don't pay sales tax when you procure the services of a doctor or lawyer; why would web coders be any different?

This. The computer on my desk at work is an Athlon 64 3700 that I built eight or nine years ago as a MythTV box. It's now running WinXP SP3, VS 2008 SP1, and other such things. Video has been provided by a succession of nVidia cards—a 5200, a 7300, and now a 9500GT.

On the rare occasions I've needed it to play Flash, it's handled it just fine. I also have an old notebook with a Core Solo T1300 and integrated Intel graphics...definitely not a powerhouse, yet it has no issues with Flash either. (It runs Gentoo Linux, FWIW.) If you can't get Flash running right on a 3-GHz P4, you're doing it wrong.

The SD card slot's somewhat less useful now that you can't move apps to it. Being somewhat new to Android (picked up a Galaxy Tab 2 7.0 and a 32GB card a couple months ago for my birthday), I didn't figure this out until after the fact. I can have file downloads go to it, and I suppose I could put movies on it before going somewhere, but the built-in 8 GB is all that's available for apps.

Dammit...that was supposed to be an insightful mod, not a funny mod. Posting to undo. Grr.

Which household pets are tastiest after being blended?

Puppies, if Glenn Reynolds is to be believed.

Can you get a 50mm machine gun, or does anyone in the public need one?

I need a "50mm machine gun" in the same way Rosa Parks needed to ride in the front of that bus, asshole.

of the people I know, no one is actually still using their WRT54G for anything other than one guy is using it for a small wired subnet

I've had a WRT54GL running for I don't know how long now...2006 at least, probably earlier. It's still providing wired and wireless service in a 1900-sqft single-story home. It's in a wiring closet near the front of the house, next to the garage. I get good signal from it in the backyard and throughout the house. Nowadays, it's running Tomato; transmit power level is unchanged from stock.

There were CPU cards for the Apple ][, but these were complete computers on a card that simply allowed use of the Apple ][ I/O.

Most of these were just a CPU (usually a Z80) and the minimal logic necessary to take over from the 6502 on the motherboard. A relatively small handful of cards included their own RAM; it was far cheaper to use what was already in the computer.

The only Apple II expansion card that comes to mind that really was a complete computer on a card was the Applied Engineering PC Transporter, which had an 8088-compatible CPU, up to 768K RAM, an MFM floppy controller, CGA-compatible graphics that could also drive an analog RGB monitor (commonly used with the IIGS), and most of the other bits that would make up a complete PC/XT-compatible computer. More recently, a Carte Blanche could be configured as a nearly standalone computer, running in an Apple II or on a board that provides Apple II expansion slots.

Rentenmarks were backed by land and industrial goods to replace Papiermarks (of hyperinflation infamy). One trillion Papiermarks were tradable for one Rentenmark. It was only a temporary measure, supplanted by the Reichsmark at a 1:1 ratio.

Rentenmarks were backed by land because Germany had been cleaned out of gold by WWI.

Aside: I think you'll find that the Walmart printers are dye-sub, not inkjet.

An earlier post said they use Fujifilm Frontier equipment. Drilling down a bit through their website turned up this PDF for a couple of their models, in which we learn that these machines use red, green, and blue lasers to expose an image onto photo paper, which is then developed with chemicals. It's not dye sublimation or inkjet technology, and while it uses lasers, it's not a xerographic process (what laser printers use). They've replaced the enlarger with a setup that scans the image onto paper with colored lasers. Once the latent image is on paper, though, it's not significantly different from the color photo-printing processes that have been used for decades.

How many decades ago was that? Anything reasonably modern (and rentals are usually no more than a year or so old) would be fuel-injected and computer-controlled; altitude shouldn't affect it like that. I've driven up to Pikes Peak (about 14100', IIRC), and my car didn't have any issues. (It was a 2004 Oldsmobile Alero...nothing particularly exotic. Still drive it to work every day.)

You can write code that can use all 3 interchangeably. I do it all the time, as my queries hit tables stored in all 3 formats and it's just way easier to go generic that try and keep your code strait between data sources.

Perhaps if you're just doing basic select/insert/update/delete queries with nothing too fancy, you can get away with that. Try doing anything even slightly more advanced than that (like pushing your database logic into stored procedures and/or functions instead of leaving it mixed in with your PHP, C#, or whatever) and things start getting interesting. Even something as seemingly simple as returning just part of a result set (select top 10 * from tbl in SQL Server vs. select * from tbl limit 10 in MySQL) can get in the way if you're looking to do something cross-platform. (You could return the entire set and have non-SQL code extract the subset you want, but that would be lame.)

I have the right Alt & Ctrl keys mapped to the Windows & Menu keys with some software I found years ago. On boot, it remaps the keys you want and then exits. That then means using some other rarely-used key as an escape key for things like VirtualBox, but I'm OK with that.

I can get a new keyboard at Big Lots for $8

...but would you want to type on it for any extended length of time? My work computer has a 25-year-old IBM Model M plugged in. At home, I have one of its successors from Unicomp (with a USB plug and Windows keys, combined with the same key mechanism). Try finding either of those at Big Lots for $8.

(In fairness, my Model M was maybe $15-$20 from a random eBay seller.)

At least you weren't trying to browse TFA on a tablet or phone...on my iPad, the first page and every other page after that was a warning that the page I wanted wasn't "mobile-optimized." If you can't code your page to be usable on all devices, you're doing it wrong.

(One minor point in their favor: at least they're not using that abortion known as Onswipe. Whoever decided scrolling should be replaced with pagination should be taken outside and shot.)