Never mix (real) dairy with acidic stuff like lemon juice

Unless you want buttermilk, because that's what you just made. But keep buttermilk in the pancakes, not the coffee :)

The leadership of a union represents it's members in about the same way a government represents it's citizens - that's to say on paper, but really they're in it for themselves.

I'm a developer, my wife's a teacher. She was recently laid off, and got nothing whatsoever. How helpful were the union? They did nothing. After years of being forced to pay dues to a union she didn't even want to be a member of they were completely useless the first time she had a problem they're supposed to be there to help with.

On the other hand, I know my employer has laid people off in the last few years and they always get nice severance packages including cash, training and job seeking assistance. I earn FAR more than her, my hours are more flexible, my management is far better, and my working environment is better.

So with the unions preventing employers from firing useless people (and instead making sure it's always the person at the bottom of the totem pole who gets it - way to encourage new talent!) and actively working to prevent keen & passionate employees from going above & beyond (wouldn't want to make anyone else look bad!), and then providing no benefit whatsoever when the shit hits the fan - I'm happy to be as far away as possible.

Good riddance.

As a long time Java & .NET dev I can attest to the quality of some of those projects. NUnit for one is better that the Java version it was originally based on. I'd also add Moq which is a great mocking library.

It's lock-in in the same way that Ford lock you in to using parts designed for Fords. I'm a Canon user but my lenses are about 50/50 Canon original and third party. No, I can't use a Nikkor because they've never made an EF mount lens to my knowledge, but a number of companies do.

Back in the film days there were several companies making class for other big brands

There still are - Tamron, Sigma etc. I have a couple of Sigma EF lenses that I love.

I have one of the Korean 27" screens - they seem to be generally great. I went for a slightly higher end model to get HDMI etc, and I have no dead pixels at all. I can see slight variation in the backlight when it's full white but I've seen it at least that bad on every monitor I've ever owned (costing a lot more than this). Highly recommended (and if you don't want to go the eBay route, monoprice are now rebadging these themselves!).

As someone who's spent significant time living in both, your belief that the US government is significantly better/different is quaint and amusing. Maybe the EU went overboard on fan guards (the new rule actually seems reasonable to me) but at least no one tells you how big your soda cup can be, or threatens to lock you up for carrying a bottle of wine in public, or crossing the street at the wrong place. Every country has their little restrictions and laws which often seem normal to those living there and batshit crazy to everyone else. C'est la vie :)

No optical viewfinder, no sale. I've played with a few mirrorless models (micro 4/3 etc) and just can't get on with any of them. Maybe I'm a dinosaur :)

Not according to Wikipedia, or this site or this one or this one. You get the idea - I can't really find anything defining CNC as anything other than Computer Numerical Control(led).

Sucks being both a pendant and wrong. Must sting.

Yes, must.

You ALWAYS get better performance with a wired connection. Even if you have superfast wifi that can max out your downstream connection the stability and reliability is never as good as wired. And if you need to run multiple streams of data around the house, forget it.

I read a lot of resumes. 3 pages for 35 years is fine...it's the 6+ pages for less than 10 years which get me.

Nice straw man you've built yourself there.

I'm certainly not against progress, in fact I'm pretty strongly for it. I also have no desire to live in a straw bail house (whatever one of those is) and have no issues with vaccinations (Jenny McCarthy can die in a fire). Organic food is preferable for me because it's more environmentally friendly and probably healthier than food grown with heavy use of chemicals, but I'm not obsessive about it. GM is a whole other matter, IMHO it's an interesting technology but the risks are huge (think complete collapse of the food chain) and I don't believe due diligence is being properly followed. I see the benefits though and it's something which should be explored, but our attempts at manipulating the natural world haven't always worked out (e.g. rabbits in Australia) so I'm a little skeptical. Nuclear power is similar. The benefits are obvious but the whole "we have no idea what to do with the waste" issue is troubling never mind the fact that we keep having pretty serious accidents. It seems likely to me that it can be done safely - it just isn't. To be honest I'd much rather the money was put into safer sustainable energy sources.

Anyways, maybe this year will be the year of SSD, just like the last 30 years.

Wasn't that a few years ago? I can't imagine using a machine with a non-SSD boot drive these days, and I can't understand anyone who knows anything about computers not having one. You don't need a big one typically, I recently got a really nice 160GB Intel for my mother in law's laptop for under $100 - made a 2008 vintage Vista machine feel brand new. Without a shadow of a doubt the most significant performance boost you can add to a machine $ for $.

Which it does on every boot. Doesn't need to be reinstalled. Most retail SSDs come with software which can do the transfer, otherwise you're choice of bootable linux USB sticks will do the magic (with a win 7 recovery disk to rewrite the MBR).

It's not the aspect ratio (I personally prefer widescreen) but the number of pixels. The weird thing about those "windows" you mention is that you can get more of them on the screen the higher the resolution. Personally, dual 2560x1440 is nice and works fine for video :)