I'm a very quiet guy and find it hard still to talk with people that I've worked with for weeks. My current office mate has worked with me for a few months and I just recently started talking to him about more than some code details. It just takes me a really long time to warm up to people. I'd probably make people who have to talk miserable too but I live inside my head mostly and take a long time to warm up to people. I absolutely hate small talk and I hate probing at subjects to try to get me to talk. With me, it's just a switch that goes off finally -- or doesn't.

So when I first glanced at this I thought it said "Arthur Levinson, former CEO of biotch company"

I run a business and am very left-leaning. I'm also right at 30 though and that adage doesn't seem to be inclusive.

I know they claimed at launch (PS3, XBOX) that this would be a ten year generation cycle but damn it feels a lot longer than it sounds. I'm happy to not shell out several hundred dollars per console every five or so years but I also don't want to buy the same gen console as my next console when this one dies.

Perhaps the education isn't ten-fold but the people at the 200k schools rub elbows with the right people and that is what makes all the difference. The rich keeping each other rich.

Other than at Baptisms I've actually never heard 'Satan', 'hell' or any derivations thereof brought up at mass. Interesting though - I'm sure there all all kinds of different Catholic upbringings. A lot of this may come from Vatican I and then the last generation to be influenced by Vatican I is the offspring of the Vatican I followers? I don't really know. My child goes to a Catholic school and I haven't encountered this there or at mass. I don't doubt it one bit but I think things have changed. I didn't grow up in any kind of faith upbringing so I can't speak for anything from the past only the present as I see it.

The 360 has ESPN on the Video Marketplace which is free to use. It has some live events and you can follow whichever sports you like e.g. hockey and soccer. A lot of it, however, is mostly clips and archives and not live so there is definitely that downside. We're planning to use an antenna to get over the air 'live' feeds/channels too so if the sport comes on one of the big 4 networks here in town we should be good to go.

We recently ditched our DirecTV service we have had for years due to skyrocketing prices, inflexibility, and lack of time or desire to watch enough TV to justify the cost. We've been using the 360 (and PS3, AppleTV) to watch Hulu and Netflix as well as renting some movies and the transition hasn't hurt us one bit. We've talked about it for a couple years I only wish we had done it sooner. It was cool when Red State was available to rent (at $10) before it hit the theaters. I hope this is a continuing trend.

We could just attach them to kittens!

Thirty years ago it was postulated that 'They' may indeed be Giants. After nearly three decades of study, is there conclusive evidence that They are, as a matter of fact, Giants?

Maybe I'm stupider than I'd like to think or less of a dick than I like to purport I am but I could never come up with all these absurd patents.

Bah I always thought it was a butterfly.

And now you can get Mono!

Scientology is so first decade. Dahn Yoga is the cult du jour.

I would argue that is the case for basic business programming but once you have to develop for an academic purpose or structure/create complex algorithms, a healthy knowledge of logic and set theory is immensely invaluable. A lot of the programmers I work with here have degrees in areas other than CS (Business, Accounting, Culinary Arts to name a few) and can "program" -- make a website functional and navigable-- but these are also the same people who come to us engineers for advice beyond what amounts to be understanding if/else and some basic looping. So it depends on what type of 'programmer' you want to be. Web Developer or Engineer? Script kiddie or Analyst? Und so weiter.