Oops. GP actually used the word correctly -- google it, break out a dictionary or just rely on these quotes: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/apprehend.html

And ethics can't be figured out by polling for people that don't mind a concern/problem.

Yup. I really depressed some friends who were priming themselves to quit corporate and start up when I asked what their 'moat' was? A: The WHAT? Me: The moat... the barrier to competition? What is your 'secret sauce' that keeps some megacorp from letting you do all the hard work defining your niche, then asking a team to reverse engineer your product? What's the secret they'll never master, the patent, the copyright? It's like a moat around a castle. A: Um... uh...

They're still corporate drones, but they did create the project as FOSS. It's doing ok, they're happy and busy and one of them parlayed that project into a good raise at another company closer to what he loves.

OTOH, I know another guy who embraced a project that went big. Megacorps are good at balancing 'how much to reengineer' against 'can we just hire/buy the underlying code and talent'?

LOL, GP invokes strawman (all regulations are a liberal conspiracy) on your side of the argument. P responds with ORLY?! So you claim his answer is another strawman. That's some serious drain-bammage, bro. Do like P suggests and change stations, quick!

Seriously; if libertarianism is about being unencumbered to a point where every environmental, health or safety misdeed is allowed under the dual banners of 'capitalistic self-interest prevents abuse' and 'caveat emptor', it's even less viable than communism. But you may already know that. I've noticed that extremism tends to be pushed either by nutjobs, fools, or people knowingly working the Overton Window. Which are you?

Apologies in advance for the 'when did you stop beating your wife' tendencies to that question.

Anyone else read that second url and think it ended 'cybermen'?

customizability is not the crux definition of a PC. I can't tell you how many ways I've had laptops unupgradeable over the years (NEC UltraLite, anyone) but they've all been PC's.

I don't really have a dog in this hunt, btw. Haven't decided whether I consider a pad a pc or not. I say 'not' when it involves software compatibility, ability to edit word docs, etc. But when I start getting into how I'm using it, it starts to feel like a business device used personally for computing and that acronyms down to business PC. When I'm at home and surfing, that's home PC taskage. When my kids take a turn, it's a game PC, etc.

It's a candy mint / it's a breath mint.... fuck it and accept that netbooks, notebooks, smart phones, desktops and smart appliances are all PC's. The acronym PC is dead, long live the acronym.

they didn't. 2 of the 3 pie's fat slices involve the OS.

From http://www.microsoft.com/investor/CompanyInfo/SegmentInfo/ServerAndTools/Overview.aspx
"Server and Tools product and service offerings include Windows Server, Microsoft SQL Server, Windows Azure, Visual Studio, System Center products, Windows Embedded device platforms, and Enterprise Services. Enterprise Services comprise Premier product support services and Microsoft Consulting Services."

To be fair, you're both going semantic and offtopic: rerun this argument like the monty python spanish inquisition script, and say that OS and business and servers are the cash cow yadda yadda...

Bloatwarepad is subsidized, just like Zune was.

Already been done -- Anyone remember that 'olestra' stuff? Inverted-molecule fat for fat-free pringles? Stuff died a dismal market death when word came out that it tended to cause 'rectal leakage'. Or, as Dave Barry said: "Warning! BUTT DRAINO!"

And by saying so, you get pegged with one word, which is unprintable and would just get me troll-rated..

Seriously, this isn't even on the top ten list of characterizations of the Obama administration. Then again, the top adjective list from Fox reads like political word salad anyway: Fascist, Communist, Socialist, Liberal, Nazi, Bankster, Corporation-owned, Wall-street, AntiGun, Islamic, anti-religious, imperialist, weak, etc.

Given the sheer number of absurd words chosen and mutual contradictions and the centrist-right nature of the Obama administration (ask any liberal or progressive, we can quantify the ways we object to his stances as too-conservative), let's face it: your party needs to rediscover how to use a dictionary.

Oh, and **ALL** are better than war. Nothing says intrusive like killing. Every political act, even the worst, is an attempt to resolve power struggles without warfare.

Sit-ins are intrusive. Picket lines are intrusive. Lockouts are intrusive. Boycotts, tea parties, monkeywrenching: intrusive, intrusive, intrusive. One could argue that defending oneself against negative political cartoons gets in the way of controlling one's message: intrusive.

Shouting from atop a soapbox: intrusive.

Unfettered political speech / expression routinely gets messy. Several of these are reprehensible in comparison to pamphleteering and other more civilized methods of getting one's message out, but each has shown they have their places. Asymmetry (an imbalance of power) forces asymmetric counterattacks.

That's why these are common. Now we just have to debate whether it's entirely depressing or a necessary evil...

Third 'if' is obscure (works for a reason that isn't evident/obvious). It also fails for m,n where m is a multiple of n (3 and 6), might fail for other patterns but I'm not seeing a solid proof either direction. If spec changes, your cleverness might introduce a bug.

Note, I really do think what you did is clever. If bytes still cost 1000x man-hours, you'd win. But for real-world use, do the else. It reads sanely. Yours made me start contemplating math proofs. Clever is a great measure of deep hackerly understanding. We just spend years unlearning 'clever as fuck' because it bites us on the ass eventually.

This extra time* is just techno-foreplay.

Going full anthropomorphic, the computer doesn't CARE how long (2, 4, 8 or 60 mins) we take to warm up, as long as it's balanced by how hard we rock it's world when we get busy. Four lines? Hope they're the model of code elegance and wisdom. Take an hour just to get started? Better be awesome, with deep penetrating insights ("yeah, I've never though of it that way before"). Done in sixty seconds in an elevator? Sweet.

* am torn between whether chasing 'damn kids off my lawn' IS or ISN'T worth counting. Depends on the mood, I guess.

A: $140?! At near-zero bandwidth, unless storage is large (i.e., you're storing 10+ gigs of data on the site for public access), find a cheaper provider. Asmallorange's lowest plan is a few bucks per month. Amazon's cloud stuff may be almost free, too, based on a hit/day metric.
B: I'd presume FIL is writing off the expense, so real after-tax cost is down roughly a third from there. $30 bucks becomes $20.
C: With domain registration, you'll still end up having some cost. Back up to $30.
D: If all you get is a hit a day, focus on correct info on various high-scoring results: (yourstate) (your name) (your specialty). Don't obsess, but think about it occasionally.
E: 9/10ths of local advertising mechanisms that are begging (BEGGING!) for your business will create little web-presence improvements free with any ad purchased. Instead of considering $140 a year expensive (!), do little PR things: clean up or add data for local-hospital / local/state registries / WebMD / yelp / yellow page / local newspaper / chamber of commerce presence. Analyze where clients come from, and do 80/20 effort on the sure stuff and the stuff I just mentioned - The ROI for small psych practices might be negligible, but he WILL pick up clients based on people stumbling across his name in these places, or by recommendations.
F: look at his home broadband contract: running a server from there could get DOS'd by the ISP noticing him, could get a price increase for violation of a 'no hosting' clause, and could just get DOS'd because the ISP doesn't notice him: my self-administered exim server got to be too much of a PITA eventually, with my ISP doing random things to silence rogue spam daemons.

Having said that, I'm also running tiny sites or daemons from a wrt54g, from a few Amahi servers, a Shiva (and have friends doing everyhting from FREESCO to PWNIE to RPi). Rock on. Just recognize that $140 a year isn't a good business motive.

Think I replied to you elsewhere, said you didn't know shit. From here, I can see it ain't that you're ignorant... you've just been burned. My apologies.

I completely get where you're coming from. Any championship starts to get burdened with side values/costs, whether it's olympics or these sorts of academic leagues or even amateur sports. It's the golden rule, in reverse: Money corrupts, more money corrupts things more. Maybe I'm lucky: my kids are so far down the damn well that merely qualifying for state boggled our minds and will expand their horizons immensely. Some of these kids come from entire families that have never set foot on a college campus or seen knowledge work as a career possibility. I don't want them to strive to almost win and then get nuked by the money-centered cheaters club. That'd sting bitterly, and again my condolences -- most of us have this happen occasionally. But that's not the only possible takeaway. I just want my kids to see more career options than their parents saw.

BTW, you're still wrong about FIRST w/r/t FIRST Lego: entirely preprogrammed minibots. The bots may seem lame, but what were you expecting for 5th and 6th grade kids?

An old boy scout leader friend once called himself a ponderosa pine: a big tree, offering shelter and somewhere to lean. As a type-A nerd, it's one of my toughest lessons, to step back and make the kids do all the work. To ask good leading questions, or explain an engineering concept succinctly in a tangent. To keep them from hurting themselves. To praise good hacker insights, or doggedness.