I agree with you, but like one of your respondents said, even that doesn't always work. I know a dude who, in the opinion of both my wife and myself, is still basically a kid. Despite being generally responsible, having a decent job, being a home owner, having two normal kids, this he's still at the center of his universe, and awfully cocky about it, too.

How he became a home owner is telling. He and his wife recently made the decision to buy a house. Not long after the decision was made, out of the blue he hit her with "Let's buy one in this resort area that I go to really often (side note: usually without her or the kids) to do this sport that I'm really into. I'm sure my company will let me work remotely." Surprise.

He's the dominant one in their marriage, so she quit a good new job that she's been doing for a few months and at which she's already had a promotion, which of course was to the great surprise and disappointment of her employer. The kids were uprooted and moved to a new school in the middle of the school year. There's little to no tech work in this resort area, so it's going to make it hard for her to find a new job, compounded by the fact that she quit her old one after only about 6 months.

My choice for exactly that same thing was - after years of not wearing any watch and just looking at my phone - a fully mechanical, automatic (AKA self-winding) watch. There's nothing greener - its all metal except for the crystal, and is thus fully recyclable should it ever come to that. It tracks the time and the date, that's it. It uses no batteries. There's nothing greener this side of a sun dial for telling time.

I wish I had some mod points for you, SRV is the first thing that popped into my head, too :-)

I know who SJVN is by his full name (but thinks he's something of a windbag; the Rush Limbaugh of tech, if you will), but missed the abbreviation entirely. My first thought was that the N must be for Network and this is just YANTA (Yet Another New Tech Abbreviation) :p

How dare you inject logic and reason into this conversation?! :p

Everyone is busy dumping on the police, who had - so far as TFA indicates, anyway - nothing to do with his being barred from being alone with his kid. That's all the doing of whatever they call Child Protective Services over there - an organization that is well known for going ridiculously overboard in both directions (restricting or removing contact with children from people who have done nothing wrong, whilst on the other hand letting people who should have zero contact with any child go happily on their way) over here in the US, too.

It's not the police that I, as a parent, fear. It's CPS, an organization that means well but is, in far too many cases, utterly incompetent.

If games were cars and Shilling were a car company CEO, buyers of used cars would find that the factory stereo, nav system, and rear entertainment system would no longer function because they only worked for the original purchaser of the vehicle. Maybe a couple of cylinders would be disabled on the engine, too. And forget about overdrive gears; you'll have a 1:1 top gear, like in the old days.

No, that's not true at all. KDE 3.x was a quite good UI. KDE 4.x has (finally) matured to the point of being >= 3.x (at least in every area that matters to me). Gnome 2.x is decent out of the box, and let's me tweak it to be really good. My only beef there is that the tweaking is harder/requires more expertise than it should. Fortunately, I have that expertise. A new user might not, or even know where to find the info.

With GNOME 3, it's not that it's necessarily a bad UI per se. It has some interesting ideas, and some things that will seem fairly familiar to Mac users. My big complaint with GNOME 3 is that it's almost completely non-configurable, which means that I can't take the points about it that I don't like and change them so that I do like them (and no, writing extensions does not count as "configurable"). Granted, KDE 4 was like that in the beginning, too. I regarded it as pretty much unusable and eventually moved back to GNOME because of that. It's possible that GNOME 3 is also just in that young-and-incomplete space. It might be much better 2 or 3 years from now. In the meantime, we have Cinnamon and Mate as alternatives.

Or it might not be, in which case Cinnamon and Mate will be alternatives for a long time to come.

However, it is simply untrue to say that Linux hasn't had a decent UI yet. If you still doubt me, go spend some time using Windows, then come back and use Linux again. Among the three major OSes, Windows has by far the worst UI.

I like something that stands between OS X and Gnome (or KDE). In Linux since the late 1990s, I've used FVWM 95, Window Maker, AfterStep, GNOME 1.x, KDE 2 ~ 4.something, then back to GNOME 2.x because of some specific weaknesses in KDE which seem to have since been fixed. At work, I use a Mac (mostly) and a Linux machine running Ubuntu 10.04/GNOME.

I like the OS X dock a lot and use Avant Window Navigator on my Linux machines. I also moved the window buttons to the other side (Mac-style) for consistency. Any app that I use much, I put in the dock. For ones I don't use much, I like having a menu rather than the Finder->Applications approach on the Mac. On a small screen (laptop) I like the Mac-style menu bar. On a big screen (like the 24" dual monitors I use) I like the menus in the app window (Linux/Windows style).

Overall, I think OS X is the best desktop, but it would be better if it had an app menu and if it allowed me to configure whether the menu bar was global or in the app window.

I like having the notification area in the dock (AWM style) rather than in the menu bar (Mac style).

Since Apple is unlikely to either change their UI or make it configurable in that way, I find myself generally able to get closer to my ideal on Linux, and applaud the Cinnamon and Mate projects. These recent moves by GNOME (3) and Ubuntu (Unity) to create UIs that tell me how it's gonna be and that I ought to shut up and like it, instead of giving me a UI that I can configure how I want it to be, are wrong on so many levels, the greatest of which is that it's just not the Linux Way.

If you have to preface a statement with "I'm not into fat chicks, but..." -- you're into fat chicks.

(?:B|B)W

There, fixed that for ya.

That's hilarious!

Yeah, I was gonna comment that when they can mix H&M's computer-generated models with Realdoll and some robotics, there will be quite a few guys who won't even *try* to get a date :p

In the long run, this may result in significant changes to the gene pool as they remove themselves from it and society once again turns to polygamy out of a shortage of males who are interested in non-robotic women. Granted, they may by then have robotic men who are good enough to cause some women to go down the same road, but overall I would expect more men than women to go for a robotic companion.

According to every source I've been able to locate, the heaviest MM got was 140, but that wasn't her normal weight. It was the result of an eating binge resulting from depression before making "Some Like It Hot." She got back down to her normal weight (115-120) for filming, and her weight at death was 118. She was 5-5 and 1/2. 115 - 120 pounds is a normal weight for a woman of her height and age. By way of comparison, my wife is 5-2/105 and is actually slightly overweight (belly fat) but that tends to come with age (40). She doesn't weigh what she did when she was 21. OTOH, when she was 21 she only weighed 100, so 5 pounds over almost 20 years and three kids bothers me not at all - she has a great body and doesn't really even need to work much at maintaining it :-)

Depends. My wife is 5 foot 2 and weighs 105. If she weighed 120, she would most certainly be not just overweight, but downright chubby. Even at 105, she has some belly fat, but that kinda goes with being (almost) 40. Not many women who have three kids under 10 can claim to weigh only 5 pounds more than they did when they were 21, but it's true about her.

I'm not complaining about the belly fat by any means - she still has an absolutely hot body overall and you get a little of that when you're 40; anyway, she has less of it than I do - but saying a 120 pound woman isn't overweight unless she's a midget is just plain wrong. A guy who is 5-2 and 120 is OK is not overweight. Or could be: when I was 16 I weighed 125 and am 5'9. I wasn't what you'd call skinny, I was really average. A guy 7 inches shorter than me who weighed almost as much would have been a bit on the stocky side.

I had to scroll down this far to find a Vger reference?!?!

These young whippersnappers!

My younger brother, one of our friends, and I ditched school to see first Star Trek movie on opening day. Amazingly, none of us got caught.

A lot of Chinese stuff still is just the lowest-quality garbage you'd ever not want to see, but yeah, some of it is pretty good. More than a little of the Taiwanese electronics industry has re-outsourced to the Chinese mainland and the quality is good. I expect China to move toward quality in more markets in the coming decade.