After you get through the socket, you need to avoid the poison-filled firewall.

The days of Windows XP are over, man. Windows 7 has functional drivers for damn near everything.

As soon as I started using FF4 at the last beta (12), I started using all of those features. I keep GMail and Google Calendar in app-tabs, I love sync because I have Firefox instances in many VMs and on many machines, and the Panorama tool (which I thought would be gimmicky before I actually tried it) turns out to be very useful. I am happy with such "Feature Bloat" - what the hell to I have 4 gigs of RAM for anyways?

Or lets try not continuing business as usual.

Let the gas prices rise. Fine by me. Currently $1.30/liter in Vancouver, BC - bring on $2.00/liter, I drive a small car and fuck you if you drive a big one. Suck it up, that's the cost of your choice of vehicle. Yes, the cost of everything will go up, but you'll be amazed how fast we suddenly find solutions to problems we've been "trying" to solve for last 30 years.

Just because oil is purchased on futures contracts doesn't mean that current gas prices can't be affected by current events. If you're an oil company, you would rightly predict that, based on current events, future oil prices will be higher and supply will be lower. Thus, you need to make your current stockpile of gasoline last longer by raising its price, because the output from your refineries is going to slow down soon. Of course, I believe there is definitely an element of opportunistic price gouging too, but that's not the whole story.

Why? Simple - a single device for all purposes. I can't wait until this technology has matured, and is common place.

Most of the day, you'd be in Android using your smartphone for the things it's good at. If you need to get work done, you plug your phone into a screen/keyboard/mouse/speaker station via HDMI or something, and you're ready for serious work.

What, you don't think Apple will make a second iPad, which will be better than the first iPad, and cost roughly the same?

But then, who uses a smartphone that can receive e-mail as a bomb detonator? I'd use a $15 Nokia, the one with the black and white 15x20 display.

The problem is simply that HTML isn't good enough yet.

Two apps that I use in lieu of their mobile website equivalents are "Reddit is fun" and "XDA developers" on Android. The user experience is simply dramatically better than the web versions can create. Simply the ability to long-click/right-click on items to bring up a context menu, the ability to bring up a global context menu via the menu keys, the ability to search the current content via the search key, and the ability to more quickly and easily collapse comment threads or scroll quickly without having to wait for more AJAX requests and HTML rendering is completely worth it. Even though Android's browser is based on Chrome, it's still much slower than a native app.

"I'm pretty sure 500MB falls below the "basically usable for most people" line."

Actually it doesn't. Most people use less than 250 MB per month. Even I, as a "power user" (aka geek) use less than 500 MB per month. Of course, I don't regularly stream video or radio; people that do will obviously exceed the cap. Most people use their phone for e-mail, IM, and navigation.

There should be a "Delete Account" mod option, which kicks in if every moderator selects it. It would be great for tired old jokes that just won't die!.

I don't think fearing death and not wanting to die are the same thing. I certainly don't want to die either, but if I were to be diagnosed with a terminal disease, I don't think I'd be afraid of the actual event. I'm reasonably certain it will involve going into a sleeplike state, some vivid dreams, and then nothing. No biggie.

The FPGA's I've worked with lose their programming when the power goes out, and are reflashed by software on every boot.

Personally, I don't care whether the writers have the whole series planned out or are improvising, so long as the result is good. Of course, shows are usually better when they are planned out, but BSG worked out very well, in my opinion.

It's not a browser plug-in. It's HTML/Javascript code that you place in your page where you want the video to appear. It will try to use HTML5 first, and then use Flash if it fails.