Yeah... but if not for looking at my GPS, plus listening to it's voice prompts, plus hitting the traffic map button, plus texting from my iPhone, and using the camera to snap a picture of the traffic to send to my buddy to explain why I'm late and using my bluetooth speakerphone, and drinking my Starbucks and eating that Big Mac... what else am I going to do while in the car?

When I read that, it jumped out as the ultimate symbol of what is wrong in that part of the world.

In most countries, she gets the house, some money, maybe a car, and the kids.

In Somalia, she gets an RPG round.

WTF?

Some insurance companies will not insure ships that have armed personnel aboard. They believe that it gives an incentive to fight, which may increase the damage to the vessel and result in additional (insured) lives being lost, increasing the payouts required if the ship escapes the pirates.

Until it starts leaking. Then you have cold, and mold.

Anyway - addressing the more important part of your post: I think there will always be manned fighter and attack craft, for the same reasons that there will always be grunts on the ground. The machines and the technology are cool, but they can't occupy a territory, they can't impose their will on the occupants of a territory, and in fact, they lack any will to be imposed.

That doesn't seem something terribly important in the air. You'll always need grunts on the ground, sure, but I can easily see a future where the only combat aircraft are unmanned drones - mostly fighting other unmanned drones, and supporting the grunts on the ground.

Hmm... my CS curriculum must be pretty weird, then. In neither high school nor university have I taken any class that even suggested Visual Studio. I can and have used it on some of my assignments, but I've also used kate, gvim, netbeans, eclipse (OK, this one was for work; I prefer NB for my Java coding), and even Monodevelop (which is sadly inferior to VS, but gets the job done for C# and can even use VS project files). I think the only major code editor I've never used is Xcode, although I'm not personally a fan of emacs.

As for using a makefile... makefiles are easy; the basic knowledge required is the material of a single 50-minute lesson at worst. Learning the intricacies of GNU make vs. bmake vs. cmake vs. nmake is an irritating, but not difficult, exercise in use of a search engine. On the other hand, I've not found much where a makefile is actually the best possible way to do something. Sometimes it's the best solution easily available, but I'd really rather let my development tools take care fo that for me, so I can focus on writing and testing code.

As for high-cost, you do realize the "Express" editions of Visual Studio (which are basically the same as the normal editions, except each one provides support for only one language) are free of charge, don't you?

Joss Whedon is a derivative hack who can't help be defile every thing he touches with some sort of adolescent fantasy involving shitty, super-powered, little girls. Then his shows get canceled and the fucker throws a tantrum a 7 year old would envy, killing off all the likable characters and pile driving what little story there was face first into the fucking ground.

It would be termed racist. However when you look at the situation isn't it likely that black men are better-built physically due to forced selective breeding by slave "owners" back in the day? Slave "owners" would want to maximize their "investment" in slaves, so why not force "ideal" black men and women to maximize strength and child-bearing features? While the reason for it is quite disgusting (treating people as mere cattle) the results are pretty remarkable, if horrifying (horrifying in the sense that people could be "owned" and forced to mate). This would be micro-evolution at work. Is this actually what occurred? I'm not familiar enough with the history of slavery to know the answer, but I do know of african-Americans in the Boston area (who told one of my friends of this theory) who believe this is the case.

Just food for thought. And believe me, I do not intend to offend anyone with this post.

As far as what is fair: it's not fair that I can't do strenuous exercise for long periods before my muscles cramp up (salt wasting). Should I demand to be allowed to compete since I am a very fast runner, and be given a handicap or other concession for my lack of endurance? Of course not. Athletic competitions have always centered around two things: physical fitness (usually by conforming to "ideal" physical structure) and skill. When it comes to running there is some skill involved but it's more about what one's physique is technically capable of.

If that selective breeding theory holds any water, is it any wonder that black people outperform white people on a consistent basis? Would it be fair to segregate competitions by races? To me that would not seem fair. If white people really see a disparity and are angry about it, nothing is stopping them from marrying based solely on athletic ability and hope that those desirable characteristics follow in the next generation. However, I do not think eugenics can be considered to be justifiable under any moral standard.