The most obvious example is Flash, which won't load through the Play store onto my devices running 4.2. That may be Google refusing to install it rather than a true incompatibility, but for the average user the effect is the same: an app that worked on their old device doesn't work on their newer one. The same thing is true of some games.

Android is completely backwards-compatible, so an application you wrote for Android 1.0 or 1.6 will still work on Android 3.x or Android 4.2 (without any changes).

That's odd, because I keep encountering apps that worked on older devices that claim they won't work on my Android 4.2 devices. Maybe that's a certification issue rather than a real compatibility problem, but it shows that upgrading isn't 100% perfect.

And all I got was corruption and expensive healthcare and education.

And police, fire departments, roads, parks, health inspectors, waste water treatment plants, food safety and labeling standards, etc. You know, the stuff that separates us from wonderful, civilized, government-free places like Somalia.

There's a reason it's called the Iron Range.

Yes. It's because there's lots of iron ore there. It has nothing to do with geological stability, though Minnesota is nicely stable. Of course that stability means that what passes for a mountain there is pretty laughable.

We have no earthquakes, hurricanes, and our buildings don't mysteriously vanish into holes in the ground.

Yes, but you do have floods, blizzards, and pestilential mosquitoes in the summer. Your winters are so miserable that people literally live in giant shopping malls so they don't have to go outside.

We have access to the largest reservoir of fresh water in the world as well.

No you don't. Both Lake Baikal and Lake Tanganyika are larger than Lake Superior by volume, which is the only sensible measure of how much fresh water a lake contains. Lake Baikal has a larger volume than all 5 great lakes combined.

Look, I'm sure that Minnesota is a nice place. It seemed nice when I visited. But it has its own set of problems, and it lacks things that other places have that people who live there really enjoy. I'm glad you like it there, but don't try to impose your ideas of what an ideal place looks like on everyone else.

The problem is that you won't get anyone to vote honestly for any options that involve not answering. All you'll get is "Answer honestly", "Lie about my opinion", "Complain about the lack of options", and "My vote is always for Cowboy Neal".

And while emotionally I don't get how programmers who work with precise grammar and syntax all the time in computer languages don't instinctively know how to do the same in their native English, it's a common enough pattern I've seen over the last few decades so I acknowledge it's there.

It's because humans are much more forgiving of grammatical and syntax errors than computers are. If you make a mistake when coding, it turns into a bug that you genuinely need to track down and eliminate, which can be a painful process. That pain creates a strong incentive to get it right the first time. Even the most obnoxious grammarian won't make the same level of stink about problems with natural language writing, so the incentive to get it right isn't as strong.

But these days it's hard to type into anything other than vi that doesn't draw a squiggly red line under words that Microsoft thinks are misspelled, and I don't get how people can leave those in by accident. But they do.

The key phrase is "that Microsoft thinks are misspelled". Microsoft's dictionary is weak outside of general and business English, so people who write using any other specialized terminology will find that a lot of their words aren't in the dictionary. Unless they get in the habit of adding new words to the dictionary when it doesn't recognize them, they get used to seeing lots of red squiggles. People who aren't that confident of their spelling in the first place are going to be reluctant to add new words to the dictionary because they are genuinely uncertain if they're actually misspelled, not in the dictionary, or maybe both. The result is that the red squiggles start to lose their power because people see so many of them.

hopefully there's at least a little thought going on during the coding process.

For almost any creative process, the limiting factor will usually be your ability to come up with something worth typing rather than the speed you can type it- at least over the long haul. I can type at something like 50 wpm, which is OK but nothing special, but it's still 120,000 words for a 40 hour week if I could keep it up. That's enough for a decent-sized novel every week or two, and somebody faster than me could do something the size of War and Peace in well under a month. Nobody writes novels that fast, though, because they can't come up with stuff that's worth writing nearly as fast as even a moderately competent typist can type them.

The place where typing speed is helpful is in bursts. My typical writing is limited by my ability to come up with ideas worth typing, but when a good idea comes along, it may be large enough to take a while to type out. When I'm writing prose, I may have an idea for a whole paragraph coalesce more or less instantly; when I'm coding I may have a function come together just as quickly. The faster I can type out my idea, the more likely I am to express it while the thought is still clear in my mind, which is when high speed typing is most useful.

I think you're leaving out some of the good stuff. The moon landings and the Large Hadron Collider make me feel a bit better about what humans are able to achieve. And it's not as if we're done yet, either.

Where are the "stone tablets and a chisel" and "I tattoo my printouts onto Cowboy Neal" options?

The point isn't to have things that need energy harvest it as they go, which is what XKCD's photosynthesizing cows are doing. Instead, it's to devote large areas to collecting sunlight, use the energy to synthesize energetic chemicals, and then use those energy-dense chemicals as a source of energy in other places.

This is essentially what people are talking about with biofuels. It's just that with biofuels we're depending on plants to do the energy storage for us rather than directly storing it ourselves. Biofuels have the advantage that growing plants is cheap- the plants build themselves- and the disadvantage that photosynthesis is inefficient and a lot of the energy the plants collect goes into maintenance rather than energy storage. Using solar energy to generate fuels directly may be more efficient but has much higher capital costs.

My feelings were pretty much the same. I looked at cell phones as being one more way of work tying me down. Then I was given an emergency pager for work. This was during the height of the California power crisis, and my employer was on one of the power plans that allowed Edison to turn our power off with 30 minutes notice. I suddenly had to be within a few minutes of a phone, 24 hours a day, so I could call and let people know if the power was going down while I wasn't there. The pager turned out to be the leash I had been trying to avoid, and the cell phone was the thing that got me off the leash.

Chinatown is so 19th Century. If you want real Chinese New Year celebrations, move to an area that has enough Chinese people to take over whole cities instead of being ghettoized into a Chinatown. Having a serious range of authentic Chinese regional restaurants is a major bonus, too.

Regarding the rating and heat I think it make total sense to at least be able to put a similar power rated light-bulb in the same fixture considering the higher efficiency. I'm not 100% sure it work like that but I can't understand why it shouldn't. Using LEDs those cooling fins get hot but then again a regular lightbulb get very hot to.

The big difference is that LEDs (and CFLs) will fail at much lower temperatures than incandescents. The sensitive part of the incandescent bulb is the filament, and it's the part that gets really hot, so the fixture will usually fail before the bulb does. LEDs and CFLs contain electronics that can fail at relatively low temperatures, so you have to be a lot more careful about where you mount them. If LEDs weren't temperature sensitive, they wouldn't need the big cooling fins.

Or as I would put it, if RMS is the backbone of the free software world, it is more important that he be stiff than that he be flexible.

That's a neat quote, but the analogy is imperfect. You don't want a limp noodle for a backbone, but you don't want a rigid rod, either. A real backbone has to have some flexibility or you won't be able to turn your head, bend down to tie your shoes, or do lots of other vital daily activities. That's why doctors don't like to perform spinal fusion surgery until they've exhausted less drastic approaches.

To continue the analogy, maybe RMS is too far on the inflexible side to be a good backbone. He obviously has some flexibility- he recommends licenses other than the GPL in some cases and is even willing to accept proprietary software for specific, limited purposes- but he may be too rigidly ideological to be the main leader of the movement he founded. He seems to be unwilling or unable to look around and see some of the new stuff that's out there. Someone like Linus Torvalds may be a better leader. He obviously has a strong commitment to Free Software, but he has been flexible enough to try more things (e.g. working with Bitkeeper), and I think it's made him more effective.