As a huge fan of Sirius I fought with the ever present problem of never being able to listen without a Sirius receiver. When they came out with the Sirius Internet streaming I was ecstatic! I joyfully fired up my Nokia N95 and tried to go to Sirius.com. It does not work. A service I payed $15.00 a month for would not let me listen to the product. So I went through all the trouble of setting up Orb and uSirius and running a transcoding station at my home PC - just to listen on my mobile. But it just wasn't practical. I turned off my Sirius service. Everywhere. The minute those morons can get their act together and stream in a platform independent way I'll be back.

Technically, isn't the role of a monk partly giving the student a hard time? I studied under a Zen master and he generally spent most of the time giving me shit, which translated into challenging my preconceptions.

I think mainly he did it for his own personal gratification, actually. But to this day I crack a little bit of a smile at the notion of him pretending to not understand sarcasm, just to perplex me.

At the moment I remember him fondly, at the time I wanted to kill him.

Look at actual available jobs. Not silly popularity contests. Do you honestly believe Delphi is more common than Javascript??

I'm a long-time perl fan and I recently began learning Ruby since it seems to have more jobs available (for RoR websites.) It's not terribly impressive, although I think code can be written more compactly than even Perl. It is many times slower than Perl for almost anything.

The real language that has stolen my keyboard is PHP5. Even though it seems to unite all the negative features of Perl, embperl, Python, Java and C++, I'm still intrigued. It seems to be a language which cannot be written cleanly. It can never look beautiful to any eye but that of a PHP programmer. And yet, I love you PHP5, you dirty dirty girl.

Anyway, it seems like web people are moving from Perl5 to PHP and sysadmins are moving to Python or Ruby. Although most are remaining versed in Perl, a language which has had more lines written in it than Python, Smalltalk, Eiffel and Ruby combined.

No. "Perl or Python?" is exactly like a battle between Smalltalk or MC680x0 machine code. You can do many things in assembler, but it's technically impossible for anything to be written in machine code, it's just to much like line noise. And as we all know, machine code is often written in assembler. Which is indented using tabs, which leaves python out as well. It's just so unsolvable.

Once upon a time I worked as a salesman at Sears. Anyway, I had a guy storm out of the store because I refused to discount a television if he didn't take the remote. This was in the late 90's by the way, not the late 70s.

I agree with your analysis of the causes and possible solutions during the Great Depression. Unfortunately, I think drinking well known as the best solution for a hangover.

I'm from Missouri (and happen to speak the St. Louis variation of the Bostonian dialect) and we don't say farty far, you insensitive clod! It sounds more like "forty far". Which you drive down to get your warsher, from tha super Wal-Marts. Of course, you can listen to the dialect yourself.

Unethical is knowingly sentencing someone to die. There is not difference between sleeping with someone if you think you have AIDS and pulling out a revolver with a single bullet in it, spinning the chamber and then firing at someone.

It is true that some people are innocent who have AIDS. However, these are the victims. It is a horrible chain reaction which may sentence several innocent people to death because of the irresponsible actions of a single individual.

Why would you fear an invisible chip when you are innocent? If you do not intend to pass on this terrible disease which will take your life then why worry? This isn't a small matter of convenience. This is life and death. It is true that some people may find out that an innocent person has AIDS and this may hurt their ability to connect with their family. But this is not likely, and it's completely understandable to someone who has AIDS. What is the cost that others will not die in the way that you have?

Any other view would would be akin to a protecting a serial killer because you used to room with the guy and you're afraid of the social stigma.

I don't have an iPhone (I've got an N95) but I have noticed that I play more games on my mobile then on my XBox or PC. Mainly because it's always available and it's easier to get addicted to a game. Also, the mobile graphics have gotten good enough (at least on a small screen) that there's not really any reason to bother. With 8Gb of storage you can have some fairly immersive games.

Ahem, I'm sorry I'm not a physicist; his name is Liftshitz? No way! Wasn't he criticized by the fabulously successful paper "F = ma", written by his arch enemy Dropshitz?

Um, no it's not, your notebook aside. I've got a reasonably new laptop and OO.o is too slow to be usable when compared with MS Office. I use MS Office 2007 and it's markedly faster. The reason I purchased it was I came across an application that a customer used which created malformed Excel files that Gnumeric and OO.o could not read (they lack a proper magic number at the beginning.) Otherwise I'd stick with Abiword and Gnumeric.

There is a reason why MS has such a large user base with Office. It's hard for some people to acknowledge but Office is a fantastically well thought out product that has undergone the most extensive real-world testing of any Office suite in the world. OO.o is nice if you don't have the cash, if you want to get work done then buy Office.

At least as things stand now, anyway.