Why on earth did we spend all this money on beautiful 1920x1080 screens, AND spend so much time developing so called "responsive design" stylesheets and javascript, that we are still suck with extremely thin websites?

How on earth is this even remotely an improvement?

Also, Soylent Grey tastes lousy, so they don't even have that going for them.

I got a Tokina 1000mm (500 and a doubler) for $17.

That is certainly not a "fantastic lens" :)

What I don't understand is this bogus association between the DSLR and not sharing. I shoot 99% DSLR, and I share like mad -- almost everything I shoot gets posted, unless I outright foul up the shot, which isn't typical. I have cameras in my iPad, my phone, I even have a small video camera I carry, but almost everything comes from the DSLR. First, the images are MUCH better, even when crushed down to "sharing size", and second, the lens selection gives me many times the flexibility as compared to the various P&S hardware.

So it's fine if you shoot the way you do, but I don't see that it points up anything inherent in DSLRs that represents a shortcoming.

My aspergery nature prevented me from saying "I'm sorry for your loss" (mostly because I don't actually mean that) so I'll say "I'm sorry for the difficulty you and yours had to go through" (because I do actually mean that.)

Fortunately, as humanity at large goes, this is rare and certainly not common enough to be effective in "volume purchases." I know it seems insensitive, and it is, but at some point, we have to face and accept our mortality and this includes making practical choices under terminal conditions. I have only faced this type of thing once with my mother and I can say that I believe the "making them as comfortable as possible" is the best approach. My mother disagreed and went through all sorts of hell before she finally died. My reaction to the news was silence but internally I said to myself "...finally." In the end, she was praying for death. ...well anyway...

Sometimes not even then: ask the Spanish about the exciting inflationary action that trying to build an economy on the galleon-loads of bullion smash-and-grabbed from South America led to... They scored a massive pile of gold for the cost of a few shiploads of hardened psychos; but you can only buy so much actually-useful stuff for gold before you distort the precious metals market.

You're not healthy. Not by my definition. Healthy means "needs no medicine." You need it... and it is apparently expensive.

The HSA you speak of is artificially set that way to prevent it from being a viable option for many people and to (unfairly) reduce the competition it would provide to the medical industrial complex.

I realize you are being sarcastic, but you are quite correct. What's more, people can actually do that if they exercised more self-discipline and actually understood what they are doing to themselves at every turn.

And as another commenter pointed out, a MSA + high deductible insurance account is a terrific balance and you get to accumulate interest on saving accounts. Try accumulating anything for an insurance account.

You just proved that a particular method of handing a problem is too expensive to be practical.

And the question that never comes up often enough is why these medicines and treatments are so expensive? Is it because the current structure of the medical industrial complex is such that people are always spending "OPM" (other people's money) and so they don't care about the actual cost and just pay expensive monthly subscriptions to "modern healthcare" magazine?

I admit there have been advances in medical science. But I don't think the advances justify the costs. I think the costs were set increasingly higher and the profits of certain industry participants are ridiculously high. And while we can talk "capitalism" all day long, I just have to remind people that a great deal of the R&D comes from public support and funding in various forms. Also, the standard "supply and demand" model always breaks down when demand is unlimited and this is always true of medicine where it's not so much that demand is unlimited for everyone, but for a few. Supply and demand economics is inhumane where life and living are concerned though it's all good when it comes to things which aren't necessary like iphones and such.

When was the last time that invading somebody for their cash was actually cost effective? Early Roman Empire? Modern war is damned expensive; plus it tends to play scorched earth with various flavors of stored value (human and physical capital destroyed, fiat money's health contingent largely on who wins(and there's always the alternative of just printing what the opposition has squirreled away into worthlessness rather than trying to grab it), markets for assorted intangible assets disrupted, you are basically back to stealing big chests of gold coins, if you can find any). Plus, unlike the good old days of barbaric plunder heaps, modern weapons are so costly that you had better plunder quite efficiently indeed.

Most people are healthy and only need to learn to stay healthy. Most are better off with a medical savings account than with medical insurance. Why give money away for someone else to make billions off of it while you get little more than weak promises that in the event something bad happens, you might get minimal care?

We live in such a debt financing society we've all completely forgotten how to save money for bad days. Does a credit card really substitute for a savings?

I'm honestly a bit surprised that Nielsen is still alive. They are the landline-polling of TV audience metrics. On the pure TV/content industry hell side, you've got things like Tivos and cable boxes, which tend not to leave HQ guessing about who is watching what(Remember Tivo's casual little announcement that 'nipplegate' was the most rewound event in history? What've you got, Nielsen?) On the internet side, you've got your assorted 'social' gatekeepers and search jockeys, who pretty much see every word you type a few hundred milliseconds after you do, and are thus well placed to see who's talking about what.

Where does the exhaustive sample of 'Nielson households' fit in here?

Well, I suspect that I'm talking to a particularly belligerent wall here; but somebody else might read it: 'social' networks are explicitly and fundamentally, designed to produce profiles based both on what you provide and what people you have real-world connections with provide (eg. people who don't even have facebook accounts; but are still tagged and machine-visioned in the image libraries of people who do). Your Slashdot-type profile is probably more vulnerable to a clever analyst than casual inspection would suggest; but the value of information provided by 3rd parties on the system about you is overwhelmingly lower, leaving the question of how 'knowable' you are much more in your hands.

Also, of course, 'real name' policies are a fairly obvious attempt to both extirpate dupes and ACs (presumably because the quality of discussion is already low enough, and because uniques with attached data are worth more as eyeballs); but also quash pseudonyms in the process. Again, many pseudonyms are vulnerable to clever or sustained attack; but in casual use they allow the virtues of consistent 'characters' to emerge (Yeah, that guy, he impersonates a fungus on the internet. Fucked if I know...); but leaves it up to you whether to connect that to other parts of your life or not. Some people use pseudonyms; some use pseudonyms by preference but make little or no effort to hide who they are, some post under their real names, up to you.

It probably didn't help that (at fundamental cost to battery life, and significant but theoretically solvable cost in fancy management) phones got powerful enough to just do email. No second set of not-exactly-mailservers in the loop (either for reliability or security concerns), on the corporate side you now need to sell a BES(and as the 'better than your existing mailserver alone' option rather than the 'well, do you want mobile email or not?' option), on the consumer side you need to sell a telco on giving you a cut of the action in exchange for a modest reduction in data transfer, and the handset customer on an increasingly uncompetitive device.

Even if it were perfect, RIM's fancy proprietary network was not exactly getting more viable with age. Any deviations from perfection were just nails in the coffin.

Just you wait: if Qualcomm buys them out we can have BREWberry, the world's most hostile mobile development environment!