I don't move a 23" monitor everywhere I go. Portablity means something. It's why I have a 13" MBP instead of a 17" MBP. If a phone won't easily slip into the jacket pocket of my sport coat or suit, I don't care what it does. I am not watching hollywood blockbusters on my phone.. I want my phone to be easily portable. To me the Galaxy S4 is a larger phone than I want to hold. But my clients are more likely to call than email or text me.

The future wife, she carries her phone in her purse mainly. And she uses it far more for social media and texts than phone calls. She can get away with having a larger phone.

I built an online shopping cart once that was originally 42k of javascript. Handled all the tracking of items, tax, and shipping in a variety of ways and even developed a multi-vendor capable version that was still under 55k. It powered an online ordering system for restaurants and coffee shops and it worked amazingly fast. All the server had to do was render pages from the products database in HTML. There weren't any writes to the database until the user clicked "order". It ran amazingly fast. Of course we still cared about those things as "broadband" was a 256k DSL line back then.

My dad was in charge of Payroll at Ft. Hood during the late 1960's while he was drafted. (he was a private with BA in Accounting and ran the department because the LT screwed up the Col's pay one too many times). They figured pay vouchers a lot by hand, but processed even back then via a Mainframe, usually at night. Then they would dispense the pay in cash those days. It was a nightmare even back then, often times requiring a lot of manual calculations.

Most the "Apps" I'm being hired to write are basically CRUD form apps that are designed to read info from tables in a database. Usually to take forms already in use by desktops written in Java or .Net or in some cases god only knows what and adapt them for use on mobile devices.

I've frankly found jQueryMobile + HTML5 + Phonegap/Cordova makes this task farily easy to undertake client side. Actuallly in most cases the cost is still developing and deploying the API side in your choice of server side scripting language. And often that's based upon a perl script that I wrote circa 2000 to take form input, validate, and then go fetch data from a database and return in XML, YAML, or JSON these days. Other projects, the server side is in PHP or C# or Java. Just depends on what the client already has.

Now I can see trying to buld other types of apps using HTML5/JS is asking for disaster.

Sorry, I'm an old perl guy who thinks use the right tool for the job and there is still more than one way to do it.

He'll if I knew what each of the major hospitals would charge for upcoming carpel tunnel surgery I could make a fair assement.

Compare that to some dental work, My dental insurance will cover 80% of the two crowns I need. Knowing that I could shop around and get estimates from two dentists. The one I chose for this work was almost 30% less.

My girlfriend got LASIK done a few years ago. It's now half what she paid with better lasers.

I'm in my early 30's and relatively healthy. Frankly I could get by with major medical and then even pay out of pocket for the carpel tunnel surgery if I could honestly shop around or even my yearly check up and occasional sinus infection if I could get a fair cash price.

But the fact hospitals will charge different amounts to different insurance companies hides what this stuff really costs

We rot13 out keys, nothing could be safer I tell you!

When we passed concealed carry here in Missouri, the Post Dispatch cried that the streets would run red with blood from conceal carry holders shooting everyone for every little offense.

A year or two later they ran a piece basically saying the paper's editors were wrong. Basically nothing changed. Crime rates didn't decrease overall nor were the streets running red with blood.

I keep an eye on the stories locally. I've read a few cases of where someone with a CCW was being robbed, pull the gun, and the robber ran away as they reported to the police. One case that sticks out in my mind was a group of 70 year olds who were mugged by an armed robber. They gave the robber their cash and he went on his way, but then turned and pointed the gun in their direction. That's when one of the men pulled out his revolver and shots went down range. Didn't hit the mugger, but the mugger didn't stick around either.

This is why I carry a $100 bill in my wallet. Most muggers are looking for a quick buck for a fix and will happily take the $100 and run.

But I also have a Walther PPS right above the wallet in case they don't.

Oh I can think of a way of stopping them: libel lawsuits.

And why can't snowmen be both/and instead of either/or? I know dualistic is lens most of the West uses, thanks Descartes, but this is a both/and. Snowden can very much be the hero for letting the public know about the various domestic and likely unconstitutional spy programs and a traitor for revealing certain details of foreign intelligence operations and at the same time.

Although at this point I'm pretty sure most people already knew or at least suspected that the government were doing such surveillance, we just didn't know the name of the program.

Furthermore I've yet to see anything really that damning that snowden released. We ease drop on the eu. File that udder shit they already knew. You really don't think the French try and acquire info on what kinds of deals Boeing is trying to make and give that info to Airbus?

It's amazing to watch just how quickly the story shifted from being the spy program to Snowden. It's been two weeks. Most people now are wondering, "oh yeah, what was that hubbaloo about spying or IRS targeting political group..."

I have a small business consulting/contracting and now upto 3 emplyees. I've been paying my own insurance out of pocket the past 6 years and has run me about $75 to now $87 a month for a decent plan that meets my needs well. (Nothing special, $2500 deductable, $35 doctor vists, prescription drug coverage) But again in the past 6 years I've been to my Doctor 7 times. 6 for annual check ups, free under my coverage, and once for a sinus infecction. I was young in my late 20's and now early 30's and single. I also pay for dental coverage.

The way my Dental works is pretty simple: they pay for twice a year cleanings, once a year x-rays, and then 80% of any non cosmetic proceedures. I don't have the best teeth in the world, and the solution is going to be a few crowns before things get worse. I was able to shop around and actually get prices from different dentists. I wish my health insurance could work much the same way. There would need to be emergancy coverage that is good anywhere: i.e. heart attack, etc.. But for a lot of other proceedures hospitals should have a 1 price policy, not this negioated rate mess where say a bypass is $18,000 for company A, $26000 for company B, and $50,000 if you come off the street. Hospitals should set the price: say $25,000 and then your insurance tell you if they cover 100%, 50%, 80% or whatever. And the prices should be upfront and on their websites in a PDF. An example for me personally is the fact that Carpel Tunnel surgery is in my future. Its not critical but I woud shop at the various hospitals around town to see where I felt I could get the best care for the $.

This issue was addressed a couple thousand years ago by a man name Plato. The work is called The Republic. You might want to consider reading it because it addresses this exact problem with direct democracy: it ends with the tyranny of the majority where minority opinions don't matter.

That's why we're a Constitutional Republic with checks and balances. At least on paper. That was the original intent of the Founders. What we are today is more or less an oligarchy. Politics here are controlled by a couple families, one Republican, one Democrat. One seems to hold one half of the state and federal offices, the other one holds the rest and occasionally job titles change as they reach term limits or get elected to a federal post.

I remember the failure rates for burning CD's early on was probably around 40%. Now if I burn a CD or DVD I don't think I've had a failure in a couple years now.

My building has a 5Gbs fibre connection, I spoke with the teleco service guy when they were out replacing the equipment a couple months ago. The limiting factor now is the fact the building was wired about 12 years ago with Cat 5. Overall I can't complain too much other than when it's bad weather out on the weekend and everyone seems to be home streaming Netflix. Usually it's throttling at the server I'm connected to that is my bottleneck.

More over I thought the largest problem today is the fact that our bodies are outliving our minds as more people develop diseases like dementia and Alzheimer's.

Why? I'm really debating this coming generation of consoles. I'm partial to the PS4 because it's BSD based and I'm still a BSD geek at heart and at the moment the only title I'd miss are the future Halo installments and frankly Halo 4 just didn't seem like "Halo" to me. I don't know why, it's just sat collecting dust most of these past 6 months.

But I wouldn't put it past Sony to launch a patch this time next year that included some kind of "DRM". Hell if they removed OtherOS I don't put it past them to have an "Add DRM" patch.

I've tried BF3 on the PC when it was $5 the other day to compare it to the console versions, which I know multiplayer on console was seriously gimped. And I discovered why I stopped playing WSAD pc games: they hurt my wrist after a couple hours. I guess I'll have to look into an Xbox style controller for the PC if I elect to go that route.

I don't play many games. Last 2 years the regulars have been BF3 and then Battlestar Galactica Online or Star Trek Online. And both of those have seen seriously diminished playing times because of my wrist as well as the boredom of the grinds.

The game I'm looking forward too is Star Citizen presuming it's going to be in the cockpit space combat simulation that I can play with a joystick.