And you trust the advertisers?

I believe the term is "stepping up to the crease".

There was some speculation that it stood for NeXT / Sun (superseding the old NX prefix used before the OPENSTEP days).

I'm the other way round. I found ObjC a joy to learn, picked it up pretty quickly. C++ took several abortive attempts and had me pulling my hair out for a long time. Now that I'm relatively comfortable with both, I still find ObjC to be my path of least resistance (certainly when writing gui apps).

I'm not sure why that is exactly. I think the use of templates in C++ made it difficult for me to pick up. I know you can write C++ code without using templates, but a lot of libraries seem to make heavy use of them. The types of error messages produced by gcc when templates are involved tend to make finding out where you've gone wrong rather difficult at times.

I know though that I have a lot to learn in C++. Specifically, I have yet to write my own generic class or function. I'm sure I will at some point, but so far there hasn't been much call for them in the problem domain I tend to use C++ for.

Trouble is, that's a lot of pictures you're going to have to send to embed a useful payload. Maybe you could set up something like a 1080p webcam looking out of your window so you have a constant stream of plausible signal in which to hide your "noise."

I pre-empted this by turning off the ability of others to tag me in photos etc.

So where do I send my cheque?

I blame the marketing chimps. They naively assumed that GPRS and EDGE would be temporary stopgaps until "3G" swept the board. They didn't count on having to still be selling these services 10+ years down the line.