Oh no, and as a vim user, I can't have anything like emacs. Thank you for pointing me to the error of my ways, I'll resume to prejudice against emacs and go back to basic vim. Thank you.

I use vim because I like it, not to look cool and l33t and fight against emacs users. ;) There's nothing wrong with making yourself more productive, and sticking to the tools you enjoy while doing it.

Mortal sin? First, get over your ridiculous predisposition against extending vim. Vim is built to be extended, and extending it can make it much more useful as a tool and not just an editor. If you're good enough in Vim to prefer it as a text editor, then make it comfortable as an environment. There are some amazing extensions for vim, that for me at least, make me much more productive than using an "IDE". Fuzzy file finder, exuberant ctags with taglist, minibufexplorer...

For me, complete silence is the best way to program. At work, that's impossible and the people I work around practically yell pointless chatter all day, so music becomes the best second choice.

I have noticed that music actually hinders my ability to program slightly. I am not as "in the zone" with music playing, but it is MUCH easier to concentrate with a song you can tune out than with people laughing and talking about their weekends (or even work related talk).

People that don't require that level of concentration at work don't (and can't) understand...scheduling meetings, talking on the phone, writing emails, and multitasking is much easier to do without concentration compared to wrapping your head around hundreds of lines or thousands of code and how they all interact. I think programming without concentration would be nearly impossible for me, and more importantly would be dangerous...music avoids that. :)

I have never heard of these points, and in my mind have never made a connection between a black person and a monkey any more than I have made between a white person and a monkey. Race has nothing to do with my linking of humans and monkeys. What exactly is perverse about not having ever been exposed to the types of people that demean others and their racist comments and actions?

Your assumptions are misguided and overreaching. To claim not to be aware may mean that the person, like me, is truly unaware. I was interested (though not shocked because people outburst about race far too often) when I read the story that there was any link between race and the picture, especially since it is not the first monkey/human image I've seen. Thank you for enlightening me and for insulting me based on my ignorance of what stupid people do. And now that I know...I still don't really care. I would say that the answer to b depends more on the author's intent than on socially understood racial prejudices in other countries and possibly outside of the author's sphere of influence. It is not every human's responsibility to understand every cultural oddity in every country of the world. Although I just wouldn't have made the image considering it was a waste of time and was clearly meant to at least be slanderous specifically to Michelle Obama, if not a racially charged insult.

Because bon-bons are high in sugar which leads to tooth decay and possibly an increased risk of heart disease as well as other problems such as diabetes.

I bought the PS3 version of the game since I'm in a familiar place with my PC being outdated. Overall, I feel like the game runs differently than experiences on the PC. Instead of a cursor they implemented a "reticle" that lets you target enemies and perform actions on them from the character's point of view. You can control each team member and do the same. The solution originally seemed like an elegant solution to me since pulling up the reticle paused the game, lets you assign actions, etc. But it quickly becomes clear that it's not a good solution to micromanaging. I find it nearly impossible through the course of a battle to assign actions to my primary character, target the same enemy in first person on another character, assign actions using the gamepad, etc. Where it became even more useless was when I started to get more spells. The controls allow for 6 quick slots per character. Everything else is controlled through menus in the reticle, which means that to cast a spell beyond your 6 quick ones, you need to hold (or press, it's an option) L2, move your cursor to spells, press X, find the spell, if it's on more than the first page (there are about 15-20 per page), move your cursor to the next page, press X, find the spell, press X...then hope that you remembered to target the right enemy. Rinse, repeat, for each character, depending on your micro-controlling wants. Most of the time the quick slots are fine, but you can only use the quick slots in live action with the game unpaused. All in all, the game is beautiful on ps3 and is very fun, and I suppose could be micromanaged with enough patience. However, I find it more fun just to play my main character, let the other characters do what they want and assign tactics to them unless they're about to die (which is pretty often since I often don't see that my rogue decided to run up to the main boss and steal aggro). What this also means is that I probably can't play on anything harder than Normal because it would take far too much micromanaging and I don't have enough patience. None of that would have kept me from buying the game, but it definitely seems like a different experience than I would have on PC.

Yes, since the national government has a long history of supporting individual privacy and keeping our best interests at mind over that of corporate interests.

Bad product...pure and simple. It has been years since I have bought a commercial CD. I do buy individual or small studio published cd's. Their assumption? Oh, I must download it (since it is impossible that anyone would not listen to their music). In fact, I do not download music or copy music at all. Now their assumption is that the reason is because I play games instead of buying CDs and music. No, I buy products of quality with my money, and do not waste it on crap music produced by the studios associated with the RIAA. There are a lot of game studios that put millions of dollars into amazing games with great stories.

I'm tired of being insulted by this association by their assumptions that I listen to their crappy (and popular, but not all things popular are good) music at all cost...frankly, I don't care if they do well or not, though I would gladly support any movement to get them out of the news (by their going out of business, not by my wasting money.) With that said, I have pretty much already boycotted the RIAA because of these antics.

Hold down the orange button, and it will change your cursor...you can now scroll by moving your finger on the screen while the orange button is down. It's a lot easier than trying to click in the right place, and is probably easier imho than pressing a left button over and over. Also, the shift button does the same thing but selects the text...

Not entirely true, the important thing is to let it go completely dead in the first two days after a complete charge (and only once...I did let it charge completely, just not overnight which is ideal). Then after that, you need to keep it charging as much as possible, perhaps 90% time or more for the first two weeks. In my experience, that adds about 25% to the life of a battery. And at least if I screwed it up, I can just buy another battery. :)

I was incorrect in giving AIM as an example to save battery...you CAN turn off AIM (it is a hidden green button in plain site on the messaging app) and was very likely a major cause in my battery draining so quickly

I agree entirely...I feel like the platform is there or almost there, but I really do want the extra functionality of useful apps. If they don't get the dev kit out soon I feel that people will lose interest and it will be a big bust. :-/ But I'll give them the benefit of the doubt...it is still day one.

I too bought the palm pre today...just as a note, I came from a motorolla q9h, not an iphone. Overall, I love the phone. I wish palm would release the sdk already so more apps would come out and so I could start customizing/contributing, but the apps that were there generally feel solid. There's about as much delay as one would expect on a smartphone, but the phone overall feels very responsive (which was my very first impression.) The webos's shortcuts are very intuitive, and between quick launch, synergy, etc, I can probably match my productivity on the Q9H that has windows mobile.

I don't care about syncing anything other than mp3's and emails over imap so I can't answer syncing questions. Ubuntu 9.04 detected it as a usb device just fine.

I think that tales of the keyboard being way too small are overrated, but it definitely will take getting used to...I think you will pretty much know instantly if you will be able to adjust to it or not.

Really the only thing that may make me regret buying it may end up being the battery life...but it's hard to tell considering I didn't really give it a decent first charge (I charged it for 4 hours then took it out exploring for 6 and it was dead by the time I got home with about an hour's worth of talk, constant browsing, and a little pandora streaming.) Even with that said, I think there will need to be a few more battery saving options...like maybe not being logged into AIM/etc. (you can just not enter aim information...but I don't want to disable it completely)

Another thing I wasn't expecting was a free (cheap?) sleeve that came with the phone. :) I feel much safer with it in my pocket in a nice sleeve.

The browser is nice...it can be hard to zoom in and click on certain links, maybe like the iphone? But it is nice having a fully functional browser with ajax. The only problem I had was with iGoogle not loading properly (I think due to the calendar widget), and I just had to use the mobile version.

So far though, I've loved the palm pre. I hope it returns the love.

So wait...I realize your last comment was sarcastic. At least I know Bush is disliked... If I take a bitwise right shift of Linux, I'll end up with Windows? Holy crap...makes me want to try a left bit shift...