How about a "They're all awful" option?

...And they like to say the mother of the last C-130 pilot hasn't been born yet...

Thanks, but I think I'll just eat more beans...

"...as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened."

That new AT&T logo just keeps getting better and better...

I know a lot of comments here are going to be about their horrible customer service, unreliable network problems, etc. I know cause I've heard a lot of friends' (in St. Louis, where I live) horror stories. Maybe I'm the only customer that has been pleased with their services. Calling customer service has always been surprisingly pleasant and my issues resolved impressively quickly.

AT&T's U-verse just became available in my area (when I moved here cable was the only option for high-speed internet, DSL didn't reach this far) but I really do not want to deal with the pain of switching my TV, DVR, internet and phone over to a different company. I already give AT&T too much money each month for my cell phone.

Charter has done good by me (so far), they're a local company and I hope they come out of this stronger. Options and competition are a good thing for the kinds of services they offer.

It still amazes me that after all these years Eclipse does not have an *easy* way to change the text editor color scheme. There don't appear to be any good plugins that let you apply pre-defined color schemes. Eclipse is one of the most popular Java IDEs out there, used in many other products, when will they fix this problem?

On the Vomit Comet, it's pretty-nearly zero-g (0.001-0.003 G's... you float) for about 25-26 seconds, and then there's a period (I wasn't keeping track of how long) for about 1 minute that's around 1.8 G. I would assume the ESA plane follows a pretty similar flight path. The transitions are *pretty* distinct.

(disclaimer: I rode on the Vomit Comet in August)

"Just imagine how handy it would be if musical notes were color-coded. Learning to play an instrument would be a snap. You'd never have to wonder if you were in the right place for a chord, for example."

In college, I was in a sketch comedy group that also did some musical bits (parodies and the like). Our musical director one year had synthaesia, probably since birth. It had helped her learn to play the piano and, more usefully, meant that she could more easily tell all of us when we were (not) in tune or (not) sounding right, because she could see the colors associated with different musical passages. She described some musical note to me once as sounding "white". Very cool.

You know, I hate this conception that all engineers are EE/CPE types. Sure. I'm in aerospace, which may not be a growth industry but certainly isn't one in much danger of stuff being outsourced. American companies still have the edge in experience, know-how, and institutional momentum. While Dan Goldin did his dead-level best to kill NASA, it's not quite dead yet, and between the public and private sectors there's a lot of need for know-how. Of course, the fun thing about aerospace is that, unlike the computer world, the new hires are treated like dirt for a reason--we really don't know crap. We learn a lot of basic conceptions in school, but there's so much OJT that it's not funny. I worked for my current employer for almost three years before graduation, and I'm still way behind on the power curve. It always amuses me, though, to watch people hit the big trends in technological fields. I'd tell a kid coming into school these days to major in civil engineering. We're going to need a lot of those folks soon, and they might as well get in while the getting's good.