I have no mod points today else I would've liked to mod your post up. I have the Nokia 808 Pureview incidentally and whenever anyone sees that it has a 41Mpx camera, they literally gasp and then laugh a bit in disbelief. I doff my hat at Nokia - it made me feel too, just for a moment, that this is the stuff of dreams. Symbian is great so far for me and I found that my simple greed for just the 41Mpx actually made me end up with the best phone on the market.

I've not seen how well/differently this camera tech would work out on the Windows OS, but I am waiting till I get a chance to get my hands on the 1020.
Out of curiosity, I check /. and I see people saying, "41Mpx but runs on Windows OS? Shit phone."
Out of curiosity, I check some more forums and I see people saying "41Mpx but doesn't run insert_whatever_inane_mobile_game_you_play_here? Shit phone."

I only shrug at the hate and prejudice.
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"Pragmatism. Is that all you have to offer?!" [Guildenstern]

http://www.philipcoppens.com/cottingley.html This is my favorite story of Photoshopping without Photoshop. I still don't get why many people believed those photos, especially Arthur Conan Doyle...

Learning to draw spirals and stars in Turtle Graphics ! I miss The Turtle - If I messed up, he never ever said "Segmentation fault(core dumped)" to me :).

Sun suicide while surfing on an Australian beach? Sounds good :).

Vint Cerf gives a very good answer, though that was for the Internet and not Mobile Broadband. "For example, at one time if you didn’t have a horse it was hard to make a living. But the important right in that case was the right to make a living, not the right to a horse. Today, if I were granted a right to have a horse, I’m not sure where I would put it." http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/05/opinion/internet-access-is-not-a-human-right.html?_r=0.

Committing suicide by walking into the sunlight of Crematoria. [After saying something very profound of course like "We all began as something else."]

Why has no one has mentioned Fred Hoyle ? I read his Professor Gamma books (The Frozen Planet of Azuron and The Giants of Universal Park) when I was 10 and I loved them! http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/h/fred-hoyle. His biography is here : http://www.hoyle.org.uk/FH/Home.html
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The sleep of moderators produces monsters.

Mail stationery. http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/gmail/3tbpqlWw3CI

" I don't mean that in the sense of photography as a hobby or a profession, but simply as a method for taking images — of friends, family, and projects — that actually look good." Reading that, I do not think you should buy a D-SLRs at this point. I have a Canon Powershot SX20 IS and I have handled a few D-SLRs belonging to my friends.

1. D-SLRs are quite bulky - You can't walk into every party/gathering with a D-SLR. I have receive comments like "Oh! What's that? A camera ?! " And of course you can't move around easily, leaving it somewhere - It will always be on you.
2. D-SLRs can be tricky. It will take some time for you to learn all the settings - and would you really have the time to to mess with all this while things happen around you ? (I remember an incident - I changed to a telephoto lens on a Nikon at an event as the stage was far and the normal lens wouldn't zoom so much. Then my friend suddenly started serenading his wife nearby and of course I missed capturing the moment properly - telephoto lens won't take the best closeups.
3. D-SLRs usually need more than one lens (you will need to buy a telephoto lens, then perhaps a macro lens as you go along). And lenses don't come cheap.

I am an amateur photographer and I own a Canon Powershot SX20 IS, bought a year back. The major reasons: Less bulky than D-SLR, Super-macro mode( minimum focusing distance of 0 cm! ), 20X zoom, my confidence that I won't have the patience to change the lens to suit the scene, my confidence that I won't invest in extra expensive lenses. Being a little flighty, it is well suited to taking shots of whatever I feel like - sometimes it's a bird in the sky, the very next moment a beetle crawling in the grass; and it does have manual mode in case I ever have the leisure of setting each parameter on my own.
To tell the truth, this Powershot is still bulky (it might not have a heavy lens, but it is 0.500 Kg, so almost as much as an entry level D-SLR) but I tolerate it for the great zoom and super macro capabilities in one lens.Frequently, my photos have been mistaken for D-SLR shots - so it depends on the photographer and the post-processing software too. Few photos I took recently with a borrowed Nikon D-SLR came out so well that I almost wished that I had bought it instead, but then I remembered the weight, the pain of adjusting exposure, aperture,etc and that these couple of good photo came from a bunch of twenty bad ones.

I suggest you go for a decent P&S - I've seen photos taken with a Canon IXUS and they look pretty good. (Try out in the stores which zoom capability you need). Perhaps you could borrow a friend's D-SLR for a month (yes that long!) and see if it suits you. Since you have only used mobile cameras till now, maybe you will be happy with the quality of P&S photos. I still believe it is a good idea to start with a simple camera so you learn from all the bad photos you take - and then when you are sure it isn't your ability but the camera's limitations that are restricting you from taking better photos (you start complaining about exposure or ISO range), go for the D-SLR !