The portrait screenshot you posted looks infinitely more usable than the landscape one; I'm surprised you prefer portrait? Look at all the extra text that's on it too. Even with multiple widescreen monitors on my desk, my browser window is still "portrait shaped", because reading long text is easier with narrow columns, like a newspaper.

I fear you still don't get it; people advocating learning to code are not advocating people become programmers. If you see this as a contradiction, think about it a little harder.

"FiftyThree carries this message throughout out the Paper app, as well as through their site and brand. Everything about this product is designed to lead you to believe, “I am the kind of cool latter-day renaissance person who carries around a Moleskine notebook because my free aesthetic soul may encounter a beautiful scene I want to render as art. I am that awesome.” This is, in fact, the very image in the Paper promotional video: a guy wandering around New York City sketching stuff. The video is shot from first-person perspective. That guy is you." Uh, this marketing isn't very good; this kind of guy is the pretentious knobhead that I want to punch in the face and smirk while he holds his bleeding nose. Not literally, of course, but about that level of contempt. It's a toxic mix of narcissism, indulgent self-actualization and sheer fraudulence. It's the stuff that makes people who switch from PCs to Macs want to pull out their new laptops in cafes. These people aren't artists; they don't even have a conceptual model of art, the way art schools churn out confused students; instead, they just want to wear a t-shirt with the label "artist" printed on it, so that they can feel good about themselves when they see their own reflection. It's onanism and it's repulsive. It's a fine distillation of the essence of what I don't like about Apple products.

i7 920, clock for clock, made a huge difference over my Core 2 Q6600 on the desktop. I estimate it was between 2 and 3 times faster, both overclocked to 3.4GHz, depending on whether I was doing a build of the source tree, or transcoding a video. Definitely not "blah".

What I'm not seeing in this analysis is the wealth effects of the US housing bubble. Germany didn't have a property bubble. In view of how much of the pile of muck was created by the financial sector and the housing bubble, it seems to me a more than a little shortsighted and ideologically driven to focus on differences in deficit spending etc. Even the very phrase "anti-business legislation" is propaganda.

Jimmy Wales - Wikipedia *co*founder, not founder, no matter how much he tries to say otherwise.

It's pretty rare to go to the bathroom unless it's a very long flight, such as a transatlantic one. Most intra-EU flights take a max of about 3 hours.

Friction free + DRM-free, OK. Friction free but DRMed, no thanks.

Odd. I don't see that setting, and instead I get a message: "There have been misleading rumors recently about the use of your photos in ads. Don't believe them. These rumors were related to third-party applications, and not ads shown by Facebook. Get the whole story at the Facebook Blog, or check out the Help Center." The facebook blog link is to here: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=110636457130 Very odd though that I don't see the same settings as you. Makes me suspect it was a trial balloon that was hastily drawn back in.

I believe the relevant term to use with Apple is "fascist". Bing: "microsoft fascist" - 16 "google fascist" - 49 "apple fascist" - 99 Apple aren't faceless; they're a foot in the face of freedom. Probably my deepest worry as a software engineer is that they gain an equivalent position of power to Microsoft - MS are infinitely better.

Michael - don't forget that many people look at money as a relative measure in the first place. If everyone on the planet was getting 25,000 and you were getting 50,000, you'd be far better off (in an absolute sense) than if you were getting 100,000 and everyone else on the planet was getting 200,000. You might be getting a slightly smaller slice of a much bigger numerical pie, but the amount of product that's available is fixed, so the absolute dollar numbers divide out, so the actual real pie is the same size.