thanosbaskous

Alaska has had to deal with an extreme version of this issue for a long time. One mitigation that the state has come up with is to offer competitively priced student loans to Alaska residents who are bound for colleges across the US. The interest rate on the loans is further lowered if you live in Alaska after graduation, incentivizing educated Alaskans to come back. Those students are also likely to have maintained their Alaska residency to qualify for the Permanent Fund Dividend (an annual payment that comes from rolling returns on the state’s sovereign wealth fund).

Kali! I haven’t heard that name in a long time. I used it to play many hours of Warcraft 2 and Command & Conquer with friends - what a great enabling technology for its day.

I know that you're being fatuous but in case anyone doesn't get the reference, check out Nightfall by Asimov - it's a classic sci-fi short story.

http://www.uni.edu/morgans/astro/course/nightfall.pdf

Excel can do some pretty impressive things.

Another cool-but-probably-useless example:

Excel as a 3d engine

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131968/microsoft_excel...

Check out the videos to get a quick understanding of what they did.

The comments here about przemoc's choice in browser are surprisingly critical and vitriolic. S/he claims to be purposely keeping that version, and so presumably has some good reason - specific plugins, specific version testing for an internal web application, etc. Even if przemoc didn't have what you would consider a good reason, it should be his or her choice to keep that browser version and the onus is on us as web developers to encourage him (in positive ways) to upgrade - through better web applications that require new features, better communicating the reasons for upgrading, etc.

Believe me when I say that I understand the frustrations that come from having to support outdated browsers - I used to develop a web application for the financial industry, where as of a year or two ago a significant portion of traffic still came from IE6-locked machines in large financial institutions - but browser choice is not the issue here.

The issue as I see it is that the software that przemoc was running did not behave as he or she wanted and expected it to behave. That means that the software had a design problem (poor or misleading auto-update setting design), a communication problem (didn't inform him or maybe mislead him about the default update behavior) or a bug (updated despite a setting telling it not to).

There isn't enough information in the original post to determine if the last one (auto-update occurring despite being turned off) is what happened here - I'd like to learn more. It would be worrying (and I'd argue an insecure design) if the software were even capable of self-updating with that setting turned off.