Someone who has an iPhone, iPad, iPod? An iDiot. Unhappily Apple Watch doesn't fit into this rather feeble joke, but these are consumer fetish items.

It's working though, a charity that I volunteer for bought a load of iPads for an older-person project, display keypads are a lot harder to use than clunky mechanical ones for old fingers and they're really expensive. So, if any of the people in the trial wanted to 'progress' they'd have to lay out £500 pounds. I'm not a huge fan of Android either, but, at least the follow-up would have been more affordable and a little more open.

To go with all the tiny, blinking sea of blue screens of death that surround me.

My ex is from Singapore, where they speak 'Singlish': http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... The rhythm is different and the grammar is something like bits of Mandarin, loan words from Hokkien the most famous being kiasu: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K.... For example 'eat already?', 'don't want', it tends to sound a little harsh because it's very abbreviated.

I think this is probably the future of English, that is it will win and lose at the same time. However, for a while, most of these variations should be roughly comprehensible. It's also a reason to try and keep some kind of 'standard core' as a fallback. In Singapore, once they hear my Brit accent, they slow down and use fewer local words.

BTW Perl does suck, but the useful vacuum created is 'awesome', to quote the kids.

Yes, from a 64 year old who uses Geany each and every day. I hate Eclipse, Emacs and [except when in a hurry] Vim. Vim reminds me of when I started 'editing' programs on a Teletype 33, who would want that?

All the best to you. Learning is fun when you're older, there's less of the random pressure that comes with late teens and twenties. I'm doing one or two Coursera courses at the moment too.

Me too. Around computers since COBOL/RPG2/Filetab in about 1977, I wouldn't regard myself as an expert. For one thing, I've changed languages with the industry quite a lot. I learnt on the job, then did an MSc in my mid-40s, so I learnt a little about 'computer science' only at that stage. Also, once you really rate yourself, you stop learning.

I feel very grateful and lucky [for one thing at 64, I'm still working, probably have more than I can handle actually] that I joined an industry that provides me both fun and cash. Many, many people work at jobs they don't like.

Bah! You have a smart phone. Actually, so do I but it spends most of its life in the kitchen drawer. Although it was straight purchase, it was/is full of bloatware and I'm waiting to get around to rooting it.

I don't have Facebook, I'm thinking of giving up on Twitter and I do have LinkedIn for professional presence only. I'm 65 this year and have spent my whole life in tech, my house is full of computers, but I see no need for permanent connection with superficial social transactions.

News at 8, Facebook 'friends' aren't friends in the main, you can go a couple of hours without the latest Curtis Jackson [you see, I do keep up] video. Especially when it involves bumping into me, because you aren't PAYING FUCKING ATTENTION TO OTHER PEOPLE. When I say I'll see you at 6pm, I'll see you without half a dozen intermediate texts and [smart, what's the diff?] phone calls. End of.

My opinion is that education is about a great deal more than becoming a trained worker ant for some [US usually] multinational. Hey, a topic could be 'optimal picking in an Amazon warehouse', what joy! That would combine sports, graph theory, manual dexterity and subservience to the man.

Against this, I don't know exactly what the 'plan' is, so my comments could be wide of the mark. I hope so, in fact.

And pressure for all on-line retailers to add a 'secure boot status' bullet point on their detailed descriptions.

Yes, agree, I use hive.co.uk here, they try and support local bookshops to some extent too. I don't hate Amazon and have programmed for one of their subsidiaries for a while, but I feel there are dangers that I expressed. Same kind of thing we had with IBM [in the old days], Microsoft [more recently] and Amazon, Google, eBay etc. now.

However that was nearly always one class of products, this is a lot more 'horizontal', everything needs to pass through the Amazon door, if it comes to that.

I live in the UK and have cut down on Amazon for nearly 'everything'. I appreciate their efficiency, their systems and their prices but I don't want to live in a world where there's just one shop. That's the thing for everybody to be afraid of. They treat their staff pretty badly too.

With great power comes great responsibility, with late-stage capitalism comes winner takes all. I'm prepared to give up optimal pricing and some of the the rational economic man stuff for 'choice' and 'quality of life'.

Or SDD as it is known in HughBar-Labs [inventors of llama-case, one capital letter at the beginning of stuff] has been in use since about 1930. Some blame it for the rise of the Nazis in Germany, they used plenty of slogans, too. Our lawyer tried to sue them, but we never heard from him again, last thing was a postcard from some place sounding like Tribblinka, maybe the tribbles ate him?

Seriously though folks.

Stopshitgategate ?

Also, you're supporting the Murdoch empire, including the Sun etc. etc. As for the rest, 'quad play' and 'bundles' used to be called bundling in the computer industry and several large lawsuits [somewhat] abolished it. When everything comes from one supplier, they give you the service they want at a price that they want.

As a bit of an eco-nazi, I don't see any of this as 'good', more 'features' every year, none of them particularly useful [do you really want to watch crappy music videos on a tiny screen, judging by my commute people do though] and more phones made/destroyed/in landfill.

Actually cell phones are a nuisance anyway, people can't walk and text or phone and text, so they bump into you. On bicycles, they risk life and limb [theirs and unhappily others] in London by using headphones [though admittedly a walkman or ipod is just as 'good' for this].

Despite what you see above, I love tech, having been in/around it for 40 years, but I really, really believe we need to step back from our current destructive and rather purposeless [except for making cash, of course] product cycles. Fat chance.