"The researchers were also able to tell the children's genders from the shape of the fingers."

I remember a story about the famous pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock. When told that a child's gender could be determined by the shape of the skull at birth, he replied "I prefer the traditional methods..."

As someone who's way older than you...

15 years ago I left development, to take an offer to become an (Oracle) DBA. Intelligent employers, while hard to find, recognize that DBA's with dev background bring a wealth of knowledge about what works and what doesn't. And the specialized skills of DBA's can demand a premium in the job market.

Walking away from development and into production-side database work was probably the best career move I've made in 30 years.

And there are still opportunities to get your hands dirty. I'm constantly creating Perl scripts for monitoring...coworker DBA's set up web pages...some DBA's do hardware configuration (servers, SANs)...

Diehard touch typists using English-language keyboards actually use the little dimples on the F and J keys. Feeling them under your index fingers confirms that your hands are correctly positioned. While this is a noteworthy advance on IBM's part, I doubt that a keyboard which morphs keys - but lacks a way to ensure your fingers are where they're expected to be - will get much traction in the marketplace.

Electronics prices are constantly dropping. The Roadster came out a few years ago. They're probably saving a lot simply by getting the same (or better) electronics for a lot less money.

The first place I worked told me to log onto jolt. A couple of weeks later, it was drpepper followed by sevenup.

My personal servers tend toward gibson, fender, takamine...you get the idea.

No computer can help a human understand a simile, much less an abstraction that's often in the guise of a complex historical or literary reference (i.e. metaphor).

IBM might dispute that, now that Watson's won at Jeopardy.

The article never mentions a sink. Does this mean that Victoria BC has given up on convincing men to wash after their pit stops?

One in three can actually farm, since they travel with their bacteria.

I guess that means that two in three are accepting agricultural subsidies instead of farming?

About 15 years ago the first of the grandkids showed up. The next year, the parents and grandparents and great-grandparents got together and decided that we adults would not exchange presents any more. We continue to get some for the little kids because they're still trying to figure out what this is all about.

Instead of adult-to-adult gift exchanges, the adults all take the money we would've spent on each other and pump it into college accounts for the next generation of the extended family. The first of the grandkids is approaching college age. Over the years, we've all contributed enough that her first year or two of college will cost the parents nothing.

A side benefit of this is that it puts some of the burden of college expenses on those who can afford it. The generation below mine is still trying to figure out how to make payments on their first house and a second car (so both can work), let alone put a kid through school. otoh, my generation and my parents' generation are well established financially, and can easily afford to help defray the college expenses.

And I can personally attest that it's very satisfying to be able to share in this way.

I used to work for AT&T. The ordering system I worked on (1990's) was the largest PL/1 system IBM had ever seen, managing a customer database larger than the (US) Internal Revenue Service's. We had 5 datacenters and maybe 30 databases all talking to one another to make this system work. And absolutely nothing we could ever do made that OS misbehave. Not even my rookie shenanigans.

And it was fast.

Now I can fit ten times as many documents on my hard drive!

Most ships wouldn't turn. But they would send out a rescue helicopter. My guess is that the 'copter crews will see this as a great new tool.

In my state, anyone who doesn't have car insurance pays an "uninsured motorist fee" that's about what I pay to insure the car. So it only makes sense to stop paying car insurance if I sell the car, too.

I spent 13 years working in development. I survived matrix management, interchangeable plastic people, managers who couldn't prioritize work, managers who couldn't understand the purpose of a Gantt chart, senseless incentive plans and other IT management disasters. At 45 (a little late, I guess) I realized that I was simply sick of the BS that comes with being a drone in IT. 13 years ago I was offered a job in 3rd-level tech support (production DBA, in the trenches every day), and took it.

The politics is much lower on the production support side, which gets you out of most of the BS. No requirements drift, fewer communications problems, no crunch-to-meet-the-deadline, etc. So the move's been good for me.

But I've also noticed that my tolerance for BS in every area of my life has dropped as I've aged. Like the time when a grocery clerk had some apples and a box of cereal on the weigh station while she was weighing the apples. I pointed out to her that she was weighing the cereal at the same time as the apples and the weight / price would be wrong. "No," she indicated, "the scanner will read the cereal and get the price right." After a couple of minutes a manager came over, removed the cereal and weighed the apples. I left before she explained the issue to the clerk, who was still wondering how the apples dropped by a pound.

It's become quite a struggle, as I grow older, not to stand up and shout whenever someone makes a decision solely for political reasons, or when they don't understand the value of training employees of any age bracket, or when I work for someone who's incapable of making a decision. In my younger days it was easier simply to ignore it, but now in my late-50's it's sometimes quite an effort to ignore the BS that comes my way.

People talk about how you should "pick your battles." Walking away from the BS, on my terms, was my way to pick my battles.

This was one of the first technical books I purchased when I started in this crazy business. It's one of the best books I've ever read on how to think like a tester. Following Myers' principles will make any developer's or tester's life better.