Heck, I've been using Perl for 20+ years and I'm still confused by what '=' means. For all I know it's been overloaded into the equalsignderefpointeraddinstantiationer operator.

I do have a friend who painted his bike fluorescent pink to discourage theft. That was as far as he went with the "gay" motif, though. The bike has not been stolen yet.

Actually, my old road bike is "flamingo" colored. It's a fairly common color for a bike, and I have yellow handlebar tape, which makes it look pretty spiffy but not unusual.

Bottom line is pink is a much less common color for a car than a bike. You could paint your car international orange, too, so, like, whatever.

Give me just one example of sensitive data that gas escaped from a major cloud service (Google, Amazon, etc), and I'll give you 10 more examples of data that has escaped from an incompetent IT organization's in house systems. Do *your* in house systems allow you to configure ALL your user's desktops and laptops to be completely disposable, with no other software necessary than a recent version of Firefox or Chrome? Never had a DBA accidentally botch a transaction, do your users never accidentally delete email, never had a spearphishing attempt slip though your spamassassin filters? Never put off a software upgrade because your users were to busy for downtime? Never had a backup fail?

Let's just admit it's all the politics of control, which is fine. Personally, I'd rather not do the shit work of reading log files, restoring lost email and files, forgotten passwords, and cleaning up the mess when a user gets phished.

If will be a long time before development of the horseless carriage will overtake the technology of my steam-powered ornithopter!

Ha !

Actually, a good question. I don't think color perception degrades with age. Ability to focus does. So those blobs of color still look as good as they did in the .....

The problem with slides is you need a projector or a scanner to show them to people. A projector will fade your slides (even stable Kodachrome) if you show them more than a few times. I can tell which slides in my library I projected a lot, and which stayed in the box.

And eventually you won't be able to buy 35mm slide scanners anymore, although I suppose there will always be services around that will be able to scan them in

I don't think digital media will become inaccessible because DVDs will "fade". It's pretty easy to migrate bits from a doomed media format to another. Rather, it's that the file formats change. I even avoid RAW files: the formats are proprietary, the software has lots of annoying dependencies, are you ready to maintain a box with the last 10 years' version of GTK+ around so the stuff will compile? I keep the highest resolution JPEGs that I can (and don't rewrite them), figuring JPEGs will probably be around the longest amount of time.

Why can't manufacturers make a digital camera that writes files in open TIFF formats?

The problem with slides is that the dynamic range, especially of Kodachrome, surpassed that of prints, so the prints were crappy looking. You had two choices:

1) Make a contrast-reducing mask, used along with an internegative, for a "type-C" print, the same kind of print made from negative stock. Of course the intermediate processes reduced the fidelity of the resulting print, but if you went to a good lab the results were pretty good and very pricey.

2) Use Cibachrome or some positive process print. Ciba prints always looks murky and strange to me (I can immediately spot them in a gallery). Other positive process prints had unstable dyes, at least until the 80s or so. I can still tell my positive process, direct-from-slide prints from my Type C ones.

A third alternative was to scan them in. This was easy when you worked for National Geographic :-) For us mere mortals, decent sub-$5K slide scanners didn't really exist until about five years ago.

Still, I shot nothing but slides (when I shot color and not BW), and used nothing but Kodachome if I could. All my Kodachrome slides, dating back to the 70s, look as good now as the day they came back from the lab.

And that's my ancestors are NOT known as "Bruce the Bridge Builder", "Bruce the Fence Builder" ....

.. but my guess is that the Western "R"'s great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather is the Devanagari "R".

And at the same time it is based on a Western "R" with the vertical bar removed.

Clever!

There will be no encouragement to force you to link them, because places like my university, that uses Google Apps, will definitely want to control authentication to our stuff, and let you do whatever you want with your own.

There's already a useful page with radio buttons, when Apps get confused about what you are trying to connect to, it pops this page up and asks which account you are trying to connect with.

Amen to that, up to a point. The difference between people with and without degrees is substantial. It's not correlated with how many years ago they got their degree or if it was even in something technical.

The one exception to this has been military veterans. If a college degree counts for +10, recent military service counts +11. I suppose it has something to do with having people who yell at you until you do things they way they are supposed to be done, a luxury I cannot indulge in.

I'll let the NSA put spyware on some of my computers, *if* they let me target a Tomahawk missile at my least-favorite spammer once or twice a year.

When you're as paranoid, you're never alone since they are always out to get you.

They have their "slow food" movement, now they have their "slow computing" movement.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.