...and that the Internet exists, and that gay people are not the pariahs they once were, and that I'm not quite rich enough to buy you all off. I will work harder in the future to address these faults. A boycott can only delay the day when I will succeed in doing so. Thank you for paying attention, but please stop.

Sorry to hear it, but luckily we still have GCC...

Unfortunately, it's far from clear that the defendant would prevail, and he would be seriously harmed even if he did. I personally know of a kid that now has a juvenile record for something even more innocuous than this incident, but that was also twisted into something terror-y by some seriously vicious adults. It's kind of like the whole Satanic Ritual Abuse thing (remember that?). It'll keep going until we finally decide as a society to call bullshit.

This is pretty awesome, but do I really need it? Yeah, the generic charging pad is a great idea, but I'm not that crazy about "spooky energy at a distance"...

In the bureaucratic world, I've only seen two kinds of security: nonsensical and nonexistent. On the whole, I prefer the latter.

Am I the only one that read that as "TI-99/4A"? Personally, I found this device quite educational... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_TI-99/4A

I've certainly seen cases where an organization could realize a substantial likely profit by paying someone millions of dollars to go away (or to just sit quietly in a room and stop working mischief). But any organization smart enough to realize this would not find itself in such a lopsided position to begin with. So mostly this state is just an observable marker of a poorly functioning organization.

This sounds like a rehash of the old "Computer Said It, So It Must Be True" meme from the not-so-distant past. If that experience can provide any guidance, people will mostly learn to ignore these flashy new graphics after 50 or 100 years or so...

I want my spider-squasher to be cloud-ready...

But until then, they're kind of pitiful...

Re "7 figures": Must be nice. :-)

I have no doubt that discrimination exists, and I've probably run into it a couple of times, though of course there's usually no way to know. But what are you going to do? As far as I can tell, my play is to relentlessly work on polishing my skills, and try to remain in the vanguard. More often than not, I'm the guy dragging my Gen Y colleagues into the future. What's not to like?

Re "apologist", you're reading an awful lot into something I tapped out in a few seconds...

Last year I was 48. As part of something like a mid-life crisis, I interviewed at several of the Bay Area majors. In some ways, it was kind of a Logan's Run sort of experience, with me in the role of Old Man (Peter Ustinov). (Maybe next time I should bring some cats with me to the interview.) I was turned down by several, but received a good offer from Facebook. After a lot of careful number-crunching and soul-searching, though, I felt that I couldn't accept it. The primary reason is that I have a wife and kids. Though the offer would have been fabulous for a single guy, it probably would have been ruinous with my financial responsibilities. I guess what I'm saying here is when discussing ageism and the Valley, one needs to be careful to pick apart reluctance to hire older people (which I don't doubt is a bias sometimes) versus the personal economics of the Valley, which makes it a marginal place to consider living for many people (and probably tends to hit families the hardest). As an aside, I think many younger managers are nervous about hiring older workers. For what it's worth, I recently worked for several years for a guy that's at least ten years younger. Best boss I ever had. We got along and got things done.

I had a really good offer for a major Bay Area company a year ago, and after running the numbers, realized that (largely because I have kids) there's simply no way to afford it. Maybe if my wife was also a tech person, but she's not. Ended up taking a job in NYC, as it's considerably more affordable if you have kids...

Legalized gay marriage in 2009. (Four years earlier than California, and counting...)