I find it more interesting that 10-year-olds are committing code to the Linux kernel.

I've worked with tons of people in my IT career (roughly 15 years now, mostly with a Fortune 100). The cross-section of "elite" people who had the knack and enthusiasm for tech wizardry and learning were all ages, all genders, all races, etc... and pretty even distribution at that. Those who couldn't handle tech and learning well were also evenly distributed. Trying to correlate various factors and put people in categorical boxes is not only a nasty, frowned-upon behavior, but it leads to fewer friends, fewer opportunities, and greater inaccuracy in all things. I like to appreciate or dislike people for exactly who they are. :-)

Check your demeanor in how you deliver answers and solutions... everyone has their own sense of pride and don't like to hear condescension... negative reactions to your solutions may really be negative reactions to smugness. Also, "new" is not always "better." If something new actually sucks, commiserate with your coworkers about how MS Ribbon is Fischer Price crap, etc... and it will help build rapport. You'll be seen less as the new-stuff-addict and more as truly a source of tech-wisdom.

If you're truly the tech badass in your team, that means you can participate in sharing and mutual bettering with the office-politics-badass and the communication-badass and the customer-relations-badass, etc... If you're missing/wanting to get into great discussions and mutual knowledge sharing on cutting edge stuff, check out your local 2600, Makers, Hackerspace, programming language user groups, etc...

Perhaps half of us are simply disenfranchised. When the gamers have gamed the system to disallow any new players and to preclude the kind of change half of us care about, we feel nothing but despair and disgust with the presented 2 options, every bloody time.

My house is three blocks away and I never knew until recently that he lived in this neighborhood. This is arguably the best neighborhood in Memphis (walkability, diversity, mix of biz/res is awesome), but in the 2007-2008 time period, prices dropped pretty hard, and continued downward a bit. 1.3 million to 850k is quite reasonable for what was happening then. The fact that he got back his purchase price, given what was going on, is the impressive bit. No one was getting a price increase during this timeframe. A lot of losses were happening instead.

Thankfully, the area is having a nice resurgence, with previously closed/shaby businesses re-opening as really nice things, and our prices are going back up finally.

Oh yeah... I attended a GA high school (obedience school) and was really impressed with what they emphasized. The most important geometry to know was skirt length to knee distance, etc...

Memristors. Google the word. I did not expect to see real AI in my lifetime before that announcement, and now I do. Memristors are close enough to neurons that you can run something like a brain on a chip, whereas before, all neural nets were simulated and therefore took a lot of computing power just to do small things like machine vision (face recognition, etc...).

Have you considered acrylic or Lucite? Possibly wood? Harbor Freight (US discount power tool chain) carries "good enough" routers for under $20, and a router + wood could make a very posh "luxury" facade for a touch screen... Polished screws with possibly non-standard heads in counter-sunk holes on the facade could be made to fit with the design aesthetic... you even see *fake* countersunk shiny screw heads on bezels of some devices, due to how it looks "high-end" in some contexts.

So, RV or boat control panel?

I think it's a regional thing more than a "secret racist person" thing... before I moved to the south east, I really thought the USA had grown the hell up and gotten beyond that. I see so much racist garbage mindset since I've moved out here though, that I can actually see how the current laws can't/don't do enough.

I would argue that the stupid exist to be preyed upon, and there is nothing immoral in that; in fact it is just, in that their stupidity usually causes splash damage for which they should pay. Any time a stupid person gives his or her money to a self-centered charlatan who spends it on entertainment, there are less dollars that stupid person can spend buying theocratic laws, etc...

However, an immoral act occurs when stupid people are used as a resource to commit harm to the population at large, such is the case with the autism/vaccines scare, and most religious and political efforts... the Catholic Church's efforts against prophylactics, the selling of the Iraq war, the selling of the upcoming Iran war, etc...

I've heard a very well educated "anti-atheist-agenda" speaker talk about this. He was a brilliant speaker. We talked a little afterwards, because I found him interesting... he knew enough medical, biological science, and so did I, that he couldn't actually use bullshit reasoning denying how DNA works, etc... so he acknowledged that "microevolution" happens "of course." What these kind are actually denying is Geology, not Biology. Their premise is that, sure, DNA works, and there's a lot of useful science there, so they won't deny that with an audience who gets biology... they'll simply state that those mechanics can't apply to humans evolving from other creatures, because that just couldn't happen in 6000 years and they're correct! And since geologic science is not as hot of a topic right now, and generally drier than biology, they can fool more people... I'm guessing a lot fewer people can articulate why we know the earth has a lot more than 6000 years of history than there are people who get the concepts of DNA and inherited traits and natural selection.

Geology is the current target of denial by the crafty charlatans... Denying the mechanics of evolution is just the arena for complete morons and low-grade charlatans.

(g) The government will use this to perform extra-advanced interrogations on everyone who might know about terror, drug sales and distribution, and on women who report an ambiguous rape so that they can have an abortion in the few states that keep a rape exception in the next few years.

My thought on that aspect: they belatedly realized that they kinda already did "raise" her, by growing up with her as a best friend, and due to her influence on their lives, they couldn't go back and alter that. River's childhood already happened a certain way, and they even witnessed it already. It still doesn't account for ages zero through 8 or so, but causality and all that... *shrug*

Those are some lovely straw-man cases. A fan or other moving part is most failure prone in a fridge, and standard bolts allow access and cheap replacement. The digitizer screen and battery are the failure/damage prone parts of a phone, and it can be easy to access or hard to access to repair... if it's hard, is that design out of necessity, or is it on purpose, for nasty reasons? That's what this boils down to. I don't think people are complaining about surface mount electronics being involved in the phones or the dishwashers here, but cool story, bro. And as for locked up vs. open firmware, I'd pick open every time it's available, but that's still very rare.

Next time you clear compartments in your refrigerator, take a look around. Our 'fridge quit on us during the summer, and we were suddenly quite sad about the prospect of spending hundreds of dollars and dealing with shipping / moving a huge object. But there were proper, standard hex bolts in there. So I started disassembling. I found the fan had died. I ordered a replacement from amazon, re-installed, and it has worked great ever since.

Dishwasher manuals usually come with an exploded diagram of all their parts, so that a pump here or a valve there can be replaced, rather than the whole unit, even on the cheapest models.

The government actually got involved in regulating standards on cars to fight this trend. (i.e. standard OBDII tools can work on many vehicles and the cost has fallen under $20 for a very capable device)

Varying levels of difficulty do not a "walled garden" make. Manufacturers deliberately choose to construct the "walled garden" when they employ connectors that can't be disconnected without destruction, glues rather than screws, inventing new screw heads just to defeat those of us who already own a good variety of screwdriver bits...

Is repair / DIY for everyone? Hell no, but that's simply not the argument here. Anti-DIY and anti-repair choices (made for that purpose) on the part of manufacturers have some serious shadiness: They don't want the product to last, so customers are forced to buy more, sooner; they want to kill the used products market, less by innovation and more by quality degredation and irrepairability; they generate more waste, including rare and valuable materials; they drive people away from the joys and benefits of working for themselves and building / maintaining useful, money-saving skills.

Just like pepper spray and sonic weaponry and bean bag guns and rubber bullets and tazers and batons are only used so very properly, right? It's a nice thought you have, but any bit of reading on recent history of non-lethal weaponry used by police forces might make you rethink your assertion. Also google for some recent news articles about the random people at peaceful protests who start visibly and audibly inciting the crowd to start breaking things. The peaceful demonstrators usually complement the officer on his standard-issue shoes. Don't take my word for it or just reject it; go look it up.

And oddly enough, this isn't about disliking or liking cops. Cops are directed to do what they do. Their protocols and their attentions are directed by others. Bad cops are responsible for being bad cops, but bad systems are defined at another level. I'm not starting the "us vs them" mentality, and really, neither did the cops.