Um, yeah, no.

Graffiti was the fastest way I've ever input text into a PDA. Second fastest was the Blackberry keyboard. A very distant third is the Android virtual keyboard that most people are using now.

I'm pretty sure I remember how to do graffiti, and it's still better than any handwriting input I've ever used.

> Separating children and teenagers into 'boys and girls' keeps reinforcing the idea that these are part of some black and white, unchanging reality.

I see what you did there.

Because, gender equality.

And some will just buy it.

...and he is us.

It starts.

>The CFL hate here confused me until I got one that was designed to look like a bulb instead of long weird loops that just did the job. The early stuff was fine, the later stuff where marketers decided it needed to look like an incandesent bulb were the pieces of shit that took ages to warm up.

"Hate" is such an overused term.

I was an early adopter of CFLs, and of the three I bought around 1996, the first stopped working in 2005, the second a couple years later, and the third is still working in 2015. But the CFLs I've purchased after approx 2003, loop type or fake bulb type, last one to two years, no better than incandescents.

Besides using less electricity, the selling point of CFLs was longivity, and the early bulbs, after the bugs were worked out, really did meet that goal. But later they were value engineered to the point where you change them about as often as you change incandescent bulbs. (Which, I believe, was the actual goal of manufacturers.) And they still cost more. We were rooked.

I strongly suspect that IoT devices and appliances, sometime after they become common, will generally be value engineered to the point where failures are common. And we'll just accept it, like good little consumers. The "I" part of an "IoT" device is just another thing to go wrong.

Point. Said more generally, does IoT mean that the most common failure will be some malfunction in the "I" part of the device? That more complexity inevitably leads to more points of failure?

Will this be a pattern similar to that followed by CFLs? Early IoT devices will be buggy, but the bugs will be ironed out, followed by a short Golden Age, where the prices have fallen and the devices essentially last forever, followed by the inevitable Value Engineering, after which things fail randomly and often, with error modes never seen in non-IoT devices?

Or, "But Dave, you're already in the house. You came home hours ago."

You knew there was one.

It seemed like he was enjoying his job a little too much.

> That company is of relevance HOW ?

Good point. I guess the only relevance is that they are having their moment in the news for some politically correct drivel.

Mind you, I'm on your side on this. Just pointing out that some companies are trying to sell us on the idea that salary negotiation is *mean* and unfair to genders who are less able to negotiate. (And why this isn't in and of itself considered sexist is beyond me.)

Right. I was a contractor for several years, but got a FTE position when I decided to buy a home and raise a family, for precisely this reason. Took a hit in salary when I made the switch, but that's the price one pays.

The positive side, savings during the contracting days paid a hefty down payment on the house.

Nope, can't negotiate salary anymore. For gender equality, you know. Not for the benefit of the hiring company. Really.