Why doesn't anyone ever notice that the greater the energy density, the greater the energy that can be released all at once? You'd think people getting their houses or private parts burned with energy dense devices would be a lesson learnt...

Touch controls in a car bouncing around on crappy roads are stupid.

I'd be happy if I didn't have to turn my HTC upside down to plug in the USB charger in all three of my cars.

My dad had one (green 1961). It was mechanical, and it did change to red at 65. Google Safety Spectrum Speedometer for pix and vid.

I had a 1991 BMW 750 with a built-in analogue phone. When I commuted over the Coronado bridge while talking on the phone (around Y2K), sometimes it would switch me to an Ensenada tower, breaking into random conversations en Español.

I've been saying it since Howard Jarvis and Ronald Reagan implemented their "tax revolt" at the end of the '70s: any benefit from tax cuts and less regulation is temporary, short-term, and soon overridden by the increased size of the crash after the greedy rich people abuse various economic sectors. That's why there was an S&L crises in the '80s, a housing crash in the '90s, bank and housing crises in the oughts, California schools run out of money. Shoot, does anyone think to check the top tax rates under Eisenhower? Even Greenspan was shocked... shocked! that rich people were greedy, that Objectivism is... oh well, why bother, people just filter it through their biases. Brown and Clinton have the best budget surpluses of their eras, then conservatives have to go and mess it up with voodoo economics.

Will some psycho please reenact an episode of Criminal Minds with George Will and Arthur Laffer as victims?

Takes a Real Manly-Man Programmer to wear one of those.

Are you fucking kidding me? No one mentions the strike price for all these employees with bad morale. I'll speculate: $1 for employees, $.1 for the investors.

Oh wait, I'm totally wrong. They're fucking RSU's! Your free money is only worth 40% of $38. Boo-fucking-hoo.

This is true. When I was in 8th grade, my best friend's dad, a programmer for an aerospace company, had to take a job 100 miles away when that industry crashed. He was quite happy commuting in his 356C Porsche, but the wife saw that was ridiculous and made them move. There was blatant age discrimination then, and I also saw it when my dad had to politic for his Willy Loman job.

One of my train buddies is on his second cell-phone programming jobs just since I've known him on the train. His wife is also a cell-phone engineer, she drives a delivery truck.

I've been balding since...

Actually, I'm over 11 years, partly because of the inevitable merger etc. requiring some technical person to keep doing new things to the same old, and same old to the new versions (including upgrades to web enabled versions and the latest db technology). Yes, I'm deep into legacy, and have told them in so many words I'd be happy to convert to whatever they decide is better. So I'm doubly protected - either they keep the same ol', which means a small conversion project and more new programming, or I do a huge conversion project and get the new skills. This should keep me going until I retire. Wife and two kids and two cats and giant house in subruralia (nicer than suburbia), why would I want to turn over? People denigrate the idea of doing the same thing over and over, without evaluating how same is same. I worked on the grandparent of this software, when relational technology was some newfangled idea.

Don't cast too many aspersions upon the legacies in the world, they have their place, and the more obscure they become, the more lucrative. And they still have to deal with the new stuff, one way or another. (The odd place still using punch cards notwithstanding.)

Funny, that was a carved wooden sign (with "toys" instead of "stuff") in my stepfathers toy store. We sold the building to a chopper motorcycle dealer, and they kept the sign up :)

http://tkyte.blogspot.com/2005/10/young-persons-game.html

I note that almost all the people commenting there are still working in the field, many are now respected Oracle Aces and Bloggers.

I had to laugh when I saw one of the people who bullied me, in the newspaper as a success story. The Flying Spaghetti Monster does indeed have a sick sense of humor.

I liked the 10 and 20 year reunions, even though I hated high school. wft, did I miss 30? Anyways, 37 years on, the facebook groups of my high school and neighborhood are actually quite interesting, for a few minutes. Facebook interface sucks though, try following a thread with 150 entries and you just want to toss the monitor (I was going to make a Second City reference, but all these young'uns...). Rather than robbing nostaligia, it seems to to have inflamed it.

The alternative is seeing your friends at funerals. I skipped the one last weekend, haven't even wanted to see what was posted on fb about it. It's hard to be the same age as a parent when they died. But now I know all my online meanderings will spin anti-chaotically forever.