Ah, well I'll tell you something that disheartened me a little. The local radio personalities were talking about Bruce's journey as if it were some sort of publicity stunt, blissfully unaware that if it were it's at least 30 years in the making. That bugs me. I really would prefer that it help the public accept an entrie group of people that are pressured to keep a secret all their lives. We recently had a murder of a transendered person here that was probably motivated by lack of acceptance.

... non-removable?

We're not in disagreement that cell phone use is a dangerous distraction. The people you see drifting to the left, they're not using their GPS. Also, the problem with that sort of observation is that you're not seeing who isn't distracted. It's a bit like trying to determine how many visitors to a website have Javascript disabled... by using Javascript to detect it. "Oh look, 100% of people visiting my site have JS enabled!"

I do think I've run out of things to say on this topic. Maybe it's time to say agree-to-disagree? Either way, I hope you're having a good weekend.

A. Finding out your loved one is safe is valuable.

B. Your comment is outside of the context.

The dipshit that modded my post down should have clicked the link. Since braincells are at a premium here I'll spell it out:

And what do you see when you click my link?

Same site, only a day earlier.

'Moron' not only describes the AC, but the people who modded his post up and mine down.

Moron.

A better question is: Why are you on Slashdot?

How is that actually supposed to work, though? Does the Apple Watch make people walk so much they gain weight? Does it make somebody see their doctor more regularly?

I'm asking because I don't remember WebMD ever getting raked over the coals on Slashdot.

Hmmm, no irony (actual or the generally admissible definition of it) here. I think you replied to the wrong post.

The phones are stable. It's the junk you put on them that make them unstable.

If an OS lets the apps make it unstable, then the OS (and phone) is bad. A well configured OS shouldn't allow instability caused by apps.

I think it's a mix of getting old, "stuff was better when I were a lad", and things moving else where.

When you were younger, you were almost certainly more excited about things which were not nearly as new as you thought. This is simply because when one is younger, one has less experience, so more things appear new. Where your older self now sees a rehashed idea from 1957 with pretty graphics instead of punch cards, your self 20 years ago would have seen a brilliant new idea. I think this inevitable and it's why us old farts don't instantly jump on the latest bandwagon. We know, for example that Hadoop is not actually a world changing thing: it's yet another distributed computing platform with plus points and minus points and which doesn't solve the killer latency problem all that well. A friend of mine mentioned that the rather fashionable startup he's minioning for, they worked through many of the most fashionable platforms, and ended up on the deeply unfasionable MPI because they had a latency sensitive problem and it turns out none of the cool new tech solve the old, hard problems all that well.

The second thing is due to good old selection bias and you remember the good ones from the days of yore that amounted to something and have forgotten the mounds of insane bullshit which I'm sure were there. This is not surprising: who *would* remember a mount of insane bullshit from 20 years ago.

And finally... something completely opposite. Industries do move in cycles. Things settle down and solidify/stagnate, which is what happened from the golden years of home computers (the 80s) moving into the beige box era. Sometimes all it means is that you have to look else where for the genuinely inspiring things that feel like they might change the world.

Despite teh bad rap it gets, cheap 3D printing is there for me. It's like the early 80s of home computers. There's all sorts of home-garage based operations. The pace of change and level of innovation is immense. Many operators can pretty much assemble one from scratch (you pretty much have to to keep the sodding things running), but it's also moving into a more commercial realm, as cheap, decent commercial ready made ones are slowly squeezing out the little garage companies. None the less there are plenty of genuinely interesting and innovative things happening and it's visibly improving month-by-month.

I also do some work in the small end of aerospace occasionally (not the big contractors) and I can assure you there's some amazingly exciting stuff coming down the pipeline. Read up on Skylon and the Sabre engine for example.

We're not so different.

You should visit LA some time. The mounts are all over. You may be confused because they're not always in the window. Most of my coworkers, for example, have their mounts down by the cig charger.

If by 'dead' you mean "ticketed" then, yep, you're right. That's why the eyes-free mode in the iPhone is used a lot. In LA the ticket is very cheap but the court fees push it up over $300. That has taught everybody I know to behave with their phones. Everybody uses their phone as a GPS in LA.

Why exactly is this bad? Weren't we making fun of the fatties just last week?

Just them?

You can add "yeah, but on a STEAM engine" if you go back far enough. Fun fact: if you look at some old drawings of Watt steam engines, you can see a pecliar sun-and-planet gear arrangement instead of a crank because someone patented the use of a crank ON A STEAM ENGINE. For bonus points they patented it after it was already in use, but that didn't stop them litigating.

Patents have basically been broken since their inception.

You've picked a strange topic to be butthurt about.