Call HR. The candidates are not liars anymore.

The one thing I still use YouTube for is music. Sometimes you just get an album cover and the song. Sometimes lyrics. Sometimes you get the original video, if it hasn't been taken down. If they put all that behind a paywall, I'll do without for a while and then chose something else that's music-only. The video was just a nice add-on.

I was never a heavy participant on YouTube, uploading just a couple rather lame videos before... wait for it... Google demanded my phone number. That's what made me stop logging in. I just didn't have that desperate a desire to participate

So. Real ID turned me into a passive user. Demands for money will just make me go away.

Da-na-na na-na na-na Batmaaan!

I'm just sort of picturing a scene at the university bookstore. "What? Six thousand rupees for a cheap blue plastic dagger to leave on the desk? That's robbery?"

"Suck it Sanjay. The professor only accepts the standard dagger".

I gave up on conformity a long time ago (I suck at it) but I didn't strive to be a non-conformist (I would have preferred to be normal).

Result? I've found that the opinions of others are all over the map. I stand still, they do the moving.

For example, there was a time when everybody was wearing these glasses with really narrow lenses, like horizontal strips of glass. I hated them. I wanted the kind of glasses I've always worn--thick frames, big lenses.

I get out to California, and for a year or two, people were complimenting my glasses.

Now nobody says anything about them.

Crap like that. I don't care. Then there are other, far more important things that matter... and if you are true to yourself, the rest of the world may or may not like you for it; but at least you don't hate yourself.

Anyway, as for the "hipster effect", maybe it just so happens that there are only so many generic categories. The odds that you'll really stand out for anything just aren't that great. In fact, the odds that you'll even be perceived as unique aren't that great. I've had people tell me I look like somebody I know on a number of occasions over the years. It has happened when I had short hair and a mustache. It has happened when I had long hair and was clean-shaven.

I care more about the price of gas.

Net neutrality means that QoS based on port (e.g., VOIP gets priority over HTTP) is OK; but QoS based on content or the owner of an IP is not OK.

We all understand that; but the mouth-breathers and cronies that will regulate the Internet will generate 1600 pages of crap that nobody can read, just to define "QoS".

Reagan, speaking at the gate.

It knows when you are sleeping
It knows when you're awake
It knows when you've been bad or good,
So be good for goodness sake...

Therefore, Big Data is Santa Claus.
I wouldn't have guessed; but the clues were there all along. He's a communist, which explains the red suit and giving away stuff that kids should be earning; but it still doesn't explain the flying reindeer. We're working on it though. We'll get back to you...

Retcon Midichlorians out of Star Wars. Shouldn't be too difficult to do.

"At one time, it was believed that the Force was the collective intelligence of microscopic organisms. Later, Jedi scientists discovered that they were merely attracted to the Force, not the creators of it".

As an added bonus, we'd get Jedi Scientists which sounds like it could be really cool if they didn't fu.... oh well, so much for that plan.

Now if you'll excuse me, duty at the Jedi Science Academy calls...

It's called "The Discovery Channel", but if they show us a man being eaten by a large snake, what is the discovery there?

The discovery is that if you try to do commercial educational programming on cable, this is what happens. I'm waiting to see if it ends up as 24hr pro wrestling. So the whole thing's gone meta. Don't watch the Discovery channel. Observe it.

I heard all kinds of stories about sand replenishment on beaches when I lived back east. The most interesting story involved dredging a few miles off-shore and dumping it on the beach. This had the unintended consequence of churning up the occasional sunken treasure. Visiting the beach shortly after such a replenishment operation, maybe you'll find a doubloon, but more likely an old nail or an interesting piece of sea-glass.

California doesn't seem to have this problem. I'll hazard a guess that it has something to do with the continuous seismic activity replenishing things. Also, young mountains bring silt down and many of the beaches are not sandy in the first place. So. The "nightmare scenario" of sand loss is a rocky shore with what we call "pocket beaches" of sand here and there. Strangely, I actually prefer this rugged shoreline. It's more interesting to me. If it comes to that on the East Coast, they'll adapt. I understand Home Sapiens is a highly adaptable species, even though it complains about change a lot.

Actually it makes plenty of sense. The choice of whether or not to realize a capital loss should be his. If he pays BTC and gets refunded in cash, that complicates matters. My understanding of how the IRS would treat this is hazy, as I'm neither a tax expert nor a BTC user; but it's not totally out to lunch. He may have to write down the loss when he really wasn't looking to do a tax-loss sale. Even if the tax issue were not in play, the decision of when to convert should be his.

There must be a name for this phenomenon.

Corruption.

I didn't know. I knew he was the CEO of Apple and that's it. If you asked random people on the street "Who is Tim Cook?" and even if you gave them hints like, "He's a business man" a lot of them wouldn't know he is CEO. A good number of those people would be holding iPhones. It's not something that matters to them. I knew who he was because I care about the direction of technology. I didn't know his orientation because I don't care.

So, kind of like William Randolph Hearst, but without the charisma and Hollywood starlets at parties?

So, kind of like papers that actually had "Democrat" in the name of the paper because, you know, they were going to slant everything that way and made no bones about it.

So, "Yawwwwn", because it's a company rag (except that it's online so there's no actual rag) and everybody knows it.

Now, if only we were getting a decent education and actually being taught how to think instead of how to use Office. We'd understand all of this, and be able to analyze the news ourselves based in part on the source.