From the headline, I thought this was a story about damage to a smartphone.

I wonder if this has anything to do with the double-standard that Facebook applies to nudity in images. Posting a drawing or painting of a male butt can get your photo removed and your account suspended, while posting a photograph of female breasts gets nothing. Too many straight guys reviewing people's image uploads?

"Diversity is not a virtue", said the straight white dude who fears he will lose his unearned position of privilege if diversity is valued in the workforce.

"There is nothing worthwhile in diversity in and of itself," said the straight white dude who fears he will lose his unearned position of privilege because diversity in the workforce makes his character traits less valued.

Of course you are right, straight white dude: diversity in the workforce doesn't do a whole lot to directly make things better for you. But there are other people in the world who matter too. As much as you do, even (if you can wrap your self-centered solipsistic little brain about that). It is a virtue, because it's worthwhile for them.

"Older people have families, they come first."

No, I don't. So they do not.

But I'm almost 50, and I figure that I've successfully interviewed for my last tech job. That doesn't mean I'll never get hired for another job, but it does mean that I won't get another job through the hiring process that recruits younger techs. If I get one, it'll be through networking, through the still-good-old-boy system.

I thought that BoringSSL was named in honor of classic Superman artist Wayne Boring.

You can find some interesting examples of Chinese (non)reliability in the motorscooter industry. With no domestically-manufactured scooters on the US market, there's a range of imports sold here, from the top-price European bikes (e.g. Piaggio Vespa) at the top, Japanese (Honda, Yamaha) and Taiwanese (Genuine, SYM) in the middle, and P.R.Chinese (generics) at the bottom. Those "chinascoots" sell for mere hundreds of dollars, have a poor reputation for quality, and are sneered at by everyone who understands that.

However, a few scooter manufacturers based elsewhere have tried opening plants (or using existing ones) in the PRC, and applying their own corporate quality-control standards to them, with rather good results (e.g. Piaggo's PRC-made Fly). You'd have to be both racist and ignorant of the iPhone to think that Chinese workers can't produce quality goods; like anyone else, they build to the specs that are given to them and standards that are expected of them. The difference is the legal environment in which they work. They don't have the environmental, human rights, or labor standards of their competitors in other countries, and that's why they cost less. (But give it time: I hear the US GOP has a plan to fix that.)

So you've never heard of someone getting on in years, looking back, and telling younger people not to make the same mistakes they made?

(Maybe someday it'll even happen to you.)

Dear God.

I used to know this guy. It took me a little while for it to register, but the goofy grin confirms it: this is the same doofus I went to college with. The college is a haven for Republican Calvinism (i.e. God chooses certain people to be successful), steeped in the worship of capitalism (God's invisible hand rewarding hard work). (The Amway/Blackwater dynasty are major donors.) I didn't know Dave well (sorry, no damaging stories to tell), but he was active in student government, and struck me as a classic empty suit: superficially charming with an upper-middle-class sense of entitlement. Not stupid, but not a deep thinker, the sort who doesn't question the values he was taught as a child... because they've always worked for him. (One of the key ways I differ from him.) I should've known he'd run for Congress someday.

I'm sorry.

"We are not currently aware of any automated technology that could do that (detect sarcasm). No one is considered a leader in that..."

Is he serious?

Have you ever tried to do this? Without your own car? Perhaps with a disability? Are you lucky enough to live in a city that has a library? How far is it to walk to it from where you live? Do you have cold winters there, or hot and humid summers? Is there public transportation that goes from near your house to the library? If so, how many buses does it take? What's the fare, and how much does that add up to if you do it once a day? How long does the ride take? Do you have someone to watch your kids while you do it, or do you bring them along? Did it even occur to you to consider any of these questions?

This "Internet Essentials" program might help some poor people, but it's only available to people with children (eligible for school lunch programs). It's a typical example of how we consider children who live in poverty to be "innocent victims", but adults who can't work due to disability or lack of jobs are treated as if they were unworthy of assistance. In this case, internet access could make a huge difference for them in terms of quality of life and/or additional cost savings (giving access to low-entry-price services, such as VOIP and Netflix instead of POTS and CATV), or the ability to effectively try to re-enter the workforce (incredibly difficult without in-home internet access).

I've gone 10 days without washing (other than water), on a wilderness backpacking trip. Despite the fact that I was sweating a lot every day, at the end of the expedition I didn't feel as "dirty" as I would've expected. I think we could find a happy medium between our modern antibacterial-soap fetish and ye olde annual bath.

The stopped-clock metaphor is rather apt in this case. Rand Paul's hands are stuck in one position ("the federal government is wrong"), and from time to time that position is correct.

Complaining about DRM right after a snarky comment about how old-fashioned it is to want your own copy of a movie was the best laugh I've had all day. Because the only people who complain about DRM on video discs are people who want their own copies. Meanwhile, the oh-so-modren approach of streaming movies from cloud services is wrapped up in all sorts of DRM, as well as the certainty that you'll lose access to them one way or another down the line (the main legitimate argument against DRM).

This line of thinking – mechanical keys are not perfect and sometimes don't work properly, therefore we must replace them with something else – fails to take into consideration that whatever we replace it with will also not be perfect and will also sometimes not work properly, especially in new and unexpected ways that we are not prepared for. Fact is, the mechanical ignition key is a pretty well-debugged piece of technology. It isn't fundamentally broken, and doesn't need to be "fixed" by throwing it out and hastily replacing it with something else, especially something without a century of usage behind it.

I'll be honest: I'm an old-fashioned person who liked having the ability to shut off a computer by physically opening the circuit that powered it (i.e. flipping a big crimson switch). As a tech, I get frustrated with equipment that has a "power button" that really only serves to put the device in low-power standby mode, such that turning it "off" and back "on" doesn't reinitialize it (requiring me to instead pull the power cable from the wall ... which only works if it doesn't have a battery). The "open the pod bay doors, Hal" approach doesn't give me warm fuzzies, mostly due to experience with the real world where new technology routinely fails to live up to the naïve expectations of the young and/or credulous.