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.

My boss and I routinely look at new tools and technology with an eye to solving our company's problems and build cool new stuff. Our goal is not to embrace flavour-of-the-month technology. It's to identify better solutions to old problems, or find good solutions to new problems. Tools have to work, or they serve no purpose. Everything else follows from there.

We do most of our development in C on Linux, but have incorporated virtualization and cloud computing, new technologies that provide better solutions to old problems. The jury is still out on other goodies. I like python, while my boss prefers perl. I like Django, while he prefers PHP. He's the boss, so I write lots of perl and PHP... :-}

...laura

It's on the wall, for all to see. Inscrutable display, mysterious controls, the works. When the weather changes it tends to lag a day. So the first warm day we cook with the heat on. The first cold day we freeze with the heat off.

I prefer opening the door out on to the balcony. Fresh air is so much nicer than anything the HVAC can do.

At home I leave my bedroom window open - even if only a crack - all year.

...laura

My fave is still the original Star Wars. It was fresh, it was new, yes, it was hokey, but it worked. Check your sophistication at the door and enjoy the ride!

I find the prequel movies unwatchable.

Some things never change: when The Empire Strikes Back was imminent, they re-released Star Wars in the theatres to get some buzz going. It was accompanied by a short, a trip to the Moon, assembled from NASA footage. Some younger members of the audience expressed loud displeasure at the "fake" movie. They didn't read the credits where it said "Filmed on location by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration".

...laura

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.

I double-ROT13 all of my textual communication.

I did my first year Computer Science in Algol W with punched cards.

The system required a blue "ticket card" to do anything other than list your card deck. We were issued a supply of ticket cards, and could (and did) buy more at the campus bookstore. We punched our cards ourselves. We were very careful to write everything out, to walk through our programs to make sure the program was syntactically correct and might have a chance of doing what it was supposed to do before spending a ticket card to find out what the compiler thought of it. We had immediate turnaround, which meant you could go through ticket cards that much faster.

I now program mainly in C on Linux boxes. The programs I create are orders of magnitude more complicated than what I created then. My interactive productivity is much higher too. I'm not sure I'd even attempt much of what I do now if I didn't have much more powerful computing and debugging facilities available.

...laura