And that concerns me on a desktop for what reason exactly?

It's just like Windows 8 all over. All hail the all mighty and all important mobile market, the old desktop farts can as well eat shit, who gives a rat's ass 'bout them? We got them anyway.

Now. Let's wait a few versions.

And even back then people saw it's a crappy idea and didn't want it.

But hey, maybe people today are stupider than they were like 17 years ago, let's try it again!

Well, let's be honest here, SHA-1 really is a wee bit dated.

Leaving it in is not as bad as pretending a https page with SSLv2 support was secure because, hey, it does use SSL and is HTTPS and shit, ain't it... but still.

If you repeat something enough times, people will believe it. I know a few women in IT, and without fail all of them not only come from a home that actively tried to avoid gender stereotyping (it is btw interesting how many women in IT have parents that either have psychology or educational backgrounds) but who also didn't want to be "girly" when they were young, i.e. didn't enjoy the usual "social" activities girls seem to be doing. Which does actually lead to what you describe, i.e. them feeling more "home" in social situations where interpersonal communication and networking plays a key role.

Hence I highly doubt it's an innate female trait. It's simply what we expect females to do, so girls grow up "learning" it.

Wowie, and just as I thought that the whole gender stereotyping was a thing of the past...

Affirmative action only means that women don't have to work twice but thrice as hard to prove that they weren't just hired because they're a woman. Yes, it may land her a job. But how happy would you be in a job where the immediate assumption is that you suck at it and only got it because of government mandated nepotism, no matter how good you really are?

You are aware that there's little chance of getting a Bush without a Dick?

Most really smart people I know tend to lean left. Maybe 'cause they have no money problems and can afford thinking past their next Learjet.

And I'm far from a business person. I'm more the techie myself. But I know one thing, from personal experience as well as learning from history: It's not production that drives the economy. It's selling. That's especially blatantly obvious in an economy like ours that heavily depends on services. If "producing" services was the issue, every problem the US economy has would be instantly solved. No unemployment anymore, everyone can produce some kind of service. And if it's sweeping some dirt off the highway.

What matters is selling. And to sell, that's also something that doesn't need a BA degree to notice, whoever is supposed to buy has to have the means to do so. He needs money. And of course the "want" to buy, but that's hardly the issue in a society that grew up with "wannahavemore" as the creed.

That system is self pushing as we've learned in the past. People who had more money were also able to spend more money, leading to more jobs being created for services (also something the supply side crowd doesn't want to accept: Jobs are not created by employers but by customers!), leading to more people having money.

Sadly that system is also self destroying with people having less money, spending less, destroying jobs by not buying services, leading to more people with less money.

The race to the bottom, with companies paying less and less to the point where we now have people working two or three jobs just to make ends meet, is killing our market. People with no money can not buy and consume. And without consumption, there is no market in the end!

I would've called Ford a lot, but Marxist? I kinda doubt it.

"It is not the employer who pays the wages. Employers only handle the money. It is the customer who pays the wages."

-- Henry Ford

We're a society that depends heavily on the service sector. Over 3/4 of the GDP comes from services. And over 3/4 of the people depend in one way or another on them for their job.

Services are awesome when it comes to generation of GDP. Because it's pretty hard to store them. They have to be used when produced. More, they usually have to be consumed. And only by consumption, value is generated. Yes, consumption. Not production. That's hard for the supply side preachers to wrap their head around, but tell me, what did you create when you produce something? Revenue? No. You accrued cost. You had to invest material and manpower to produce something. Without having someone to sell it to, it's quite worthless.

Value is generated when you sell it. But that doesn't contribute to the GDP yet. Because if whoever purchased your good or service uses it to produce other goods and services, the value of your product becomes part of the cost for his product. That's, globally speaking, a zero sum game. The 100 bucks you just earned might have gone into your pocket, but the economy, the supply side, did not generate anything at all yet. Because some other supplier is now 100 bucks short and needs to find an end customer, a consumer, that not only pays those 100 bucks on top of whatever he has to ask for to cover the other costs he has for material usage and his manpower.

Only when someone buys such a good or service and removes it from existence by consumption, actual revenue is generated. That, or when you export it.

Now, as stated in the entrance sentence, we're pretty dependent on the service sector. And it's damn hard to export services. How do you sell a haircut to some Frenchman? Only if he comes to you as a tourist. And ... well, let's say the US didn't really make themselves very attractive as a tourism destination lately.

If you want to sell services, you need people with money. And most services are simply bought and paid for (and consumed) by average people. For a simple, logical reason: I only need one haircut. No matter how rich I may be. I only need one gardener to cut my grass and I only need one house cleaning service to clean up my mess. I won't hire another one.

Services, though, are something you need to be able to afford, and they're usually also the first thing people cut back on when money gets tight. When facing the decision between having something to eat for the rest of the week or getting a haircut, I guess it's easy to determine which one it's going to be.

In a nutshell, and the TL;DR version: If you want jobs, make sure people have money to spend. It works pretty well for countries that didn't axe their social programs and ensured that there would be many people who can still spend money on more than just food&shelter.

But these are at least things that you might consider when thinking of "internet" and being connected and online. But who'd think that their stove could "go online"?

It's worse than that. Even and especially if people don't WANT to deal with that "internet of things" crap and just want a stove that "just works", it may open a can of worms even worse than if they tried. If various computer parts of the past are a lesson (WiFi routers come to mind especially), things will be configured with as little security and as much availability in mind as possible. Read: It should work out of the box without configuration necessary.

Now guess what happens when someone buys a stove because he wants to cook, doesn't give a shit about the built in WiFi and never bothers to configure it while said WiFi is configured to connect to whatever is within reach to ensure people won't call for their "stove WiFi not working" because they'd have to do some security configurations.

Press that Start button! See if I care!

Uh... some of my appliances already exhibit that behaviour. Fuckin' Chinese crap!

And in a few 1000 years people will claim it's religious mumbo-jumbo and create fabulous stories of how we worshipped some god named IRS.

What? What did YOU think that whole crap in Egypt is about?

Ist der Ruf erst mal ruiniert, lebt sich's völlig ungeniert.

It loses a bit in translation, but essentially the meaning is "once your reputation is ruined, you can as well stop having any shame".