OK, I am in pain from laughing so hard!

Some of my favs include:

* Effortify! "Share your favorite efforts and discover new ones." http://tiffzhang.com/startup/?...

* Sprayit! "Spray like never before." http://tiffzhang.com/startup/?...

and

* Insectify! "The evolution of the insect" http://tiffzhang.com/startup/?...

Fact: Putting the word "fact" before your sentence does not absolve you of the need to back it up with actual evidence.

Except for gaming. Gaming is really the only thing that needs a computer newer than 7 years old now.

Right now, I download my TV shows/movies from Pirate Bay or wherever, and then I get the DVD's when they are released. I can easily play DVD's without using any proprietary software, and I can also rip/re-encode them to any format I want (for things like watching movies on my phone at work). The physical media has value to me because of how useful it is (and the fact that I don't have to keep terabytes of videos around). I don't care about Blu-ray, or 1080p...most DVD's look fine to me on my 1080p monitor (considering I am usually less than a foot away). I don't own a TV. The only DVD's that look "fuzzy" are old TV shows, and it's not the DVD format that's making them fuzzy, but rather the fact that they are old shows that weren't recorded at a particularly high quality. If they make it so the physical media no longer has that value to me...then I will simply stop buying it and download everything. I'm not paying money for LESS convenience. If there is going to be less convenience, I will simply put that money into lots of extra hard drive space instead.

Honestly, I'm still happy with DVD's. And I see zero point to higher resolutions than 1080p at this time. Especially since I'm less than a foot away from my monitor when using it. I don't own a TV, if I watch something it'll be either on that computer or on my laptop (which is 1368x768). And DVD is more than good enough for my needs. Does 1080p video look better? Yes. Does it look better enough to make it worth dealing with all of the DRM (I won't use proprietary software to play movies)? No, not at all. Honestly, the only DVD's I have that look "fuzzy" at 1080p are old TV shows...and the DVD is basically the same quality as the masters they had since they weren't recorded at high resolution.

You laugh, but old school rotary phones could still call for emergency help if the power went out, they didn't hang, they didn't get viruses, they didn't get firmware "upgrades" that stopped them from working properly or at all, they didn't run out of their own batteries in the middle of a long call...

For once, I'm 100% in agreement with Khyber. Smartphones in a world with modern laptops, tablets, headsets and feature phones just look like a mediocre compromise to me. About the only thing they seem to be better at than any of the numerous other devices available is letting someone check Facebook every 10 seconds without actually having to take anything out of a pocket. At least until someone updates something remotely for them and breaks that functionality, anyway...

The pool of people who are knowledgeable about the practices, challenges, and daily business realities of the telecommunications industry (or any industry for that matter) is a small one indeed; good luck finding someone in that pool with the experience necessary to lead an agency the size of the FCC who hasn't worked for the industry at one time in his or her life.

That's a matter of perspective. I've been there numerous times and have found that the Canadian side has the best views but the American side is less of a tourist trap. The Canadians have done a piss poor job of keeping development in check, in fact, there's a school of thought saying that the Horseshoe Falls are perpetually mist covered (historically they weren't) because of changes in the local wind currents brought about by development on the Canadian side.

Besides, the coolest thing there is the Cave of the Winds, and that's in good ole USA. No trip would be complete without seeing both sides, but there are plenty of people (myself included, obviously) that think the American side is at least the equal of the Canadian side.

I think it's a rich person who has nothing better to do with his money.

Niagara Falls is in Ontario. You're not making it to Quebec unless you swim across Lake Ontario, into the St. Lawrence River, and downriver for 50 miles or so. If you can do that learning French should be easy.....

Yeah, it's like three or four whole mouse clicks to make it happen....

C'Mon people, Microsoft does enough shit wrong, we don't need to make crap up.

???

The giveaway was probably when the blue screen was replaced with CIA's logo and the text "All your base are belong to us."

Ask Siemens. They designed the equipment the Iranians are using and wrote most of the control software to operate in a Windows environment. Not that it would have mattered, once you've got an agency with the resources of CIA or Mossad after you it's only a matter of time before they find a way in. Linux is not proof against malware delivered via HUMINT assets.

It sounds like you're a little older than me but we both see this much the same way.

I have as much interest in useful or interesting new technologies today as I had when I was 21. I'm also significantly quicker at getting up to speed with them and more aware of things like pros and cons and the importance of choosing the right tool for the job than I used to be at that age.

However, if you asked me right now, I'm quite sure that I couldn't crank out a new TodoMVC example in this week's front-end JS framework as fast as a 21-year-old who just learned it can. Since not a lot of people solve real problems or make real money writing toy to-do apps, I don't find this situation too threatening. ;-)

The thing is, I've long since stopped being impressed by this week's front-end JS framework, this week's UI trends and visual design language, and this week's new programming language that looks and feels like C or JS with a thin coat of paint over it. I could get up to speed with them to the point where I too could write to-do apps in half an hour, but to me that's like deciding to learn some new GUI toolkit just to write Tetris or learning some new database API just to write a PIM or whatever we're calling them these days. As you say, these kinds of tools are so ephemeral now that they tend to be very trendy and generate a lot of hype, but they are often popular more because of some big sponsoring organisation than any particular innovation or technical merit.

To me, about the only thing more dull is evangelists for a specific browser (why?!) telling us all about these great new features it has for writing large-scale applications... when the biggest web apps out there still tend to be orders of magnitude smaller than stuff many of us "old programmers" were working on in the last millennium, at which time some of those features actually were quite innovative.

Next week, all these elite young programmers, who are leaving people like you and me and our meaningless track records of building actual working and revenue-generating projects in their wake, will probably notice that MV* is not the only possible UI architecture, that building an application that has to run for years around a framework that has a shelf life measured in months might not be such a great idea, and that JS is actually a very bad and very slow language that just becomes not quite so bad with the ES6 changes and only moderately slow with modern JIT compiling engines.

Just don't tell them that the entire web apps industry probably represents closer to 5% of the programming world than 95% and some of these state-of-the-art ideas are actually 50 years old. Such talk is the stuff of nightmares, and they aren't old enough to hear that kind of horror story yet. ;-)