As opposed to movies and TV, which never, ever suffer from bad acting.

Yup, thanks. It's been many years, obviously.

The fact that helloworld.c compiles to 11k has less to do with bloat than it has to do with people generally not caring about 11k. You could get rid of that 11k, but to do so, you'd have to make trade offs that either make real programs either slower or bigger, or make compilation slower. Very few people would make those trade offs in the other direction. Those that do either use special purpose compilers or (more likely) write in assembly.

Back in the DOS days, any moderately competent programmer knew how to copy arbitrary data to screen buffer, allowing you to display text without any libraries. It's been many years, so I am probably getting this wrong, but in psuedocode it'd look something like

char*cp="Hello World";
char *addr=0xB8000000;
while(*addr++ = *cp++);

That's the C version, of course. You'd actually do it in assembly. My suspicion is that you could do it in on the order of 20 to 25 bytes, but again, it's been decades since I've done anything like that.

Have you actually tried it?

I've noticed that people who like to post long screeds about how LCD is no worse than eInk usually have never actually used eInk.

Personally, I've read extensively on everything from a CRT to a laptop to an old Palm III, and I am willing to pay for a dedicated eInk device because, in my extensive experience, eInk is more comfortable to read on. If you've done the same and find LCD adequate, that's fine, but if your one of the many people that's never actually used eInk for a minute or two, I'm not sure your opinion on the adequacy of LCD for reading is particularly useful.

I think I'll send a letter to my congresswoman asking for a bill requiring all text ads be at least 141 characters in length.

The trouble with these sorts of devices is that they scream "secret data here!". I'd be real curious how those nickels look on an airport X-ray machine.

If I wanted to sneak information around, I'd put it on hidden directory is an SD card full of tourist photos and I'd leave it sitting in my camera. Ideally, I'd want it in a file that would get deleted during the camera's "delete photo" operation. (Probably take some camera research to figure out the best device. Depending on the goal, it could be placed in the photodata directly.) With appropriate social engineering, one might even be able to get the bad guys to order you to delete it if things go pear shaped.

You realize that the last PPC Macs are so slow that they have little hope of running a modern game anyway, right?

I am old enough to remember reading this article back in 1995. His view was uncommon back then, though shared by a lot of anti-Internet curmudgeons. His article was a reaction to all the people touting the Internet as something that would swallow up all commerce.

Or maybe, given the way crime has been dropping since 1992, society is actually generating more caring, less violent children despite what the media and researchers with agendas would have you believe.

That same area experienced an ungodly 9.5 earthquake (worst ever recorded) in 1960 so they have both experience and incentive in earthquake safety.

Twitter doesn't do anything like this. It just gives you a flat view from the people you follow, and lets you manually search using hand-entered search terms.

If you bought an HDMI cable for $60, you are an idiot. I bought an 8' one at Frys for $14.95 last weekend.

You know, whenever I hear the complaint "they won't hire me because I don't know $ProgrammingLanguage. This is stupid, because you can learn a programming language in two weeks!" I have to wonder what they were doing in the two weeks before the interview.

Exactly. To quote the article in two places:

16.7 percent for everyone aged 15 to 24, 8.2 percent for everyone aged 25 to 44, and 6.3 percent for everyone aged 45 and older. So, the older you are, the less likely you are to be unemployed.

The median weekly salary for workers in the 16-to-24 age bracket is about 41 percent less than what someone aged 25 to 44 makes -- and they're making 6 percent less than the folks in the 55-and-up group.

At 44, I've finally moved fully into management. The last production line of code I wrote was about a year ago, capping a 23 year career as a programmer. I moved into management because it paid well. I am firmly convinced, given the headhunters who've called and people I've talked to that I could have stayed in coding without much fear. (Assuming I continued to stay up-to-date technically.) However, my salary as a coder was as high as I could expect it to go and so the only way up was management.