He's starting to rub me the wrong way as a sort of attention whore
No doubt. The man legally changed his name to Kim Dotcom. That's not attention whoreish at all...
/sarcasm
YES! I just spent the last 5 minutes searching for the exact joystick I had for my C64 when all I had to do was look further down the thread. That's *exactly* the joystick I had. Oddly there are many that look very similar, but the name even rings a bell with me.
On a side note, my absolute largest regret in life is I let my wife garage sale my C64. I had a tape drive, two 1541s, an MPS801 printer (no true descenders FTW!), 1702 monitor, and about 3 shoe boxes full of 5 1/4" floppies. Can't believe what an idiot I was for agreeing to that. My step daughter and son are still pissed at her for doing it and me for agreeing to it (even though they were very young/not born yet at the time).
Good point.
I was thinking about it, and part of it may be that the way teenagers are communicating is evolving past phones and text messages. As I said he IS technologically literate so he would probably be on the cutting edge of any such trends, whether I realize it or not. I will say he Skypes a lot. Mainly with a couple friends he plays Minecraft with, but I looked over his friends list the other day in Skype and it's pretty big. He doesn't have a video camera for his computer (and thankfully hasn't asked for one) so it's all audio. But there's a lot of it.
I guess if that's the case that would make his opinion valuable to tech companies. And I guess he did participate in one paid research study sponsored by Mozilla about how, when, where and why he uses Firefox. So maybe tech companies have recognized all of this before me. But that's not surprising. For being smart, I'm notoriously bad at noticing obvious things.
Marginally more on-topic: I still don't have a "smart phone". I have a shitty Samsung feature phone (which I hate; I want my old Razr back, but I digress). I'm almost always in front of a desktop with a net connection, I commute all of 5 miles to work, don't travel, and mostly shop online. Why would I need a smart phone?
I'm with you. I'm 42. The first cell phone I used was when I was probably 24 and it was one of those huge old Motorola bricks. The first one I actually owned was probably 1999 or so (I was 29).
Maybe a more relevant answer would be my son. We got him his first cell phone when he was ~12 and more or less just so we could coordinate rides to and from various events. He's a weird kid, though. He has to be the only teenager (he's almost 14 now) who pretty much NEVER uses his cell phone. He's very technologically literate (he's my kid after all
The AC comment was more or less a joke. I've often joked with my wife that I could be happy anywhere with reliable power, air conditioning, and a good net connection. If I did live in Alaska (also in the US, however), I would trade AC for central heating.
The US was founded on freedom and freedom was important to most of us until, it seems, the last 10-20 years. Now, too many are willing to live with considerably less freedom if it means more security and more government cheese.
If you want to put yourself on the map, publish your own map.