[At a faculty meeting about sexual harassment:] "...we were handed a printed list of 'guidelines.' Number one on the list was: 'Do not make unwanted sexual advances.' Someone demanded querulously from the back, 'But how do you know they're unwanted until you try?' (Okay, it was me.) Our leader, David, seemed oddly flummoxed by the question... --Laura Kipnis, "Men: Notes From An Ongoing Investigation" (Henry Hold, 2014)

I still use a Blackberry. It has--gasp--FIVE hardware buttons. It's not confusing at all.

The article followed current fashion: Grey-on-white type. Easier-to-read black-on-white is soooo boring.

I am old enough to remember when there were a few airliner crashes every year. The improvement since my distant youth came from decades of slogging detail work and accumulated knowledge. That's just the kind of detailed subtle knowledge a start-up company won't have.

This is one of those ideology-driven subjects where everyone starts with a result and works backwards. Ironically, the "negative income tax" was advocated my Milton Friedman in 1960. Too simple for liberals, too humane for conservatives.

The root problem is this: The Android system does not allow you to back up images of your device (via USB to a PC or Mac) and restore the device from a PC or Mac when something goes wrong. With Desktops and Laptops, I save images of C: and Macintosh HD (using Paragon software for PCs, the built in Disk Utility for the Macs). I also save my data on other partitions than C: or Macintosh HD where allowed. When something goes badly wrong I don't even try to figure it out; I just restore the last good image.

So a devise you haven't paired with can access your's via Blue-Tooth. And to make it even better, they've extended the range. This is an improvement?

I was self-taught because in 1963, when I got out of school, there was no one teaching. They taught me FORTRAN syntax and how to submit a job on punch cards and threw me in the deep end. With considerable wasted time, at my employer's expense, I eventually caught on to good practice techniques that are elementary now. I am against self-teaching. With coding (as with probably theory and statistical inference) it is all too easy to think you know more than you do. Just because your program runs, and gives the right answer on a few test cases, does not mean your code is secure, the inevitable bugs will be easy to trace, or that anyone (including you) will be able to figure out what you did 6 months later. If many coders are self-taught, that may partly explain the sad state of software.

The New York Times logon does not work with Firefox 0.9.3. It worked with 0.9.2; I didn't change anything on purpose when I installed 0.9.3 over it.