Most likely the school bus driver was on their phone as well. I’ve seen that shit so many times.

I’m a school bus driver and my district bans the use of phones on the buses. I don’t say a fucking thing about it. It keeps the kids occupied and out of doing worse things on the bus, and it’s not like 15 minutes less screen time per day is going to make the slightest difference in their lives.

I had a boss years ago who owned a temporary agency, and I had the pleasure of watching him berate his two receptionists – who made $7 an hour and who had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the success of the business – because his monthly income from the business had dropped from $40,000 to $25,000. Meanwhile he spent his entire day playing solitaire and listening to the Rush Limbaugh show.

OK, which one of the things I mentioned do you think is vastly and objectively superior to all others? Genuinely curious here.

I’ve worked professionally on Windows and Mac; using Visual Basic, C#, Java, Objective-C and Qt Creator (which is C++ and Javascript); for web apps, desktop applications, and mobile apps (iOS, Blackberry and Android). I have my personal preferences but they’re all viable platforms/languages/frameworks/devices and anything that needs doing can be done on them one way or another. The idea that one of these is vastly and objectively superior to all others is just pseudo-religious nonsense.

I get it now. As the Firesign Theater said: “ha ha that’s very logical.”

I don’t understand what you meant here. OP did mean to write “unhealthy”.

Windows Phone was great. I’d done Windows Mobile since 2005 and it was nice to be able to continue developing with C#/.NET and Visual Studio (back when it was still good) in a more modern OS. One thing that really spoiled me permanently was being able to compile, build and deploy the app I was working on to my test device effectively instantaneously – like, by the time I’d moved my hand over to the device, the app was already up and running. Then I switched to iOS where the same process could take minutes, also Blackberry where it might take half an hour or never happen at all.

Funny thing: RIM was going around circa 2010/2011 offering companies cash bounties of $10K to $20K to develop apps for Blackberry, since they were dying a rapid death but were still flush with cash. Nobody that I know of took them up on the offers. I tried to get my company to make a Windows Phone version of our software but I was laughed at (and deservedly so).

Overall I think preventing discussion is healthy

Did you mean unhealthy?

Being a nitrous fiend is bad.

Eventually you feel like one of those dudes dying on Mt. Everest. But at least it’s not ether.

Any place where you don’t step on rats when you get up to pee in the middle of the night is OK by me. Yes, I have lived in places where I stepped on rats at night.

You eventually reach an age where you want the bed at your center of gravity so you can just tip yourself on and off.

My neighbors tend to retaliate when I crank music and I value silence at least some of the time. Good headphones are enough for me.

I assumed he was sitting on a portable commode.

No Kaoss pad?

Yes.

Black holes are edible?

so you can focus on what really matters… meetings! collecting unemployment!

That would be incredibly ironic given that they completely fucking gave up on mobile devices when the iPhone came out.

It’s kind of funny how eagerly we programmers criticize “premature optimization”, when often optimization is not premature at all but truly necessary. A related problem is that programmers often have top-of-the-line gear, so code that works acceptably well on their equipment is hideously slow when running on normal people’s machines. When I was managing my team, I would encourage people to develop on out-of-date devices (or at least test their code out on them once in a while).