The anecdote I have is that one of my grand daughter's teeth are worse than my other grand children and grand nieces and nephews. She used RO water more than the others when she was younger, and her dentist reinforced the idea that RO water was unfriendly to early tooth health, apparently due to reduced fluoridation. I'm not suggesting that is worse than forever chemicals.

The things I've read about fluoridation make it sound like fluoride applied to the surfaces of the teeth (eg via brushing) has the most benefit. I have to wonder if your grand daughter was also using a non-fluoride toothpaste.

I’m dubious. Millions of people in the country are on wells and don’t use any fluoride, also fluoride isn’t present in every municipal drinking water supply.

We made the offer on our current house without seeing it and I know several others in the same situation.

The author brings up some important information that is not always easily noticed. The university should definitely setup a task force to look into the matter and give the author a paid position on the task force.

I agree. It really helps to read the description and not just the title. I have been in industrial controls since 1980, so I'm I'm not so quick to dismiss the introduction of the next new thing. Ten years ago, when the Raspberry PI was introduced, I didn't expect to see it as the go to thin client for manufacturing floor HMIs. Yet, in some, very large and well funded plants, it is. Am I ready to put the Opta in mission critical control? No. Am I happy to see a more open option for IoT? Yes.

That's unfair - I read the description at length, and quite honestly, I still can't understand why i'd ever use it. It looks like buzzwords over real use-cases. The partner, Finder, is known for making these types of devices, and outside of the "Arduino" stamp, they've made a device that has been in-market (and relatievly unused) for half a decade already.

This will not be a real option for IOT.

For what they are trying to claim is the target, I'd either use a PLC, or to your point, i'd mount a raspberry pi or embedded arm device.

As you say, the raspberry PI i understand - people need something to drive HMI/etc that isn't the horrible mess that most automation providers provide.

They want something to just hook a camera up to and not worry about spending 2 years writing codesys drivers or whatever.

This is trying to tread a middle ground, but the middle ground has better options - industrial PI with builtin PLC support, for example (https://www.industrialshields.com/industrial-plc-raspberry-p...)

That's because Arduino is sort of the worst of both worlds - they are actually horrible at pretty horrible at WiFi. Bluetooth i haven't tried in a while but it was also really bad. They are okay at I/O, but nothing is guaranteed in a meaningful way.

So as an option for IoT, it sucks.

At a slightly higher level, NRF does a much better job of producing rock-solid devices and ecosystem that can do bluetooth/wifi well, and throw in I/O.

At a lower level, everything equally sucks at wifi/bluetooth as this thing.

> At a slightly higher level, NRF does a much better job of producing rock-solid devices and ecosystem that can do bluetooth/wifi well, and throw in I/O.

Minor nitpick just because I want them to be credited properly. nRF is the product, nordic semiconductor is the company.

Yes, you are correct, i typed it too quickly.

You're right. I should not have judged like that and I apologize. What I should have said is that I have seen a lot of misplaced skepticism in this industry and I never really understood it. There is plenty of room for Arduino to enter this market and develop good products. We'll see what happens.

jstarfish did not say that missionary work would benefit the target audience of the missionary, and you did nothing to disabuse what he did say.

coastal.com redirects to eyebuydirect.com. Is that the same one you are talking about?

Eyebuydirect is a Luxottica subsidiary. Coastal became Clearly became a Luxottica subsidiary. I think Zenni is independent for now (couldn't find any evidence to the contrary).

I think in 500 years the sky should look like a blue and white dot outside of the window of the space craft.

> I think software engineering is vastly different from other kinds of engineering

In that case, it kind of make me wonder if engineering is the proper label.

Well, I should explain: Software is created in the symbolic realm rather than the "physical" one. So, software has little to do with physics; and software is all design, no "labor".

So yes you could say "engineering" is the wrong label (and we go back to "development"), but it's still interesting that ethically they have such similar concerns.

Software engineering is a small subset of software development. Most software development is more akin to skilled construction labor than to real engineering. And that's not a bad thing.

Partially agree, but over a lifetime, many of us need only open a few doors. Picking an area of study that opens the doors you will want to open at some unknown time in the future is still hard. More is not necessarily better for everyone.