[Citation needed]

Uhhh...actually Win 10 Phone got updates a hell of a lot longer than damn near every android OEM, the wife's Win 10 phone got updates right up until the EOL which was nearly 3 years

Well sure. It's way easier to accomplish that when you're updating only a few dozen devices.

That could be both companies' new slogans:

"Welcome to Netflix/McDonalds: Crap with world wide appeal!"

Derp. You're right. Reading comprehension this early in the morning. Something something coffee.

Someone vote this AC up.

This is a data mining windfall for Cloudflare. If anything, Cloudflare should be paying Mozilla for this.

.... but this is the same government that says we should have backdoors on all civilian encryption schemes and they'd keep those perfectly safe. Right. I'm sure nothing bad could happen from that.

... not a product.

It's a tough situation. If you incentivize fixing "problem accounts", then you create the perverse incentive for people to create problems so that they can fix them and earn more.

Any incentive program needs oversight to watch for the most common abuses, which means that it needs to be simple enough to spot, and managed by people smart enough to maintain it.

I manage the incentive program for my department where I work, and I can tell you that it falls into what I feel is the 3-leg stool equation.

1. It has to benefit the customers
2. It has to benefit the employees
3. It has to benefit the company

If you can pull this off, you're good, but a BIG PART of this is human understanding.

Example. Last month one of my teams spent the entire month dealing with a messy bunch of clients from an acquisition. As such, their productivity (by the raw numbers) were way below the minimum thresholds for participation in the incentive program.

Their supervisor brought this concern to me. I'm not about to punish one of the best teams I have because they busted their asses to provide good service to clients we just gained from another company we purchased (and want to retain!!!).

So I said fine, those techs get an average of the 3 previous months' performance for bonus payouts for the month of August.

The techs were very happy with this (and continue to not shy away from work just because it's "difficult" or may detract from the raw numbers everyone is bonused on), their supervisor is the hero because he looked out for his troops, and I'm the understanding manager because I understand that no numbers for any incentive program can exist in a vacuum.

Productivity continues so the company benefits, the customers benefited and will continue to do so, and the employees benefited -- but only because human understanding made for reasonable exceptions.

If you don't run an incentive program with these kinds of approaches, you deserve the mess you inevitably get.

There was no declaration of war in either US invasion of Iraq. World War II was the last time the United States actually declared war.

No. And that is a very real drawback of a notebook. I've tinkered with computerized note taking applications for that reason but have never settled on one. There is something about putting pen to paper that forces me to think about what I am writing. And that is _usually_ enough of an assist so that if I do need to search for something that I know what project it was associated with, and roughly when that was, and where that was in which notebook, etc. But I am (kinda) old. YMMV.

As an aside: I can't imagine how anyone learns anything through presentations alone. Power point in college would have killed me. I can still see my notes in my head from many of my chem classes 20+ years ago because I had so see the diagrams on the chalkboard, process them, and then write them down. Now get off my lawn.

meaning you won't be able to watch movies like The Hunger Games and World War Z through the service anymore

Well, this would have been a big loss indeed. If I had been able to watch those movies through Netflix to begin with, not being in US.

It's absolutely mindblowing how much distributor-to-distributor backstabbing goes on in US and it just doesn't matter here because they never got around to get their stuff here in the first place. Obligatory XKCD.

Awesome. You just made my day.

..... I'll trade my Macbook Air in for a Surface Pro 3!" .... said no one, ever.

Is there still any prospect at all? I left 5 years ago because they stopped improving anything for a decade.

Emacs still has plenty of awesome projects going on, just that they're bloody haphazardly organised. You need to really go look for them and sometimes some minor assembly is required.

For example, the single most awesome Emacs package right now is Org-Mode, which especially speaks to me as a writer (a lot of writers swear by Scrivener, but screw it, we have a better open source alternative in Org). You'll note that it's developed outside of Emacs proper with its own release schedule. You'll note that if you want the newer versions (which aren't always required, the ones shipped with Emacs itself are usually pretty decent) you need to get the git version or use the one from Emacs ELPA package manager, which in itself is still kind of in early stages and not many projects make themselves available through it (translation: I use a whole bunch of emacs extensions, but none of them are available through ELPA). If you want nifty extensions for Org, you really need to hunt random files all around the interwebs and pray they actually work in current version of Org.

This sort of disorganisation is actually just what Emacs has been all about for decades. The core Emacs devs don't innovate that much (well, at least they do add cool new features in major releases, which is a good thing), and just package the outside contributions whenever they can. There's all sorts of cool shit going on, but you just wouldn't always know where to find them.

(That said, if you want to develop Java or C++, NetBeans just blows Emacs off the water.)

Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence.

To me, this sounds like a pretty open and shut case of "Hey, I've heard that these 'NoSQL' database thingies are trendy these days. Let's use one of those!"

There's a difference between using fun, exciting new technologies and learning something new while doing that... and doing a project which stays in schedule and budget, is based on technology you already know thoroughly, and on which people's lives can depend (well, indirectly).