...don't care :-)

1) Yes
2) No
3) An i-who what now?
4) Cowboy Neal takes my messages.

If anything deserves to massively backfire on the instigators, it's this. I really hope it does. It'll prove:

1. People are not stupid;
2. Net neutrality is a widely recognised issue;
3. Automated spam calling is one of the most hated methods of contact in the world.

This is confusing the issue. I'm not trying to imply that the SSN is a secret. I'm implying that it's UNIQUE. I, personally, don't want everything I purchase, every service I sign up for, every bill I pay (yes, I know, card issuers can track this which is why i prefer cash) or everywhere I go to be uniquely traceable on some database with an easily verifiable primary key.

It's harder to avoid than it first appears. Every little unique fact about you is one more bitmap to pry into your life and you can only limit it one piece at a time. It's far better if you never accept the linkage in the first place because, once you've given a piece of information away, you've completely lost control of it.

Why do they need an SSN in the first place? If I'm completely honest, we have to bear some of the responsibility for these breaches of security by idly allowing any and all personal information to be collected by any old munchkin. An ISP does not need your SSN, date of birth or anything else beyond your address and payment details.

For web forms that will not enable the Next button without information they don't need, I usually fake it. That fake data goes into my password manager as a third level of security that only I know.

No, the answer is 0): STOP USING TWITTER

Now, that may just be the most important bit of advice to come out of this whole affair. Facebook, too.

1) We still have misogyny on the Internet when the 'net community should really be leading humanity's evolution away from such primitive thought patterns as "man lead, woman follow." If you wish to imagine the stone-age intonation there, feel free. It was intentional. Come on, people, we have the world's knowledge at our fingertips. Surely a little research into why these attitudes have no place in our society isn't that onerous. Livelihood taken away simply for reacting once to what was probably a recurring theme throughout her career? What does that say about us, really? We're barely down from the sodding trees.

2) Exactly how much of your soul does your employer own these days? At what point does one legitimately say to one's manager "Go piss up a rope, I'm a sovereign individual. What I do in the café to which I manage to stagger in order to get the caffeine fix I need to make it the rest of the way home after 22 hours of crunch-time coding to meet your unreasonable expectations, inflexible release schedule and poor planning is my own affair."

Bugger it. I never have mod points when I need to up-vote so badly it hurts.

This sounds, to me, like a protection racket in the making. "Give us money and show our ads or we'll mark you down as a pirate."

As much as censorship is distasteful, this is infinitely worse. The power it gives Google boggles the mind.

As sjwest points out, ARM is probably the future if the strategy is right. x86[-64] is an awful architecture full of backward compatibility kludges and complexity. ARMv8 is clean, efficient and well understood.

What is needed for this to happen is modularity, i.e. decouple the GPU from the CPU and allow discrete components on a PCIe bus. Similar with memory. Slot it, don't solder the bugger to the board. Some of this is already happening but the ARM ecosystem still focuses mainly on SoC models, which is not what we general purpose computing bods want. If I could have an octa-core A53 with slotted DDR3, Gig-E on PCIe, USB3, SATA/NVME and a discrete graphics processor and, more importantly, the choice of these components rather than someone else's SoC design, I'd drop x86 like a hot rock.

Fine, let's wait until EVs have developed into a fully-arsed solution, then. Everyone seems to want us all to dump our old faithful ICE machines and jump on the electric bandwagon. Get some research done, present some reliable, independent data on running costs, lithium ion longevity and drivetrain reliability rather than the current cherry-pick the data to fit the desired result crap we're being fed and then get back to me. In the meantime, it's all starting to look like either a cynical ploy to stimulate The Economy or to restrict the general population's ability to travel at whim without being tracked and taxed.

Oh, and can heavy industry and corporations share a bit of this pain? We road users, including the buses and trucks, are only a third of the problem. Let's see the other two thirds getting reamed a bit to make it all seem a bit fairer. Oh, wait, we can't do that because investors, by which I mean politicians with massive portfolios and hopes of comfortable consulting sinecures after their current term in office is up...

So Marvin the Martian is wealthy and is well up the reserve list for a Roadster? What's the Muskrat getting in return, an Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator?

Elon is just making the ammo. The media and the gullible are firing it.

First world problems abound. What's it going to do, give you a nasty suck?

In actual fact,what the fsck do you want a robotic Hoover for anyway? Like most of these autonomous things, they never work properly and, once the "Ah, lookit going across the floor traumatising the poor dog again" novelty wears off, you're left however much money you paid and several IQ points the poorer.

Tish, pshaw and, indeed, codswallop. Also, your dog now hates you and anyone who looks like you. Aren't you proud?

My LG is hardwired. I use its DLNA features but I also block it by MAC from sending any traffic out of the local RFC1918. This obviously isn't going to work if you use the TV's streaming features but for locally hosted content it's ideal.

As for firmware updates, Samsung's recent brick debacle where it took a technician physically opening the case to get them back pretty much answers that question. The general rule for stuff held in programmable ROM is "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." I understand many will want KRACK fixes for WiFi as soon as they're available, yet I also wouldn't be holding my breath thinking this is a priority for vendors; they have your money, you're on your own. However, if there's a flaw in the monetisation of your viewing habits they'll be jamming those bytes down your digital throat before you can blink.