This. Microsoft offered everyone running Windows 7 to upgrade to Windows 10 for free for at least a year. Didn't want to take the free upgrade when it was offered? Life is tough. Go to the store and buy the latest version. Or install Windows 10 and try the Windows 7 key, it works surprisingly often. How long do people expect Microsoft to support them for free. When you start comparing how long Microsoft supported Windows 7 compared to Google and Apple with their respective operating systems, it doesn't look that bad after all.

If that was true, it would already be happening. People didn't start unlocking their phones with their thumbprints, faces, etc. yesterday.

Most thieves are not going to use violence to steal from you. I've had stuff stolen from me a few times, and it was always either something I was carrying but that I wasn't looking at, or they broke into a car, into my apartment, etc.

Nobody is forcing you to use biometric authentication. You always need to set a password lock on your device if it fails to recognize you anyways. A lot of people "protect" their devices with such terrible passwords (I can see someone making an L or a square to unlock their phones without even meaning to) that biometric authentication turns out to be safer that what they're currently doing. My opinion is that, although in theory biometric authentication is weaker than a strong password, it protects you more effectively against theft (the most frequent attack vector in my opinion) than a password. A thief may be able to infer you password by looking at you type it; he may even record you with his cellphone while you're unlocking your own for when he gets a chance to steal your device. It's not likely though that he will be able to make a convincing fingerprint or even take a good enough picture of your face to fool some primitive face recognition technique which is frequent on some Android devices.

Recent iPhone user here. This is something I found out as soon as I moved to iOS. One of the reasons I switched was Apple's claims of caring about privacy. While it may be true that Apple won't sell customer data to third parties, I don't think they do a good job of empowering their users to control what data is being shared by installed applications. Safari is the worst offender here. With iOS 12, they removed support for legacy extensions, which apparently killed almost all of the privacy oriented extensions available. I've found only one application, non-free, and nothing else whatsoever.

I think this type of crime will become much more difficult very soon. I mean, at least 40 phone numbers were bound to the same IMEI! To me, this is clearly a sign of criminal activity. The phone company should have tipped the cops way before that. Anybody considering this type of theft will eventually have no choice but to get a new phone for every 4 or 5 numbers stolen.

I think you're right, my comment was over the top. I flashed Lineage OS overnight a few months ago. I don't have another cell to fall back on if my main one doesn't work, hence my reaction.

Thanks, there's a good chance I will try this site eventually.

I'll remember this if (when?) I ever wipe my phone again, thank you.

I'm glad that you find running an AOSP ROM to be a great improvement, but that's missing the point. My point is that I find that the phone loses a lot of its value from not having access to the Play Store. You may disagree, but I think a lot of people would think the same as I do. What's the point of having a great battery life if your phone can't do anything, you might as well use a flip phone at that point.

Have you ever tried to run a cellphone without the Google set of applications? I have. That's what I got when I installed an AOSP Nougat build on my Nexus 5 (Nougat was never released/supported for the Nexus 5). I can tell you from experience that the phone becomes completely useless. You can make calls, and send and receive texts, and that's about it. I'm not sure it even had a browser. Installing new apps goes from difficult to nearly impossible. I haven't played too much with alternative markets to the Google Play Store, but my experience with F-Droid was negative. This specific market feels pretty empty, and the few choices available aren't too good. At least Lineage OS has created a few copycats of some of the most popular Android apps, but it's far from a full replacement. Losing access the the Play Store would leave my phone greatly diminished. If I could not have access to the Google Play Store, I don't think I would want to use an Android phone at all.

I wouldn't be so sure. Someone managed to register a Facebook account under my primary email some time back, I'm not sure how. I learned of it because I kept getting email notices from Facebook in some southeast Asia tongue. I was able to do a takeover of the account by asking for an email password reset. I was unable to complete the login though, because they kept asking me for my birth date, which had been decided by the attacker, and I was told to send a government ID to be granted access. I kept trying every once in a while, and I was finally able to login with no questions asked about a year later.

The account was almost empty. The account was friends with two girls who had thousands of friends (so I guess they didn't check too closely who sent them friends requests). I think the reason to do this was to use the account to try to do a takeover of my Google account, since your Facebook credentials can be used on many sites.

I would suggest locking your old account with a strong password.

From having had several different Kobo models, mostly because I kept breaking old ones whose screen had a glass substrate, I'd say calling them Kobos "the best eReaders" doesn't mean much. The UI has gotten worse with time, in my opinion, and it's always been sluggish for every single device I've had. Something as simple as clicking on a number to go to a reference is painful. Most of the time, the touch is interpreted as a page turn instead, so you have to go back to the page you were reading and try again. If it works, you sometimes have to wait 15-20 second for the reference to open, and then you have to go through the same process to go back to the page you were on. It's just OK to use as long as you read nothing but fiction, which contains few or no references. The browser is unusable for anything but accepting the terms of service to connect to a WiFi network. Converting books to the Kindle format is a trivial operation in Calibre, so the ability to read EPUB is an extremely weak sales argument in my opinion. Last, I personally dislike how strongly the device is tied to the Kobo marketplace (I suppose Kindle has the same issue). I think the vast majority of owners of Kobo eReaders are unaware that they can read books from other sources (Google market, gutenberg.org, etc.).

  Hopefully someday someone will release eReaders with good color screens, it might make the competition in that sector go up.

I can tell from your post that you haven't played Starcraft II before.

If Warner Brothers gave away the movie "Batman Begins", would you be scorning them for not giving away "The Dark Knight" and "The Dark Knight Rises" too along with it?

I've played Starcraft II - Wings of Liberty, and I can tell you I have gotten far more enjoyment out of it than of a lot of similarly priced games. I never felt during gameplay that it was missing some elements. It's an excellent game which got stellar reviews when it came out, and it can now be played for free. I could barely believe it when I received the Heart of the Swarm this week, and after playing it most of the day, it feels like a great gift.

TLDR: You have no idea what you're talking about.

I love how you reject with no explanations the suggestions of the GP and then proceed to refer him to a website about the Austrian school, which is not considered 'main stream' in economics, as far as I know.

I do not pretend to know much about economics either, so I'm not going to comment on the feasibility of the 32 hour week or UBI(which Universal Social Security looks like, as far II can gather from a quick perusal of the GP link). However, I think forcing someone to work overtime all year long for no extra pay is clearly an abuse that should be severely punished.