I can say that I use my left hand to press the 6 key. Since that is how the MS keyboard is setup. From the original white keyboard to the 4000 that I use now (and have gone through a few of those... Damn those cats spilling my drink into them!), that's the way it has always worked for me. And I've never really thought about it.

It does remind me of the time time that I saw somebody with the white original ergonomic keyboard shoved in their backpack when I was flying somewhere. This was when I had already started killing my MS 4000 keyboards. I'm killing keyboards, even when something isn't spilling liquids into mine. A key stops working, usually something I actually use (Esc, F1, A...)

Two separate issues.

The first is, is the public transportation like what I experienced when I visited Basel, Switzerland? I ran all around that city using their trams, and it was wonderful. My wife was working, and I would spend the days exploring. If it was like when I used it in Columbus, Ohio, to get to work. Well, just doing that was a time hit, it doubled the amount of travel time to get back and forth. And that was travel time. That does not include the time waiting for the bus, nor the time involved in walking from the bus stop to my final destination. Now, on the bus, I could read and listen to music and not worry about handling traffic. But I still lost time doing other things at home. And this was an express bus, not your regular local route, in which case, double that or more, again. Add on the fact that the buses there do not run everywhere I want to go (also, Columbus is a much larger city, area wise, than Basel, so yeah, it's to be expected), and that's an issue. Say, I wanted to go out to dinner with a friend that lived on the west side of Columbus (I lived on the north side), I would have to take a local bus downtown, make a transfer (if not more than one) to get to the west side. Or where ever we were going to eat at. Time wise, that just isn't feasible.

So yes, the first issue would be, what's going to be the quantity/quality of that public transportation? As it exists today? Not as it exists here in the US!

The second issue is, there are times when yes, you need a car. If you're doing any kind of major shopping, especially at say a warehouse club like Sam's, BJs or Costco, you're not going to be taking your stuff back with you in a couple of bags tucked under your arms. Again, while the public transportation in Basel was excellent, my wife and I had dinner with a colleague that lives in Basel. They don't own a car, so they rent a car by the hour when they have to have one. Which was usually around once a week or so from what I gathered.

although since I run open APs, I don't think that it's going to matter.

I still don't understand the thinking in the Apple exclusivity for Thunderbolt. Apple moves some computers, but not nearly the amount that it would take to get the kind of support that this technology really needed to do well. Yeah, it's no longer an exclusive now, but I thought the two year term was simply unrealistic. It seems to me that Intel wanted Thunderbolt to fail. If I were building a computer today (and I do build computers, I built what I'm typing on right now), Thunderbolt wouldn't even be a consideration as a need down the line. I don't see the need for it. Not for what I use my computer for. Not for most people, actually.

Interesting. But I know the IP address that I was using, so a MITM attack wasn't really something I was worried about, it was more of an attack from my own machine that I was thinking. Unless somebody really had it out for me and was spoofing my home IP address as well. Of which, one use every few years, that doesn't sound like an attack vector that would be given that much rope just to wait to see if I was RDPing in. I'm much more inclined that to think that it was the ad network.

I used the hotel internet just long enough to get on (using the browser to type in the magic word for full access), then RDPing into my home system (and then dealing with somebody who has their own computer, but was still using my home computer), to get what I needed accomplished. Get home, and find out that searches were now hijacked. A scan fixed the problem, but my home system wasn't infested, not that RDP is an attack vector that I'm aware of, and since the only pages I loaded were the hotels, it doesn't even take a WiFi exploit to get malware when the ad system obviously can do a drive by.

I've been spending all this time indoors, and now my eyesight is around -9.00 diopters. (yes, true, and yes, that's pretty high powered myopia right there).

Of course, as a child of the '60s, I spent plenty of time outside. And it was always baffling that my eyes where so bad, because none of my parents had this bad of eyesight. Both could actually carry on without prescription lenses, unlike my daily life. Turn out, both carried the recessive gene for it, and those are the ones that I inherited.

I needed glasses when I was three and my dad was throwing baseballs back and forth with me. Not that I knew anything about that. I could read (which was why they thought I didn't need glasses), but I was always getting yelled at for sitting too close to the TV (Duh!).

This reminds me of the spam that I keep seeing talking about fixing my eyes in seven days or so. Really? The only way to fix my vision is LASIK. No exercises or eye drops is going to fix anything wrong with my vision. Maybe someday I'll go that route, but I haven't yet.

But why is it that people only cry bloody murder when THEY are the ones who have to install addons, but before they're the ones who must do so they champion Firefox as the kind of extensibility and tirelessly preach the virtues of addons?

You already have code in place for a status bar, a status bar that you can hide if you don't like with a keystroke or a mouse click. And you take it away merely because not having one is the current fad, and when it does become a fad again, then what's going to happen? I'll now have two status bars?

The rapid development gets some changes faster into users' hands, I understand that. But every new release at such a rate means a possibility that a number of extensions will no longer work. At least the way it used to be, an extension author could take some time to get an extension that would work correctly under the new release and then not have to worry about it for awhile. Now, if an extension breaks, if you can get it fixed and uploaded and QA'd by Mozilla in a weeks time, in about another month, you might be facing yet even more breakage. That's a problem that really is doing damage to their ecosystem.

And while some changes are very easy to make, and believe me, my setups are all highly configured, I'm finding that some things just can't be moved like they used to. My old setup moves everything on the navigation bar to the menu bar (yes, I still use a menu bar!). I can't do that with the current nightly, the URL bar is unmovable. It looks like it would be movable, but grabbing it does nothing, I can't move it to the menu/title bar, and I can't drag it off.

Firefox is becoming irrelevant not because of Mozilla's efforts, but because nobody wants to support them while they fix their broken shit.

Firefox is becoming irrelevant because of Mozilla's efforts, because nobody wants to fix their now broken shit that Mozilla broke when Mozilla decided to change something internal.

FTFY.

The destruction of it's ecosystem.

Too many choices have been made to simplify Firefox when maybe they should have done a bit more spelunking to see what the users were actually using.

Taking away the status bar. Yeah, there are multiple extensions to get that back, the trouble being that they aren't the original status bar and some of the extensions that I use expect the old status bar, not the extension status bar. Update that extension? Well, the person writing that extension has thrown in the towel. When other issues cropped up, somebody else did come along and fix the issues, but the original programmer can come around and kill it because it's still technically his copyright. Yeah, he didn't GPL or put any other kind of license on it. So, it might exist today, but tomorrow it won't.

Making Firefox look like Chrome is just stupid in my book. There was zero reason to change it. Talk about getting the desktop to look like the mobile is pure crap. They are different environments. What works on a phone or tablet doesn't necessarily mean that it works on the desktop, even Microsoft has figured that part out with Windows 10 coming out now. Extremely obvious to me, so I must be a genius. Or not.

They have changed things such that old themes no longer work. The old personas, which I guess are now considered to be theme extensions, seem to be the only new themes actually getting developed. And they're ugly.

Their mobile push (for Firefox OS) was interesting, but again, desktop seemed to suffer again because of it. They started actually pushing a 64-bit version of Firefox on their Nightly page. Then decided that tracking those bugs specific to it might be too much, so they decided to stop it, then after an outcry, decided to keep doing the 64-bit builds, but if you had a problem, don't bother filling a bug for it unless it also happened on the 32-bit version. And then they decided to back track on that as well. You just can't find the 64-bit version on the Nightly page anymore. But it can be found, at least.

I run the 64 and 32 bit Nightlies, release and beta versions. And they work for me. At least for now.

I don't like IE. Chrome works. I'm just not sure I want Google tracking me that much.

Yeah. I've been using ForecastFox for some time. Even when others were having issues, I didn't seem to have them, and I run Nightly as my daily browser. I did morn the lose of the status bar, but an extension to fix that appeared, and I was still good. Up until the need for the ForecastFox Fix version, which happened recently. I was looking at the extension to see what I could fix when that version was released. I'm glad I didn't sink much time into it, the new author has done a great job. But it's still a derivative work that could be taken down by the original author, and who knows how long this author will stick around.

What Mozilla is doing, I see a logic to. I just don't agree with that logic. A desktop user is totally different than a mobile user. Even the original status bar could be toggled by a keystroke, and with the 1080p monitors out there, you can't say that we are exactly in a crunch for monitor real estate, and with 4K monitors coming out, it really becomes a WTF. Trying to be both to both worlds is just insanity. You're pissing off the desktop user, and I'm not too sure what the mobile user gets out of it. I run Android on my phone, and it's just been easier for me to go the Google route and use Google's apps instead of Samsung's. Yeah, I could run Firefox, but I don't run Sync, because I have issues with what extensions work with what versions, and besides Nightly (64-bit and 32-bit!), I run Release, Beta and Developer's. And I don't want to think how many extensions would get loaded on my phone then.

When they decide that e10s WILL be the default, it will be another culling of available extensions, as a bunch of those refuse to work in an e10s window. I suspect that even if an extension works otherwise, it won't be signed, and it won't be possible to run it, regardless if e10s is optional or not. Considering I can't get a static HTML page to load under e10s under my usual profile tells me plenty. At least Nightly has now stopped trying to set it on by default, I can upgrade without worrying if I can even get a working page up on it. And now I know about it instead of being a "Surprise!" and finding out that I'd be hosed if I turned it on.

I'm already seeing erosion of extensions just because of the changes that are being made in Firefox, and developers' are getting tired of fixing the breakage. Forecast Fox, a nice weather bar suffered from losing the default status bar. OK, there are ways to get it back, but now you have an extension that requires other extensions to work. Then AccuWeather created some issues, which they have since fixed. Another developer has now taken up to keeping it working, but I can't help think that the original developer is going to smack that version down. Not yet, but then, it hasn't been a week yet. Then there's a theme extension that I used to use, Noia, which has gone through a few iterations. It seems that Mozilla has made it harder for theme authors, and that author has given it up. In fact, the author has already removed it from AMO! Which means that I get left with something that looks very much, too much, like Chrome. I run a desktop, I don't run Firefox on a tablet or a phone, and I rather like how Firefox looked before everything got borked. Trying to force everybody into a phone/tablet/laptop/desktop only one way of doing things, yeah, it's something that I do object to. Strenuously, but it's not like what I have to say means anything.

Throwing another wrench into the path of extension authors isn't going to be helpful. To the end users or the developers.

Yeah, it might cut down on some cruft, but that's why you do your due diligence when installing extensions, both on and off AMO.

I'm married to a fourth generation railroader. That is the only reason why I was at the presentation, being with my wife. ;)

I don't disagree about the economics and efficiency. I think the railroads have it in spades at this point. And yes, mismanagement has been a problem with railroads as well. John Snow was well criticized for his golden parachute when he took over the Treasury for Bush (II) here in CSX Town.

I do disagree about employee turnover. Some of those new drivers are not going to be as experienced as the drivers that they just replaced. I can't see a high turnover rate being anything but detrimental to trucking's efficiency.

Railroads have always been notoriously conservative, let alone risk averse. JIT manufacturing is not kind to railroads.

I do not see designated lanes for autonomous vehicles, commercial or personal. Our freeways are already bursting at the seams, and now when they talk about expanding lanes to handle traffic, they are moving to make those lanes toll lanes to pay for getting them built, certainly here in Florida. I don't see enough traffic from autonomous vehicles to justify that kind of expense. If anything, there is already an argument to be had to force semi trucks and trailers into their own lanes due to some of the accidents that have occurred. But no one actually expects that to happen. It truly becomes the chicken and the egg problem.

Railroads know they need to work better on their logistics. My wife works for a company that sells software to those railroads to do so. In some ways, I'm amazed that they aren't further along in their development, either the software company or the railroads themselves.

The first vehicle with this technology is not going to be a personal car, or anything that resembles a personal car (like a taxi). It's going to be semi trucks with trailers.

From a conference I sat in on last week (dealing with railroads, not trucks themselves), the turnover rate for truck drivers is over 100% per year. This is considered a plus for the railroads. I say that this is a plus for autonomous trucks. They drive autonomously site to site, and then, a driver takes over to get them parked into the loading dock (most likely), the trucks manage to do this autonomously (maybe, but not the scenario I see winning out, not at the beginning), or the docks are redesigned to make it easy for the autonomous trucks to park them in loading position (what will happen once autonomous trucks are widely used).

Yes, I realize other changes will have to be made. Refueling will have to be done manually in the beginning. That may mean the truck stop hires a person or two, that then takes care of the autonomous trucks, and I'm sure the owners will gladly pay a bit of a premium to get their trucks fueled. At least until the automated fuel pumps for the trucks are in place, at existing or new truck stops.

I have zero doubt that my great grandchildren won't have to learn how to drive a vehicle. I have grandchildren, and yes, I expect that they will have to learn how to drive, the technology is moving that fast.

Yet.

This is (almost?) reminiscent of OS wars, laptop versus desktop versus tablet wars, and even portrait versus landscape wars.

My first true smartphone was an original Note. Yeah, I can be behind the times. I use both hands to use it. In fact, I used both hands when I used a flip phone. I use both hands when I use my son's iPhone. After the Note died, I now use the Moto G, which is one of the smaller phones out there. Guess what? I still use both hands.

I plan on getting the Note 4 or the Note Edge, just as soon as I can get both of them in my hands to check them out (and I know what the price of the Edge is going to be...).

If you must use your phone with one hand, then by all means, get a smaller phone, the phone that fits your hand and your use.

Phones the size of the Note fit my hands, and I'm rather used to the stylus as well, even if it didn't work with the Moto G. I've been happy with the Moto G, but I'm not liking the lack of some of the sensors and the lack of LTE, which I thought I could live without, has been something that has me wanting a new phone. So, a new Note will be in my future. The Edge intrigues me at the same time it screams that I probably won't use it anyway. But if the cost differential isn't that much, I'll go with it anyway.

So a big phone is what I'm going choose as my marketing choice.

Anybody else is free to make their own choice.

for SkyNet to become conscious?