Latest gen flagship phones are having trouble differentiating themselves. Cameras have reached the point where the newest and best features are mostly marketing ploys and not that valuable. The processors are fast enough for the kinds of things one would want to use a phone for. The screens have high enough pixel density. The phones are relatively robust and the battery life is acceptable. The new flagships are trying to race to the bottom with thinner bezels and thinner phones, but phones are already thin enough and many new phones are going for thinner at the cost of battery life, and ports. So at the end of the day, there will always be fools that will buy the latest and greatest because it is the latest and greatest. The rest of us, will pick mid-tier phones or previous gen flag ships, and have great phones, for half or less of the price. I predict that the increase in flag ship pricing, will result in a greater interest in bootloader unlocking and replacement OSes like LineageOS.

I get 90% of my news via RSS feeds. I listen to lots of podcasts (also using RSS). Not sure why everyone thinks they are dead. TheOldReader works for me, just fine.

In 2018 we should be putting a bullet through the head of unencrypted SMTP and insecure protocols like STARTTLS. I've been running my mail server only allowing secure SMTP over TLS with medium grade ciphers or better, and IMAPS (and only allowing email sending if over secure connection). I've yet to run into issues in the last two years. The only problem is that some people's mail servers keep groping my box for port 25 first, instead of just trying SMTP/TLS and then failing if it can't. For the few devices I have that can't handle SMTP over TLS, I either replace them, or when I can't, I run them over a VPN, and whitelist their IP.

If only Apple provided some way to side-load applications...

Bitcoin should be lauded for what it is/was. It was the first crypto-currency. It created a paradigm. It has too many problems to remain the crypto-currency of the future. It is not truly anonymous, something that Monero and to a lesser extent, ZCash have solved. It chokes under large transaction volumes and has high transaction costs. It has no way to easily be converted to proof-of-stake in the future, once enough mining has been completed. For all of these reasons, it is unlikely to remain king. All of these problems have either been solved, or at least significantly improved upon by more recent crypto-currencies. To the extent that I'm betting, I'm betting on Monero. Ethereum also has a lot of positives, but I think the combination of the community not honoring all transactions and the fact that the programming mechanism has proven to be devilishly hard to implement without major mistakes means that it too will be replaced with a better iteration at some point.

This might be a way to bring in Puerto Rico, which would bring us to 52 states and also restore the balance of red vs blue states.

I know a dude that was apparently an shit-hot COBOL programmer back in the day. He retired, but gave the company a lot of notice and was generally not a dick (unlike a lot of the idiots in this comments thread). He told them they could hire him as a consultant/SME from time to time if they needed it. He's been retired for 15+ years, and they still call him up every couple years. He charges 3 to 4 times his former salary, does one or two month gigs for them, every couple of years, and makes a killing.

In my experience (and I do not like dogs), certain breeds of dogs have the capacity to far exceed cats in terms of intelligence, but on average, I'd say the average cat is smarter than the average dog. There is also a huge range of intelligence across both cats and dogs. I think cats tend to innately exercise the full capacity of their intelligence a lot more than dogs. Dogs, often tend to be fairly lazy about using their problem solving skills unless they are trained to. I believe this is mostly due to domestic cats descending from solitary animals and needing to use their whits a lot more to survive.

I work remotely, but I think most of the reasons have been given above, why this is not so common: 1) Many (Most?) people are incapable of working remotely, without slacking off.
2) Even if you don't slack off, it's harder to demonstrate value, remotely. You have to be much more active about calling attention to the work you are doing, as your boss can't just drop by your desk and see you working.
3) Remoting technology, especially in the Windows world, is still not great if you need a full, remote Windows session, over the internets. It is painfully slow and hard to configure to by multi-monitor in a reasonable fashion.
4) Lots of employees have crappy internet, which makes them highly unproductive.
5) Corporate inertia against change.

Add all that up, and it's hard to make the case for full remote work. There are certain workers in certain locations which could easily make the hop, but then companies are worried about getting sued by offering those users, special privileges of working remotely, so they play it safe and force everyone to show up.

I don't trust Facebook to curate my news for me. I use tools to block all Facebook News, so hopefully this just means my ad-blocking tools won't have to work overtime. Seems like a lot of hysteria over nothing.

Don't you understand? Having an eating disorder or being overweight, means you must also have broken legs. How are you condoning Google's insensitive and mean feature that makes fun of the fact that you don't have legs? Wait, what that? You have legs and they work just fine? You can walk? Uh...carry on then...

I don't disagree. Intel can do what they want. It's their product. They don't owe me anything, and I don't owe them any of my money. I find their business practices scummy (though perfectly legal and within their rights), which is exactly why I'm voting with my dollar and going elsewhere.

I openly admit that I'm a fan of AMD. However, I think it's reasonable to ask why Intel CPU's have not seen any large jump in performance or features until they had to, due to AMD competition, again. The R&D time and cost on these new chips is multiple years. That means, that Intel can't just roll out a chip in response to AMD, unless they either have good corporate intellignence and knew one to two years ago that AMD was coming back in a big way, or the much more likely answer that they've been sitting on new features and performance because they wanted to milk the previous generation for all it was worth. I find the later to be reprehensible, which is why I will be building an new AMD system, even if it doesn't give me quite the top performance I might get from an Intel chip, because I appreciate them driving competition again (P.S. my last system was Intel because AMD wasn't really competing when I built it).

In my experience T-Mobile was faster, but you had to find the single cell tower in the country and stand right under it. That's a bit of a downside.

There are many things to criticize about Equifax, and their handling of this breach. This is not one of them. People in the security industry (such as myself), talk about "breach mentality" vs "castle mentality". Castle mentality is the old style of thinking where companies think that if they just build a strong enough wall, they will never be breached and they can leave their internal network a mess. Breach mentality is to assume you are already breached or will be breached at sometime in the future. This is the sensible approach to security, and the most realistic/practical approach. The goal is to secure everything as best you can to help withstand and catch a hack. It remains to be seen if Equifax actually took reasonable steps to secure their network from breach, or not. I am betting they did not, given their crappy response times and apparent total compromise.