The "privacy of your own home" only extends as far as you keep your actions private, if you post home videos on YouTube they don't get the same protection as you have against the police planting a spy camera in your house. When you make a call, you're volunteering information to the phone company about where you are and who you'd like to call, you don't get any extra expectation of privacy from doing it from your own home.

Part of the problem with adoption is that many of these releases are radically different from the previous versions.
And of COURSE the carriers are falling down on the job!
When you have to completely replumb an OS over and over and over again, as they do to make sure it's locked down for their network?
They're not equipped for meaningful updates to existing equipment. Small firmware and software updates? Sure. Whole new OS? No fucking way.
They're set up for static hardware and mostly static software release. Then they focus on the next generation. Retrofitting doesn't fit for them.

Mostly because out-of-the-box, Dynamics is good for exactly jack and shit. It requires extensive work to be made even marginally usable.

Salesforce, while not necessarily one-size-fits-all, is at least marginally useful from the get-go (though that could be a fluke).

Oh I dunno.

Current versions of Dynamics are so bad it's nearly impossible to get simple db backups, let alone meaningful data exports.

Okay, what do you expect? NYC (in one form or another) has been there for FOUR HUNDRED YEARS (the area was first settled in 1624). It's been a massive metropolitan settlement for the better part of the last two hundred.

It's not as if someone went back to 1700 or so and started out with a city planning commission and 2015-level civil engineering technology.
So yes, the city's going to be ANYTHING but efficiently run, plumbed, or laid out.

There are also 8.5 MILLION PEOPLE in the NYC metropolitan area.
As part of the US Northeast Megalopolis, it's the center of a population of 53 million people.

Even if everyone was a card-carrying Greenpeace member, that's STILL a metric fuckton of waste. Urban living simply can't be environmentally neutral.

But, for that matter, living in a cave isn't environmentally neutral either.
Even with the cleanest, most environmentally conscious methods of living close to nature, over time a primitive community's garbage midden will overwhelm it.

But hey, if you want to volunteer to be one of the people forced to shiver in a cave because modern society is so wasteful, be my guest.

A better and more humane course of action would be to adapt over time. Nothing lasts forever, not even NYC. It can, slowly, be rebuilt and repurposed, given a long enough time frame.

Don't tell anyone, but I'm from the future and wanted to give you a heads up how it goes:

Test 1: Make sure all thrusters installed pointing out.

Test 2: Humans can only withstand how much thrust?

Test 3: Make sure to thrust away from, not underneath, falling debris.

Test 4: Emergency homing signal for safe landing should be changed to not match Arbys drive through wireless mics. "Smoked with real smoke from real wood that's on real fire" ended up being a grimly accurate tagline.

Test 5: Turns out Ed was right and we really do need to add a laser canon for those damn pelicans.

Test 6: Success!

wyoming has radiation?

Hell yes! Have you measured background radiation in the rockies?

communication delays?

Ever tried to maintain cell signal on the way to Yellowstone?

nothing to see, or to do?

Once you've seen Frontier Days once...

No medical equipment?

I go up there all the time with no medical equipment.

I don't know what that gravity would do to your digestive systems.

That's why every astronaut has died immediately after return from space with even less gravity...

I have to break character here and say - you are SUCH a retard. That's enough fun for me. You may carry on if you wish.

From what I can tell, the only people who believe it have no other skills and are terrified that if the truth were known (that anyone can learn to program) then they'd no longer be special.

Well, then let's dispel with that piece of bullshit, shall we?

When I say "but many moons ago I was told by numerous profs that programming/CS had pretty much always been the bi-modal distribution" ... I mean tenured professors, with PhD's, with published books and actively teaching in accredited universities. Not just "I heard it from a guy".

You seem to be comfortable suggesting I feel my penis will be larger if I convince myself this is a true fact. Allow me to suggest this: You're acting like a dick and making an ad-hominem attack -- a sign of a moron or an asshole; or both.

I'm telling you what I've heard from professors, and what I've personally seen.

I marked both first and second year CS courses, I have personally seen graphs of the same course's grades for a trailing decade. And it was empirically a real thing.

I honestly have no idea the extent to which this is universally applicable, isolated, or purely random. But I have had it described to me by professors, I have seen it in courses I've marked, and been hearing this 'factoid' for ... well, almost three decades.

This doesn't come out of nowhere. It isn't a self inflating of ego. It is, in my own personal and exceedingly constrained opinion, an actual observation of reality. It is a thing, and I am curious as to what it really means.

If you think I have my personal identity wrapped up in being some special little snowflake who is unique as a programmer (something I no longer do, BTW)... well, either you're a moron, or you're just an ass who has no better reasoning skills than to fall back on the claims that I must be delusional and acting out of self interest in saying this.

I am genuinely curious if this is true, and would love to see definitive stats ... it has always baffled me, but I've witnessed it ... but if you think I'm saying this out of some mechanism of puffing myself up, then you can piss off.

But if you can state your counterargument without suggesting I need to justify my existence to you or anybody else, I might actually be interested in hearing evidence to the contrary.

Bah! For a cheaper, faster, better mission with a modest initial budget it's been an amazing success. NASA put two functioning units on Mars for not all that much money (in relative terms) .. around $820 million dollars for the initial 90 days. Compared to military and other expenses ... that's chump change.

The on-board computers are tiny by most standards:

Spirit's onboard computer uses a 20 MHz RAD6000 CPU with 128 MB of DRAM, 3 MB of EEPROM, and 256 MB of flash memory. The rover's operating temperature ranges from â'40 to +40 ÂC (â'40 to 104 ÂF) and radioisotope heater units provide a base level of heating, assisted by electrical heaters when necessary. A gold film and a layer of silica aerogel provide insulation.

Operating from -40C to +40C is absolutely not a "cool dry place"; it's a hostile environment. Did we mention the dust storms? And the radiation?

We're talking about something which had to travel millions of miles, not miss the planet, not get destroyed on landing, and which has been there for 11 years and is still (to some degree) an operational unit. It's sibling keeled over five years ago.

You go ahead and wait for something else to be impressed with, me, I'll be impressed right now.

Because there simply isn't another thing which has ever existed which humans have made which has operated and traveled on the surface of another planet for anywhere near as long as this thing has.

Opportunity needs to be recognized as an absolutely amazing achievement, because it absolutely is.

However, Windows 8.1 is great on a surface or tablet

And, quite honestly, by the time you disable the Romper Room crap, get a classic shell, and set it up to feel like a more classic Windows desktop ... it's absolutely fine on a desktop as well. But 100% of the stuff they have for tablets is pretty much garbage on a desktop if you do actual work on your PC. I utterly loathe the metro interface, and gave basically turned it off. So all the money Microsoft is spending "innovating" seems like garbage to me.

and Windows 10 can do both and run ported Android and IOS apps

Honestly, that remains to be seen. They can make any damned claim they want now, but the proof is in the pudding. Until such time as it exists, and is shipping, it's a marketing bulled point. That's it. They still have plenty of time to say "wow, we can't actually do that".

But, generally I agree with you that there isn't a device which is going to be my smartphone and my desktop.

My personal desktop is a dual monitor setup with a KVM tying in my work laptop, and spec'd to last me the next 5 years or so (8 core CPU, 16 gig RAM, lots of USB ports, and about 8TB of disk space attached). Quite frankly, we're a very far way off from there being a mobile device to compete with that.

If Microsoft forgets that some of us still need a desktop with some muscle behind it, and that we don't use them as toys for recipes, they stand a chance of producing something which is terrible for that use.

A device which wants to be dumbed down to the point it wants to feel like a tablet offers no utility to me on something which isn't a tablet.

Yeah, no kidding. I predict Microsoft is 100% guaranteed to mess up a LOT of machines. I don't trust *any* vendor's patches on day one, and Microsoft even less.

If Microsoft thinks they're not going to be pilloried by saying "fuck it, we're updating your machine and rebooting now" they're idiots.

If Microsoft just goes ahead and does them, they're going to create a support nightmare as they'll fuck up machines left and right.

When will Microsoft learn that there is a reason why we don't trust them?

Sorry guys, but I'll apply patched and reboot my computer when I choose to, not when some idiot in Redmond decides for me. it's my property, not yours.

I can understand why you say we won't colonize Mars the way we don't colonize Antarctica, but going there? We've already had people travel through the vacuum of space exposed to cosmic rays to land on a barren rock and take off again. The latest estimates is that a Mars round trip will give you about 5% lifetime risk of dying from cancer, it's far from a deadly dose. We've had people living in zero-g for 437 days straight, we have people isolated in Antarctica for several months of solid darkness and cold. There's really nothing to indicate Mars is so inhospitable that we can't go, if we want to. It might not make sense to go because of the billions we'll need without much tangible returns but in practice we probably could.

And the entire project with two rovers and five extensions has cost $944 million. The SLS program will cost tens of billions to develop and even then a launch would eat over half the budget, before you actually have any crew capsule, lander, habitat, return craft or scientific equipment. If you really did an apples-to-apples comparison on the same budget, you'd realize we're getting a very good bang for the buck.

I hereby nominate the Mars Rovers for any and all honors which can be shoehorned into being something we can assign to them.

And kudos to the people who built it and kept it going.

Fourty-five times planned mission length is pretty damned awesome!!

Pretty sure you are going to need a drink long before low gravity messes with you.

Pretty much all other reasons you list as problems could be applied to a move to Wyoming, but people do that all the time.