The article doesn't say, but here's my thought:

I expect this will use a model similar to Amazon Video, where you can download Amazon Prime videos for offline viewing using the Amazon Video app (such as iPad) and they automatically expire in a few weeks. For movies and shows you've purchased via Amazon Video, you can also download for later viewing and those don't go away. But I think the "Amazon Prime" model applies to Netflix here.

So I wouldn't expect you to be able to download a movie to your home media server and watch it for free forever. You're likely going to be stuck watching it from whatever device you downloaded it on, using the Netflix app.

This seems to be a trend in the industry. I was part of a focus group from HBO where they asked a bunch of questions about "What if we allowed you to download 'n' movies and shows using the HBO Now app on your phone or iPad, and gave you 'x' amount of time to watch them? How long should 'x' be? How many should 'n' be?" I got the impression from the interviews that HBO is thinking about doing this too. HBO even cited the Amazon model, and asked if I used this feature {I do, on iPad} and how many shows and movies I usually download at a time {about 4 shows} and if I can watch them in two weeks {yes}.

It's not a bad compromise.

When I want to stream music, I use Tunein.

But I rarely stream music anymore. If I want to listen to something, I buy it as an MP3. I avoid the Apple Music Store and look for alternative places that sell unlocked MP3s and don't require me to use iTunes to buy it.

Most of the time, I don't listen to music but instead to audiobooks or audio plays. This makes my drive to/from work go a lot faster. I got addicted to audiobooks when I had a regular three hour drive (I worked that far away from home) and just kept at them. If you like audiobooks and you like Doctor Who, I highly recommend Big Finish Productions which has the license for Doctor Who (new and classic series), Blake's 7, Survivors, Torchwood, and a bunch of other great stuff, including spinoffs (Dalek Empire, UNIT, Counter-Measures, Jago and Litefoot, etc). Even better, they do their audio plays with the original cast!

Under 9000 is nothing. His ID is under 1000!

If I had mod points, I would +1 you.

I worked in higher ed for 17 years (I recently moved to a new career path) and over the last several years we were starting to deploy more Chromebooks to users. We were a Google Apps for Education campus. Chromebooks just made a lot of sense. I didn't have to worry about the device getting lost or stolen. The device is encrypted by user - but there's a limited opportunity to download stuff to the Chromebook anyway. By default, everything runs in "The Cloud."

Most of our students, staff, and faculty didn't need a very powerful machine. They mostly just booted their computer and opened a web browser to Google Apps (Gmail, Docs, etc.) The Chromebook makes a lot of sense for these users.

Deploying Chromebooks comes with the assumption that you have wifi everywhere. But as a university campus, you have to do that anyway because you never know where students will want to use a laptop.

Before I left the campus, I was pushing to move our meeting rooms, general computer labs, and classroom PCs to Chromeboxes (basically the same as a Chromebook but in desktop form) as a way to reduce cost.

I requested a site be deleted from Wayback a number of years ago. It was a test site, and I stupidly didn't put a "Disallow" robots.txt file on it. I recall that the overview you describe is correct: adding a "Disallow" robots.txt file removes the site from display. But to remove the site from their storage, I had to contact an admin. They asked me to demonstrate that I was the owner of the site (by copying my email message to them as a comment on the website's front page) then they deleted my website from their Wayback archive. However, that was when everyone used spinning disk to store data, and before write-only media became popular in the data center. Facebook stores photos on BluRays these days .. maybe Wayback does now too. If Wayback does something like this, it would be impossible to completely delete the data, although they would (theoretically) be able to remove references from their database.

For those of you wondering if the Beta is okay to use, I'll share that I've been running Fedora 24 Alpha since it was released at the end of March, and the Alpha has been stable for me. I'm looking forward to installing the Beta this weekend.

(My Linux system is a Thinkpad X1 Carbon, 1st gen.)

My wife and I do this all the time - when we text each other, we use a single emoji to represent a phrase or expression. Usually it's just the "happy face" emoji to represent "Ok, that's fine." Like to acknowledge a conversation and it's now over, whatever you just said sounds fine to me: "happy face."

We use other emoji too. We have a cat who is afraid of the rain, so if my wife texts me the "rain" emoji and the "sad kitty" emoji, I know it's raining at the house and my cat is hiding in the basement.

But use emoji in work communication or business email or website posts? No.

The numbers in the article are difficult to understand, but I think their presentation allowed them to talk about a "decline" because gosh, the chart goes down after the Sony PlayStation 2 (2000).

So I took their numbers and actually crunched some data. I temporarily published it via Google: Best-selling videogame consoles. The generated chart doesn't show labels for all the bars, but you can hover your mouse over the bar to see missing labels.

This chart borrows the sales numbers provided from the Quartz article "The golden era of video-game console sales is over" and uses year introduced v year discontinued dates from Wikipedia. In all cases, I used the earliest available date introduced and the latest date discontinued. From there, it's simple math to figure out the average number of units sold per year. Quartz used millions, so my chart displays millions of units sold per year available. The chart is sorted by year introduced (most recent at top).

While not perfect, this is a better comparison because it allows you to compare per year averages rather than total units. (Ravaldy says that the 10 million Xbox One number is wrong, it should be 20 million, so you might double the value in my chart, about on par with PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.)

This shows that the "golden era of videogame consoles" is not over. Nintendo Wii and PlayStation 4 both sold/sell almost 15 million per year, a bit more than PlayStation 2 (12 million/year) and a bit less than the original PlayStation (17.5 million/year). From my interpretation of the data, I think the "golden era" started with the original PlayStation and is still going strong.

I don't have a landline anymore, just a cell phone. If I don't recognize the number calling me, I let it go to voicemail. And since I use Google's Voicemail service, I get texted a transcript of the voicemail pretty quickly. That's a pretty good filter for telemarketers v someone I might want to talk to.

If it's a telemarketer, I then add the number to a "Do not answer" contact in my cell phone. That contact is set up to not ring, just send to voicemail. Sometimes, telemarketers try again from the same number, but I never get the call.

I can speak to this. I focus a lot of my free time on the usability of free/open source software, and a few years ago, I looked into the usability of GIMP. I didn't do a full usability test, but conducted surveys of different people who used GIMP, versus Photoshop. What I found is that a person's perception of GIMP's usability depends on their familiarity with Photoshop:

People who used Photoshop all the time complained that GIMP had poor usability. This seemed to be because people knew they way around Photoshop very well, and were put off when the same functions were not accessed via the same menu path, or were called something slightly different. So they felt lost, like GIMP was broken even though they recognized it was very powerful.

People who used Photoshop occasionally, but not all the time commented that GIMP had good usability. These users understood the basic concepts behind Photoshop, such as layers and channels and plugins and tools, and could transfer that knowledge easily to GIMP. Because they didn't have a "muscle memory" of Photoshop, these users weren't put off by having the same functionality located elsewhere or with a slightly different name, because they probably didn't remember exactly what the feature was called in Photoshop, or in what exact menu it was located.

People who did not use Photoshop said that GIMP had poor usability. That seemed to be because these users didn't understand the basic concepts of Photoshop, about layers or tools or filters or what a "raster" image was, and felt overwhelmed by GIMP. If these users did any image manipulation at all, they used a simple "Paint" program like Microsoft Paint.

From your comment, it sounds like you use Photoshop quite often. So I'm not surprised you find GIMP has poor usability.