'I don't like tablets and don't think you should either.'

Oh come on - I like Linux and use it for my servers and even some RTOS... but 'Linux' has almost nothing to do with that. It'd work just as well on any RTOS. Would you give credit to Windows for every single freaking program that can run on it?

Something like 'Raspberry Pi Controls a Gasoline Engine With Machine Learning Using Eigen
C++ Matrix Library' would be far more descriptive.

Of course it's not a policy change. Their policy has always(?) been this isn't allowed. It's just a change in the enforcement.

Usual outsourced programming involves finding chunks of vaguely related existing code, smashing them together, beating on them till they compile, calling it done.

If this includes StackExchange they'll be completely dead in the water.

Bowling, video games, coding, homework, conversation, even speaking a foreign language - you'll do better on one beer (YMMV as to amount).

The hard part is stopping or spacing it out enough. Because after that it's all downhill. Except maybe the conversation, and that's probably an illusion.

This is the #1 case for something like a Pebble right now.
- Put all your notifications on your wrist. Email, caller id, SMS.
- Reject calls from your watch!
- Never have to unlock your phone again - it's tied to the watch.
- Canned responses from your watch.
- SILENCE your phone. You can't miss the buzz on your wrist, so now you won't be that ass whose phone is whistling every 10 seconds.
- Likewise, you cannot miss the buzz on your wrist for alarms, no matter how noisy it is.
- Navigation and music control on your watch.

People always go on about 'oh but your phone is right there!' But it's all about the user experience. Pebble: *buzz* I glance over, in meeting, okay - good to know, no need to answer. 2 seconds. Nobody even knows that happened. Or I discretely hit a button to send an 'OK'. Phone: *phone whistles or maybe I was thoughtful enough to put it face down so it just buzzes on the table* Now I pull it out of pocket or flip it over on table, unlock it (or are you just putting notifications on the lock screen, insecurely?), oh, okay. I didn't need to read that now, but didn't know that till I read it. Put it back down. 5-10 seconds, a lot of motion and being a dick to everyone around you.

It's like SSDs. You don't *need* an SSD. So I tried telling people for 5 years how they transform your computer, but oh *PISH POSH* till they actually get one and never want to go back.

Any excuse to not work!

One strike per month is seemingly required by their union bylaws anyhow, so it might as well be about Uber.

This is horrifying - how gullible do you have to be to back and trust this? It's such a big fat juicy target for the NSA (or FBI or Russian hackers or any other group of
miscreants). It's a 'spy on me!' box for the people they most want to spy on. If they have the full help of the company then they can add cheap hardware to the build so that even if you completely wipe and reflash the main partition their stuff still runs. Even if the company were legit, all you need is one guy or one pwned computer inside it.

A couple years ago you'd be crazy paranoid to think they'd bother, but post-Snowden we know they have the time, the interest, and unlimited resources.

The 3rd party apps only even worked because Snapchat is hideously insecure and has been from day one. It stored the pictures unencrypted on the device and didn't even bother actually erasing them (just moved them to another folder!). It's since improved slightly, but it's a fundamentally insecure design and they're apparently being too disruptive and innovative to fix it.

This is it! The year of FreeBSD on the desktop!

I apologize for the semi-offensive subject, but nothing else I tried was as accurate or clear.

There's no 'lone actor' or 'rogue account' forcing them to do this. This is THEIR OWN POLICY. Claiming someone else 'forced' them to do it is standard corporate/military/law enforcement weaseling. 'The officer's gun was discharged 30 times into the suspect.' Well darn, that poor officer with his gun going off like that and all.

Total damage control bullcrap.

*facepalm* This is /exactly/ why it opens up a whole new class of client (or server) vulnerabilities. You have to assume you are being lied to by something malicious instead of just using the values. Easiest one - in a length field, lie about how many bytes are in the field. That's the Heartbleed bug!

And you're still going to have to parse it - you get a binary blob, but it's not a fixed struct you can just drop into memory and access the members of directly (that would be bad, anyhow). But it's a much easier parsing job... Tag, Length, Value... unless you're being lied to.

Paper serving is not some super serious must be done in person thing. You usually do need to try to have a process server try to serve the papers in person. But when that fails, then it's good enough to just give it to a housemate or relative. If you can't do that, then it can be mailed. If it gets down to it, *the papers can be served just by posting a notice in the newspaper*.

Facebook has 'the message was seen', which is more reliable than a lot of these. If it goes into your spam then it doesn't get marked as read. And it's fairly obvious whether you've been active on your account or not - it's (hopefully) much harder for someone to fake being you on FB for six months without anyone noticing than it is to just register a mail address in your name.

The courts are used to dealing with all manner of tricksy dirtbags, so when they go into hiding mode, the courts go into more aggressive, more error-prone methods. This fits right in there. You can, of course, just lock down your FB account for posting - or use an app that doesn't mark the message as read. But FB users are more likely to be posting public photos of their crimes on FB than to fix their privacy settings.

Another engineer who thinks he can cobble up a single technological solution to a social problem.

This is the same sort of hubris that has legislators passing random crap to 'fix' a problem with zero understanding of the problem or the consequences of their solution. It's arrogance. For one, it assumes you're smarter (or at least sharper) than the people you're trying to control.

(Disclaimer: I'm an engineer.)

Everyone thinks this when their specific little niche goes away for whatever reason. Or even when it changes.

Opportunists who are just in it for easy money will bail out and find whatever the land rush is this month. The others will find a way. Remember when AAA gaming crushed all small budget games forever? Yeah.

(This can be 'bad' as well if you're one of those people who think income is the only thing that matters... some of those people could have done better financially elsewhere).