FTA:

A Central California woman claims she was fired after uninstalling an app that her employer required her to run constantly on her company issued iPhone —an app that tracked her every move 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

emphasis mine.

Where do you see that it was her phone? TFA reads:

A Central California woman claims she was fired after uninstalling an app that her employer required her to run constantly on her company issued iPhone—an app that tracked her every move 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

I do not think that word means what you think it means...

A Central California woman claims she was fired after uninstalling an app that her employer required her to run constantly on her company issued iPhone—an app that tracked her every move 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Sadly, their brags of "only five years behind" is an underestimate. It's a 65nm chip - its heyday was 2006-2007, on tail-end Pentium IVs, early Core 2, and Phenoms. 45nm hit in 2008, followed by 32nm in 2010. In 2012 Intel hit 22nm, but most others were on a 28nm half-node. Currently, 14nm is shipping from some vendors, and the rest are gearing up for it.

Account for the fact that these chips most likely won't actually be delivered until 2016, and you'll see they're really 10 years behind, not 5. That will probably still be fine for desktops or industrial use, but mobile is out, and servers will be very inefficient compared to modern ones.

SpaceX is getting some of the benefits of skipping the LAS, by using the same system for at least two tasks.

The primary use is as a propulsive landing system. That's probably the main way they'll be used. There's a backup parachute system, but they want powered landings to be the norm.

The secondary use is as an abort engine. It'll probably be rarely used, and I think it uses up all the fuel so an aborted launch will have to use parachutes, which will make for rougher landings but still plenty survivable. This way, they won't be carrying fuel that isn't used in some way during the flight.

A third possible use is as an in-flight maneuvering system. This is mostly done using the smaller Draco engines, not the big SuperDracos, but they run off the same fuel supply and are mounted in the same pod. But if they ever need to do significant orbital maneuvers, I expect they'll light up the SuperDracos.

Because they're trying something new with it. They're using the same set of engines for emergency escape as they are for propulsive landing of the capsule. That's fairly innovative in and of itself, and the changes required for that (side rockets instead of a top-mounted tower) let it also be used for a longer period of the flight.

As always, the answer is "it depends on a lot of things":

1. Is the language little-used because it's a special-purpose language? UnrealScript probably doesn't crack the top twenty as far as general programming languages go, but in the game dev field it's probably one of the biggest. Using a specialized language for a specialized task is fine - usually even a good thing.

2. Is the language little-used, but library-compatible with a more common language? Clojure is a rare language, but it can call Java libraries and code, which is a massive boon. Actual programming languages don't matter so much as the libraries they allow you to use, and if you can piggyback on a bigger library of libraries, you can go far with a small, obscure language. This isn't sufficient to make the language OK to use, because:

3. Is the project going to be worked on by more than one person? Personal projects, sure, use whatever language you feel like. Small groups can decide what to use. But if it's a big project that's likely to cycle through developers, think about the impact using an uncommon language will have.

4. Is there something about your problem that makes common languages inefficient or ineffective? Is the uncommon language objectively better at the exact task you're solving? Or is it just "the syntax is slightly cleaner"? This isn't a full deciding factor, but unless the language shows promise as being useful in the future, I wouldn't use it on a personal project.

Any chance Comcast will look at where their customers now lie, decide they're now an ISP with a side business in TV rather than a cable company with a side job in internet, and stop raping the quality of their internet to drive customers towards their cable offerings, and give up on those silly plans to become a competitor to Netflix et al. because they feel lonely without the ability to cram their own ads into something that's already overladen with advertising?

No chance? Didn't think so.

Weird, I'm a 90's kid and:
I haven't touched my Facebook account in years
My Twitter is mostly subscriptions, generally to things that are actually interesting (eg. @RealTimeWWII not @kanye)
I have no Instagram
I've never actually heard of Opentable
I've taken one selfie in my life, and it was a joke at my sister's wedding

I also used MS-DOS (via Windows 95, sure, but it still counts), think Perl is a more useful language than Ruby or any other fad-language-of-the-week, and I can read assembler if given enough time and a table of opcodes.

Do I still qualify as a Digital Native?

I was thinking just that - creating a USB device that takes input from one port, and simulates a mouse on the other, is pretty trivial.

The only excuse for having less than four should be having too many other ports present to physically fit them all.

Every current Intel mobile chipset provides at least four USB3 ports, and most provide six. The only acceptable reason not to have at least four is "between all these video outputs, audio outputs, Thunderbolt port, and SD card reader, there just wasn't room for all four USB ports".

The physical USB port costs basically nothing. You can get them for ten cents apiece on Amazon - I'm sure buying in lots of thousands instead of twenty will bring that down even further. Going above what the chipset provides adds an expense, of course, but 4-6 USB ports is enough. I just don't see a reason not to populate all of them with a physical port.

* Last-minute addition: another reasonable excuse is "we routed the USB port internally to the Bluetooth and Wifi adapters". Some motherboards do things that way, and that is indeed a reasonable excuse for having only two USB ports, if using a chipset with only four USB ports. But I would argue that if you know two ports will be used internally, you should probably spring for a 6-port chipset, particularly since only the cheapest limit to four.

Valve and Bethesda made numerous mistakes with this implementation, but I still consider it a good idea. I'm definitely planning to allow paid mods in my own games, if I ever get one ready for retail. But here's where they went wrong.

1) They set a minimum price far too high. Relatively few mods are worth a dollar, even the ones that are worth buying at all. Give supply and demand a free hand to set prices, and I think most average-sized mods would have been priced around $0.20. Some might have been able to sell at a much higher rate, but not many.

2) They didn't protect from fraud. As soon as the announcement hit, people started uploading mods they didn't make - there was already a massive corpus of free mods, after all, and basically no protection against this. The least they could have done is give a decent warning period, for mod authors to decide whether to start selling their mods or not, and to search for fake versions being uploaded without their consent. They didn't do that, and they definitely didn't do any sort of technical measures, like comparing uploaded mods' checksums against those already uploaded. All of that is easily foreseeable because I actually foresaw it - I've been planning how to do this in my own games, and all of that was on my list before they even announced their feature.

3) They didn't share the profit well. Valve was taking a 30% cut, which is already more than they do for full games, and then Zenimax was taking another 40%. I can see that, because the base game does a non-trivial amount of work for the mod, that they do deserve some compensation (although I'd say increased sales are the true payment to the publisher). But a cumulative 70% is just ridiculous. I'd argue that no less than 50% should go to the modder. For my own games with paid mods, I'm thinking more in the 75:25 or 90:10 range, or even 100% to the modder (because, after all, a vibrant modding community brings about more sales, so the marginal loss on hosting is more than recovered).

4) They launched it suddenly, with no notice. Nobody had any inkling it was coming, least of all the modders who would be most affected by it. Valve and Zenimax should have given at least the big-name modders some heads-up, so they could think and have time to rationally decide whether to start selling, and for how much, and to work out any licensing issues in multi-person teams. And perhaps if gamers had been able to see it coming, they could have realized it was a good thing, instead of letting the knee-jerk reaction control the debate.

They did, however, do one thing surprisingly right, which deserves recognition: they gave full, automatic refunds within 24 hours of purchase on any mod you didn't like. That's definitely something necessary, and something very surprising to see from Valve.

Hopefully they can sort out these issues with the next game they try this on, instead of giving up on what is an excellent idea.

You're full of shit too. You speak as though getting chickenpox will prevent shingles which it won't and there's other things that you have claimed that I find to be...less than accurate but don't have the time to find sources so I won't claim them.