To top that off, Apple always reports actual sales, whereas Samsung reports shipment to retailers, which may not necessarily count as sales - at least not in the sense of sales directly into customer hands.

That only works until it's time for upgrades... then the company takes a massive hit in re-training time and lost productivity until their staff is up to speed.

Personally, if a company isn't willing to invest in me, then why the hell should I invest in it? Better to jump ship for a company that will invest in you than to sit on autopilot watching your skillset grow stale (and yes, for anyone not a developer it will grow stale, even if you train yourself or pay for your own training, because you'll never use it in a practical work setting. Devs have an 'out' in contributing to and maintaining OSS projects, though TBH it's a small comfort.)

The car depends on where I go... if it's Atlanta, I get a car or else. If It's SFO, I prefer to just hit BART and save the whole parking hassle.

The last sentence is key - OP may be able to go if he makes it contingent on writing a report afterwards detailing what he's learned while he was there. I had an employer do that at the last NetWorld I went to.

correction - 2009, not 1999 (stupid nostalgia anyway...)

Hate to say it, but parent is almost completely correct.

There are some bennies to being on-site (hands-on labs with an expert on hand), but otherwise most conferences are just a big marketing push with a lot of hanger-on companies and startups vying for your attention on the main floor.

It wouldn't be so bad if the exhibitors had actual experts on hand to answer the tough questions w/o resorting to market-speak, but most of them don't, and are too busy evangelizing. If I wanted to get pounded with marketing-speak, I'd invite VARs to stop by at my office for that. If I want swag or bennies, there are plenty of local ones that local VARs are happy to give/throw (e.g. watching a Trailblazers game from a box seat while the VAR spends halftime talking to you about his product lines).

The last conference I went to was VMWorld in 1999, which had the hands-on labs and an opportunity to speak with the actual VMWare developers in an intimate setting about upcoming bits and existing problems (albeit the latter was restricted to certain big buyers/partners), but otherwise it seemed to be nothing more than a means to work over VPN interspersed with advertisement on-site, and more marketing disguised as after-hours drinking parties.

Seriously... They were fun as hell, and you used to learn a lot in the process, but the days of COMDEX and NetWorld are dead; you can thank the Internet for that.

Now classes or boot-camps? Different story, and still well worth going to depending on the technology and the depth offered. Conferences? Not so much.

I keep the wifi dead on my phone mostly for battery reasons, coupled with the fact that I have unlimited data on my plan, so it makes no real diff to me. :)

Exact same model and rigging here... though the house I live in uses the old plaster-and-lath walls (it's an old beast).

Dude - I live in a 105-year-old house, in a small town just outside Portland (OR), and I still do well even with a big front/back yard.

The trick? Easy:
1) the wifi router is upstairs, away from the chimney but with a clear shot downstairs (and to each bedroom).
2) It's an ASUS router (screw that cheapie one that the ISP gives you; disable that and hard-line to a decent wifi router with a good reputation made for gaming.)
3) Scan the frig out of your neighborhood, and pick a channel no one else is using.

Result? In spite of my laptop, the TV, Dish DVR, my wife's iPad, and two Android phones (albeit I keep wifi off on mine)... http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/3771041924 (taken off my MacBook Pro just now.)

You can restore that from iCloud (or wherever you stashed the backup if it ain't an iPhone) one would think, then punch in the passcode once that's done. Pretty sure a court would allow it if the defense claims the data was already thrashed.

Not much different from a proprietary project, except that instead of "sexy/ugly", the factor is "profitable/unprofitable".

This, right here. Even if it goes stagnant for years? If you can get (or already have) the source, you can resurrect it.

By contrast, if you wanted to resurrect, say, WinCE? Well, good luck with that.

Ye Gods... really?

If you're quarantined and you see neighbors dying of Ebola, for fuck sakes - do your rights demand that you escape by any means, carry it with you, and spread it to other areas?

I get individual rights over statism, and would be among the first to take up arms against a tyranny, but damn... think of your fellow human beings for once.

I see you're still stuck in that Party vs. Party trap. ...need help getting out of that, or do you wish to continue laboring under the delusion that either of the big two political parties actually give a damn about anything beyond the continued acquisition of money and power?

In fairness, I suspect that GP was assuming that aid and care would still be shipped in (volunteer basis of course), which does not preclude or invalidate a quarantine.