I just threw away half a dozen (or so) 3-button mice, some still in the box. All were PS/2 connectors and ball mice.

There was an e-waste disposal event in the neighborhood and I took the opportunity to clean the spare room out.

Thank you for this. I had disabled Flashblock, and my web experience had gotten annoying. Hoping the Greasemonkey script in that bug report will let me re-enable it.

Well, it did take some effort, because some services that I have been using since long before G+ reduced their utility and moved some functions into G+. Google Talk became Hangouts, and some things that were part of Talk started requiring a plus account. Reviews of Android Apps now require G+.

That meant that I had to get out of the habit of using those functions or sign up. Each time I tried to use one I'd get a dialog telling me that I needed to sign up for Google+ to use that function. Sometimes I'd even start to fill in the registration before I thought better of it and backed out.

Well, Facebook's policies are no better than Google+ was. But I don't use any Facebook services other than Facebook itself, and if I lost access to Facebook it would be a minor annoyance. If I lost access to my non-plus Google services it would be a much bigger problem.

You're right that the G+ policy has been changed, although it doesn't seem that long ago to me. Maybe I just hold a grudge for a long time. In any case, it tainted their brand in my eyes, and it will be a long time before I forget that.

That's pretty much it. Google was being pretty hard core about their real name policy on Google+, to the degree that people who Google determined had violated it ended up having their entire Google collection of services canceled.

Since I *do* use lots of Google services, but don't really care about the social media part, I never signed up for Google+. I didn't want to take the chance of losing the services I did value.

By the time they finally saw sense and dropped the requirement, I didn't care enough to sign up.

Sure. No problem.

It's 10.7.7.34

You're a little confused. This was a Red Hat invention. It was the other distros that jumped on the bandwagon. Or the shark, as may be.

Pretty good job finding these for sale, considering they won't be available until February at any price. Amazon doesn't have them listed yet. Nor does anyone else they have linked.

Yes, there are other Fit-branded systems by the same people, but no Fitlets. And no idea about prices other than the bare-bone base model.

It sounds really interesting, and I'm sorry I have those cartons full of mini-itx stuff sitting on my kitchen table. This would probably have made a better firewall.

Is this a "they couldn't help themselves, it was just too tempting" kind of defense? :)

I think the constant UI changes are worse, but both are annoying.

I'm sticking with the XP VMs for anything I personally have to use.

I have a Win 7 VM with Office 2010 on it (nothing else) and it ballooned up to over 30G of storage and slams into a resource wall if you only allocate 3G to it. My XP VM with Office 2007 took less than 7G and was happy with less than 2G RAM. We had to upgrade hard drives and RAM on the lab that uses that VM, just to manage the the Windows image that's used for that one class.

...that Firefox is still my favorite browser. I really don't care for any of the rest, but my gods, what kinds of drugs are they doing over at the Mozilla compound?

I'm kind of hoping that my 2012 updates fairly soon. It's still on KitKat, and it's painfully slow, even after clearing the cache.

It's not that I'm looking forward to Lollipop particularly. It looks pretty ugly (well, maybe not as ugly as KitKat) but I'd like to test it out on a non-critical device before I allow it on my phone. It seems that each new version of Android has regressions, adding things I don't care about and remving things I find useful.

I liked Jelly Bean. Don't care much for KitKat. I'm skeptical of Lollipop.

They didn't refuse. If you go to their github page for the app, it says that it runs under either Android or IOS.

They chose not to push it through the Apple App Store, because of those terms and conditions. The code is there, though, if you want to figure out how to get it onto your iDevice.

Did you look on the EFF page about this app?

Here ya go.

Let me fix that for you.

1. Tell the telecom companies to leave the Internet alone, it's been working just fine for years. Use regulation if necessary to enforce it.

2. Let the telecom companies change the structure of the Net "to pursue 'innovative' partnerships" and create "tiers" of service depending on the source of the packets and whether that source competes with their own business model. This is what you are calling Net Neutrality.