I suspect they're not producing these kinds of phones simply because, despite the author's assertion, very few people actually do want such phones.

A writer and a submitter does not constitute some vast ignored market.

How much does a middle aged Slashdot ID go for nowadays? I might be in the market to sell mine to an astroturfer.

I'm not clear as to how, for instance, using buggy versions of SSL libraries fits into your whole theory. One possibility is that what you wrote is gibberish.

You could have saved some typing by not opening the article. But then you would not have been able to write this long pointless OT rant.

"Either your name is on the volume licensing agreement... or your brains."

As we speak, Microsoft is instructing its European "business partners" to give a certain French city a shitload of really cheap Office licenses.

I have to confess, I'm pretty mystified. For our own internal servers, I have my own CA, and can see no reason why I would want to have someone else sign internal certs.

Sounds like yet another way in which the commercial CAs scam stupid CIOs out of cash.

Why is everyone so uncomfortable with the idea that something can be lost forever? How is that a problem? I'm perfectly sanguine with the idea that information can be lost or irretrievable. I'm perfectly sanguine with the idea that the universe will die of heat death. I'm also down with the idea that the Big Rip will swallow everything up in several billion years - talk about information loss... It just strikes me as fatuous and arrogant that humans think the universe has to work a certain rational, logical, way - like the universe gives a shit one way or the other.

Double kudos for writing it on touch screen devices. I do some Play-by-email roleplaying and at times I do posts on my Nexus 7, and man oh man it's difficult. I wouldn't even dream of doing long prose writing on a tablet.

Quite frankly, and this sounds stupid, but I'm emotionally attached to my glasses. I'm 42 now, and I've been wearing glasses since I was six. Frankly I don't even remember what it was like without them. I freely admit it's an irrational and emotional response, but I like my glasses.

Hell, if I put a Raspberry Pi inside the scooped out guts of ENIAC, it would be just like ENIAC was streaming a movie... right?

I'm thinking of pulling the beads off an abacus and throwing a Raspberry Pi to show how an abacus can stream movies... and then maybe hollowing out a stone and showing how cool streaming could have been in the Neolithic...

Sarcasm mode off

For certain limited definitions of "support".

For some tasks I can understand recycling. I use older hardware to build routers, anti-spam gateways, VPN appliances and the like. Normally these are fairly low-cycle tasks, at least for smaller offices. But I've learned my lesson about using older hardware in mission critical applications. I've set up custom routers that worked just great, until the motherboards popped a cap, and then they're down, and unless you've got spares sitting around, you're in for some misery.

How much do Kremlin astroturfers get paid?

And where exactly are you from? Some of the most accusatory reporting is coming from Europe.