No, they have an app like this, which allows them to view the DSLR's viewfinder on a tablet, control various settings, and take pictures. "DSLR remote shooting", in other words.

I don't disagree with either of those points. As far as games though, there's also currently a vibrant culture of independent game development that carries some of what Flash game development did. Then there's the combination of SVG and Javascript, which allow similar things to be done.

Flash actually works better on my current phone than it did on the phone I had when it was actually supported. The APKs are still available from Adobe themselves, for anyone who cares to download them. Sometimes a nostalgia trip to some of the old flash video sites is fun.

Maybe you're outside of the general demographic that they served. 10-15 years ago, there were few people that I knew between 10 and 20 years of age that didn't visit one or more of those sites occasionally, or at least know of them. In some ways, they filled similar niches to what Youtube videos and smartphone games do now, but in a lower-bandwidth, resolution/device-independent way.

Many of the non-interactive videos can be found on Youtube now, rendered into raster video from the original vector source files. Similarly, most of the game concepts have been replicated in one way or another to various mobile devices.

What about something like M-Discs? They're a consumer-available optical medium designed for long-term storage. They require a drive with a higher-powered laser to record, but will read in a standard DVD or Blu-ray drive. Of course, their "1000 years of storage" can't really be tested, but the idea of using an inorganic data layer seems like an improvement, and the discs passed some kind of DoD reliability testing.

That's a wonderful idea if I were just working on my own projects. Clang++'s output *is* much cleaner than GCC's. However, it's more difficult to suggest as one of hundreds of developers in a corporate setting. Politics, legal hoops, inertia, verification that there are vendor-supported packages for that compiler on systems that haven't updated to gcc 4.x, etc.

C++ is essentially a mixture of languages at this point, with several ways to do many things. You can still write very C-like code using C data types, with the pitfalls of C (memory leaks, buffer overflows, etc). You can write more modern-style C++ programs using the container classes, iterators, and RAII techniques to avoid C's pitfalls. You can also end up with a program that's an ugly mash of C and C++.

C++ templates, which enable generic programming, are complicated enough to be their own sub-language, and errors that are output by the compiler about any of the templated container classes can be nigh-incomprehensible on their own, and take up a few dozen lines to describe an error like "You need a random-access iterator here, not just a forward iterator".

There are other examples, but essays can be (and have been) written about unnecessary complexity in C++.

If one lived alone in a cabin in the woods, one would still not succeed at escaping irrationality, since there's still one human nearby. People like to pretend that they're rational, but they're fooling themselves. You'll find the only example of non-idiotic humanity riding a unicorn, taking tea with the Flying Spaghetti Monster, in orbit about 1.3 AU out from a teapot inscribed "Bertrand" on the bottom.

Not under those terms, which is why I don't use store-specific cards (since it's already bad enough that credit processors want to track me). If there were a pay service that could replace FB in all aspects, minus ads and data-gathering, I'd be more than interested to look at it.

Honestly? It doesn't bother me. Similar to "How does it feel [...] that think they know you because of your pseudonynmous posts on Slashdot?" I don't do anything important on Facebook, similar to how I don't do anything important on Slashdot. Sometimes, I make posts that don't reflect my feelings, just for a change in pace. Facebook wants to see my false information? Meh.

Amused, so far. FB has been trying to guess where I live for years. I don't think that it's ever guessed the right city, and it guesses the right county only occasionally. More commonly, it picks a state across the country where it knows I have a lot of friends, or in another country. I commonly look up products that friends are interested in, but that I don't care about. I mark random ads as offensive. If they can actually filter the signal from the noise, I actually think that's pretty cool, and I hope some papers eventually get written and released, based on the methods. They've done the work, and all based on information that I wouldn't have a problem yelling to random people on a street corner.

I've observed the following on my wife's Windows phone:
- The Line app doesn't do emote pop-ups like it does on my Android phone. If you want to use emotes, you have to look them up manually
- Her phone lacks turn-by-turn navigation, and won't narrate directions. It's useless as a car navigation device for those reasons.
- As far as I'm aware, Tubecast is the only Windows app that'll stream to Chromecast, and I think it's Youtube-only
- Daily reminders to reboot the phone, with the statement that they don't recommend continuing to operate the phone without restarts
- All the games advertised on TV: No Windows Phone version.
- No emulators
- No on-device scripting environments
- No on-device command-line
- I like having my ssh +ftp clients+servers available on my phone, because they're easier than connecting a cable
- No Dropbox app

I am overjoyed that you don't care about any of the things I've listed...but I do. Most of the items aren't critical requirements on their own, but the combination of all of them together means that using a Windows Phone would be a serious reduction in what my phone could do, for me.

My certainty is that the Windows app store lacks most of the software that I want.

Friday was basically about a genetically engineered woman acting as a message courier. Her biggest worry was racism (artificial people being widely hated by the general populace).

I'd be more interested if they provided a server program to run on my own hardware and act as Nest's intelligent backend+database, without an internet connection. It's bad enough that my electrical utility installed smart meters without the option to stick with the normal, non-connected ones.

I see some potential fun to be had with setting up some home automation, and I see value in pre-built hardware that's designed to work together with other hardware, but it ought to be a system where I have as complete control as possible.

My point was that at no time do they offer you access to two regions at once. I haven't read the full terms of use recently, so I'm not sure how exactly it's worded.

They've paid, but only for the things that are offered by Netflix in their country. Netflix's catalog varies country-by-country (and is unavailable in most countries of the world). People use outside services that are against Netflix's use policies to make it look like they're in another country that has the content they want to see.

I disagree. My analogy is saying that things don't happen just because you say so. Law should follow the will of the people, scientific or not, because anything else is going to cause conflict within society. I think that your entire way of thinking is wrong, because people won't magically conform to laws just because of consequences. If the world was that direct, we could just set the sentence for every crime as death. One of society's obligations is to help and support other members of that society. Otherwise, it's counterproductive for the individual to participate.