They give me more, and get paid much more. My Facebook has about as much information on it as one of my old instant messaging accounts did. It gives you rope to hang yourself with. Doesn't mean you have to use it.

Facebook doesn't know about my trip because I didn't post about it. My credit card knows a fair amount about it because I don't usually conduct all of my business exclusively in cash. Oddly, I hear a lot more people complaining about Facebook than I do about the massive datamining that credit companies do.

Really? Then what's going on if someone pays me money to mow their lawn? In that case, they're the customer. They hired me, and they're going to pay me for my work. Ditto if I'm doing maintenance on their computer, or something. I've done both. So, in what way does that mean that I haven't been hired+paid by a customer?

Facebook is a middleman for a product. The product is user information, offered by users for sale. Facebook pays their users by providing a service that many of them find useful. There's a trade; if it's a one-sided donation on the user's part, then they got screwed (like in a blood drive, where it's a donation, instead of a trade). If Facebook doesn't provide useful services for trade, then the users will take their product elsewhere.

Of course Facebook translates information into money by analyzing it and selling information to advertisers, so advertisers are the first Facebook customers that actually trade money for a product. So, the users and the ad guys are both customers, just in different senses.

When I started working as a salaried employee doing software development, my employment contract included language to the effect that everything I produced using any company resources, or using internal company information, belonged to them. When you're salaried, you don't really have "your own time", and since they're paying you, most companies would say that your time is another "company resource". I'm not sure how well that would hold up in court, but I'd also expect that most companies could grind their employees into the ground if it came to time in a courtroom.

Realistically, they weren't interested in the little hobby game I was writing (my employer produced business software), so it's unlikely that they'll claim copyright on it. Now, if I developed a new plugin for my employer's product, that's a somewhat more danger-fraught proposition.

What you want is probably some time with a lawyer, and to begin negotiations with your employer for an explicit contract stating that you own copyright on the things you're making, but that you're assigning non-exclusive, but unlimited use+distribution+modification rights to your employer (OK, obviously I'm no lawyer, but I'm sure you get the idea).

You may be on good terms with your employer, but they aren't your friend. They're out to make money off of your work. There needs to be a contract outlining who owns what, what they can do with it, etc. Otherwise, you're opening yourself up for bad times.

Only if the URL makes human-parseable sense, or if I recognize the URL and know what's on the page. The tab title, page layout, colors, etc act as mnemonic devices.

80MB is nothing, and tab groups are great for categorizing open tabs. Firefox and Chrome will both restore previously-open tabs after a crash.

Call it abuse, or not. It works for me.

The malware uses OpenCL. Nothing using a fixed graphics pipeline should be able to be infected, since they aren't capable of general purpose computation.

It's not a "complete and total lie." The Zen of Python, "Python Enhancement Proposal #20", states:

It's one of the guiding principles of the language's design. Type "import this" into a Python command-line, and PEP20 gets printed out.

Spinning your SSD is not required, and it complicates the power and data connections.

He said "watch", not "smartwatch". Why would a regular wristwatch be banned?

#1: Are you going to guarantee that another webkit browser will have the exact behavior of Safari, in all respects?

#2: You sound like you're assuming that there's a "perfectly good Mac" available, when the earlier AC was complaining about having to pay Apple for hardware to test their software on. I'd assume that in their perfect world, they're running a licensed copy of OSX in a virtualized environment on a Windows or Linux machine.

My company's purpose is to virtualize the OS for development; we don't care about Safari itself, but in the case that we did, there isn't any (legal) way to test it without purchasing Apple hardware.

By their licensing terms, OSX can only be run on "Apple-branded hardware", or words to that effect. My employer virtualizes OSX, but they do it on a old Apple Xserve from about 2009. There arentt any other rackmount options available that I know of.

If the kid's skilled enough to make a game, then surely whoever paid for the computer would recognize that and pay for something worthwhile like a game engine subscription, rather than something frivolous like an mmorpg subscription. And if not? Well, life's not always fair, and this would provide an excellent example of that. The company's got to make money, and there are plenty of free alternatives that the kid could start with anyhow.

If OP is gaming, they're more likely to use a wired device than a wireless one. I've never liked wireless devices, myself.

...Haven't we covered this already? Is there some downside to using a phone? You talk about it like it's a bad idea. As for the iPod Touch, it's been about 5 years since one was released that could be used without iTunes. If I didn't have a smartphone, I'd use my $20 MP3 player. Smaller+lighter than even a small touchscreen device, cheaper to replace, takes microSD for memory expansion (and thus has more space than my 1st gen iPod Touch, anyhow), and it's too small to break if dropped.

Unless you've bought into the Apple app ecosystem, there are better options than an iPod from any angle. Music player, mini-tablet/personal media device, etc.