Mine just turned 2 - premature, but dodged NICU by a matter of hours. Also missed my birthday (and my mother-in-law's) by one day!

Also still here, looking forward to hearing your take on it!

I've been on /. long enough to remember when most people here leaned libertarian. Ian Freeman would've been celebrated as a hero. I'm shocked at the current unquestioning acceptance of whatever the Establishment media says. Sad.

Here's a different take on this story and a deep dive into Ian Freeman.

Still here via post notification - following a few of the old Circle via Twitter, and I did try LJ for a while too. Missing Multiply though.

I've been using them for years - about 15 years now, as I recall, having started with a 64 Mb 32 bit VPS built on User-Mode Linux, now I'm paying the same price for a massively upgraded VPS on the same IP and login - probably the majority of reboots over that time have been to apply the periodic free upgrades to spec!

It doesn't help when they put ads on the service. Amazon Prime Video has started randomly putting ads between show which is annoying but they also have copied what older ads used to do which is pump of the volume for ad which is really annoying.

Most important fact, you can't trust any thing a slashdot user with a 4 digit UID says.

The defective Lenovo defaults also block Windows reinstalls... In other words this is Lenovo's fault.

Funny none of my network monitoring systems show this data transfer. Could it be that Microsoft hacked my Cisco switch, my router, and the Linux VM I use for monitoring?

I don't think Google will actually kill G+ off any time soon - that would be too embarrassing a retreat - but they've finally stopped shoving it down people's throats as hard as they were before. (Amusingly, I re-connected recently with an old friend from university who is now fairly senior in Google. Where did we connect? Facebook. Says it all, really...) The only place I've seen bits of "Circle" lately is on Twitter, plus a few I've added on Facebook. I took a look on Brewmasters when someone tried to nudge us that way, but didn't take to it; Multiply seemed fine until they pulled the plug, and we seem to have been largely homeless since.

I like Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Safari - all decent browsers in general. I share your misgivings about Opera's new owners, though, and I'm very glad Fastmail (my own email provider) is now independent again; having my email under Chinese control would be quite disturbing.

Amusingly, I find myself teaching courses in both Java and Android development this semester. (I haven't updated my /. journal for ages now, probably should; short version: now half-way through a PhD in computer hardware security/forensics, in a small and short-staffed university department where I find myself filling increasing numbers of teaching gaps.)

The mobile app dev is an evening class I teach for the "access course" - people who have been out of education a while but want to come and study for a degree. It's another dimension of "module bingo" crossed off - I've now taught levels 6 through 10 inclusive (7 being university 1st year, 10 is final year), for three of the four Schools (Science Engineering and Technology, Arts Media and Computer Games, Dundee Business School - but not yet Social and Health Sciences). Being completely new to programming, I've got them coding away in MIT's App Inventor for now - clip-together lines of code on screen. Surprisingly good as a starting point I think - and means they don't need to meet any Java yet, too! (It looks like next year's modules drop Java and use C++ instead.)

Good luck in your fights with it, anyway - I'm quite glad to avoid writing Android code directly so far. I'm hoping to cut my teaching load for the fall semester and focus on research, with some new full time teaching staff starting soon, though I've heard ominous developments on that front lately...

You can't trust people with low UIDs!

That's my worry - remember, Google already implemented a workaround for their own Flash ads, auto-converting them into a form which conveniently happens to be immune to this filter. Get back to me when they've bundled an ad-blocker. What they have here is basically a rival ad blocker - which really isn't something any of us should cheer, even if it does happen to knock out some irritating ads for the time being. (Equally, of course, the new ad-blocking facility for Mobile Safari in iOS 9 which just happens to push more ad-funded sites into adopting iOS apps as a format because Apple iAds just happen to bypass that filtering is a little concerning too.) "Big company kneecaps competition." Just like when Microsoft "helpfully" gave away IE for free in order to kill off Netscape and grab a stranglehold of the web browser market, this may not be anything to applaud long-term.

That was just about my first thought too: "what are the odds this will have/allow something like Privoxy to do ad-filtering?" To be fair, I haven't bothered installing that on my own firewall just yet (relying on ABP and Ghostery for now), but it's on the to-do list - and having seen recent upturns in ad-blocking usage lately, I'm absolutely certain Google will have noticed that upturn too, and strongly suspect it's a factor in any move like this. (It's also interesting to note that Apple have just added support for ad-blocking in Safari without jailbreaking to iOS 9 - probably not something welcomed in Mountain View!)

I stayed in one of these hotels for a computer security conference last year - and the temperature didn't drop below 27C (80F) even at 6am, making for a lousy two nights given the high humidity. No a/c, only heating, and the window only opened two inches ('for security', the label helpfully explained: being five floors up, presumably this means they're worried about Spiderman incursions.)

So, does "the future" actually include either decent a/c, or at least a window you can open properly to get some air movement? I really don't care about fancy interactive video walls - I want a comfortable night's sleep, otherwise I'll just be using that fancy custom app's "Cancel reservation" button and going somewhere else.