I've only been to half a dozen concerts from big name rock bands, and your comment is exactly why I don't enjoy it. The cell phones don't bother me because taking picture is silent. I'm at a music concert to hear the music. I despise hearing all the off key people around me singing along with the band. They can do that in their cars or showers. I want to hear the band! They ruin it for everybody else because we have to hear the amateurs singing along. The worst one was Billy Joel because it was quieter and everybody knew all the songs. The best was aerosmith because it was so loud you didn't care if someone nearby was singing. Everyone has their own pet peeves, but we're all there to enjoy the band. Just try to do it without annoying everyone else who paid.

That's because we posted endlessly at the beginning, and then things changed many times. We got disillusioned eventually over time and stopped posting. I can't remember the last time I even logged in. I do read /. daily like I said, but always anonymously because phones come and go, and I never cared to login anymore. But a story like this brings out the crotchety.

Back in my day we walked uphill both ways to hit F5 on our Netscape browser trying to get frist psot on a new /. post, and we were damn lucky if it wasn't a duplicate that we had read three days prior - because first on one of those didn't really count.

I would trust your memory over mine, but I don't remember that. If it did happen it must not have impacted me somehow as I am positive I never created a second account, and this one certainly goes all the way back to the beginning. But something about that does ring a bell somewhere. Too many sites with too many compromised databases. I don't remember them all.

Entirely possible that my memory is flawed. For instance, I thought /. started in 96, not 97 because I thought it was my freshman year. My college buddy really does have a 3 digit, and he did tell me to sign up, and I decided I didn't care for a while. I probably forgot how long that while actually was. The point of that was not anything about the number of digits, because I really don't care. It was more about how there was excitement and a feeling of belonging and a level of interest way back then that's pretty much gone now.

I didn't remember that it was 20 years. I would actually have guessed 21 years ago. All I know is I was sitting in my college dorm and a friend from across the hall mentioned that a site we had been reading had just gone live with user accounts and I should jump on it to get a low account ID. He had already signed up and has a 3 digit account. I didn't care enough at the time, so I waited an hour or two. By that time I got a high four digit ID since so many people had already signed up. That was the speed of how important these things were to people 20 years ago. There were two tech sites that I read all day every day at that point, because new articles were posted sporadically, and you wanted your FIRST PSOT! /. was by far the most relevant site to me at the time, but I also read Tweak3d. Stories on /. in the first few years were very entertaining. Most didn't get a ton of comments, and then you'd come across a story that was overwhelmed with comments and you'd go through and read every one, often posting a response or three in some of the more active threads - even if you were posting anonymously in order to not lose your editor points or whatever they called them back then. And then you'd come across the duplicate posts, probably by some editor who was drunk at the time and didn't remember the story having already been posted. Comments on those were brutal. A few years after that there was a new staff member (I don't recall the name) that had more blog style articles that weren't strictly in the same vein as the normal /. articles, and people hated him with a passion! He was more of a professional journalist than a techie that was writing news for their friends like the other editors. The point is that there was real atmosphere. There was a real sense of belonging to a site that mattered and was interesting and creative at the same time.

But things changed over the years. It was around 2010 or 2011 that the changes really took effect. The stories got less relevant, comments got less interesting, etc. Personally I still enjoy /. and read it every day, but I've probably only posted a dozen comments in the past 10 years, and it's rare that I even bother to look at the first few comments.

The mojo is gone. The excitement that used to surround each story, and the way the people commented (yes, even including a couple of the original trolls that would FILL the comment section with repeated random garbage) is just different. It's likely because the founders are gone, and /. has gone through multiple corporate overlords since those first few years. Stories are more boilerplate and more like the stories on other websites now.

There are likely still tens of thousands of lurkers like me from the early days that still read /. almost daily. Bring back the mojo and they'll start participating again.

Interesting information on the Nexus 6. Any links? My phone is a 6P. If you google "nexus 6p fm radio" there will be lots of webpages saying the 6P does not have an FM radio, including this one:
http://www.ubergizmo.com/produ...

I bought Nexus specifically so I can run stock Android and have all my features run smoothly. I don't really want to run cyanogenmod. But the option is interesting.

Not all phones have the FM Chips, but the campaign misleads us into thinking all phones have them, and the carriers just disabled them. I use a Nexus phone. There's no chip. My wife's LG does have a chip. According to the campaign website, Sprint already allows it, and T-Mobile has stated they will support.

If you purchase your phone and it is unlocked, the carrier is irrelevant. You can do what you want with it (provided it has the chip). If you bought a locked phone through a carrier, then you're at the whim of what they want to allow you to do with your device. Why is this news?

I may be missing something here, but I don't fully understand the emergency beacon type responses. Yes, of course I understand that the more options available for getting emergency information out the better. Of course that makes sense. But I get emergency beacons every once in a while on my phone today through either text or SMS (I've never investigated the mechanism). OK - now I've done 13 seconds of google-fu, and they apparently are not text messages and are specifically designed to not be bogged down during emergency periods with high congestion:

https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/...
Are WEAs text messages?

No. Many providers have chosen to transmit WEAs using a technology that is separate and different from voice calls and SMS text messages. This technology ensures that emergency alerts will not get stuck in highly congested areas, which can happen with standard mobile voice and texting services.

So having FM radio for emergency broadcasts would be good. But we already have emergency broadcasts using our cell phones - even the ones like mine that do not have an FM chip. The argument for carriers to unlock because it's a security concern seems a bit like fearmongering. It might just work, and I would applaud if all carriers unlocked the chips so we can use them. But we did sign contracts with our carriers when we bought the phones, and they control what we can do, so I'm not sure what leg we have to stand on. Unless you paid full price and bought an unlocked phone.

Why aren't standard wallets RFID blocking now? I got snagged on an out of state trip around 3 or 4 years ago. I don't know exactly how, but I assume it was someone with a scanner in the TSA line at the airport. Ever since I used one of those hard plastic RFID blocking wallets when I travel or go somewhere with long security lines. A few months ago I switched to an everyday leather RFID blocking wallet. I got one from Hammer Anvil on Amazon, but there's other brands out there too. The thing is smaller than my old leather wallet. The shielding adds almost nothing.

Question - does anyone know of a website that tests these wallets against all common credit card chip types? The hammer anvil one says it blocks a certain type of frequency, but not all RFID. I got the impression that it would block credit card chips, but maybe not building security RFID chips. But that leaves a question of whether or not they block all credit cards. I think most of the slim type wallets are the same - the shielding is thin, so it only blocks certain types.

Anyone have a definitive source for testing?

Agreed. This was my very first thought. Then I read the actual article and had to laugh. At no point did he mention that he called capital one prior to making international purchases. I always do this for my card companies. I hope and expect that my credit card companies would flag every international purchase, as well as super high dollar amount store (not online) purchases in states I do not live in or visit frequently. It's desgined to detect fraud. It's not fool proof. I expect that the fraud rate for international charges is pretty high for people that travel infrequently (meaning that with a person that travels once a year or so, if there is an international charge there is a good chance that it is fraud). Why wouldn't you take the 5 minutes it takes to call in and tell them you're traveling to x country on y dates? I do this with all three of my credit card companies. It doesn't take long. I don't have capital one, but I can't imagine it's that hard.

Then he purposefully contacted capital one in a non real-time method, and lo and behold he had problems with it. He tried online chat, twitter, and maybe something else that I don't recall before finalling resorting to the only fool proof tried and true real time contact method - using a phone! Pretty novel idea for when you want assistance that you should talk to someone.

It appears that this guy either wants people to feel sorry for something he brought on himself (didn't let the company know he would be purchasing internationally), or he wants to drive hits to his blog for some ulterior motive.

He had a bad day and wants someone to feel pity for him and agree with him, and he's dragging capital one down at the same time (they did nothing wrong other than customer service was slow for the non phone options).

I'm not seeing the issue with this. I read through all the replies up to now, and it appears to me that people are complaining about services they're taking for granted.
I live next to a major us city. Chicago to be specific. I order lots of things, and they get delivered very quickly. I do not have problems with prime shipments taking 4 or 5 days like a couple peoe complained about, but didn't say where they live. I purchased prime solely for the shipping bonuses.
People are complaining about shipping and comparing it to super saver, but the last time I looked there is a minimum purchase price for free super saver. With prime I can buy a single item that costs $4 and have it shipped, and I get it in a couple days. I do not have to store my purchases in a shopping cart until I have enough to qualify. The immediate shipping is the single biggest benefit.
I also cut the TV cable cord last year. I now do Netflix and prime plus plex and that's it. I use roku, and it works great! Many of the movies I could watch on amazon are also available on Netflix which is my primary TV platform, so I rarely watch stream from amazon. But comparing Netflix to amazon is not relevant. Compare amazon prime streaming to not having any streaming, and you'll see that this is a pretty huge benefit that is thrown in with the faster shipping I paid for.
I have three kindles, but I have never used their kindle book services. Maybe some of the books I read are available there, but they're also available in other places including my public library which has a method to check out kindle books.
I get no benefit from amazon music, but its fairly new and I can't hold that against them.
The original article makes it sound like people that were sharing amazon prime membership with friends are getting screwed. So what? It can be shared within a household, meaning whatever your definition of family is. If you cannot share a credit card, you're probably not family. You're basically abusing amazon prime services, and shouldn't be sharing an account.
I don't see an issue with amazon clamping down on people that are unrelated and shouldn't have been sharing a single account, and I think they provide a pretty decent value for the money. Maybe it's not a fantastic value if you only buy big ticket items that get free shipping anyway and don't use any of their streaming services, but it is a pretty good value for those of us that only buy one or two small things at a time, whenever we think about it night or day multiple times a week. We get prompt, free (prepaid) shipping on our small purchases and its awesome!

My home server with raid 6 started having problems two weeks ago. Reseating three drives, replaced one with my only spare, and now another drive is complaining about smart errors. I dug out my insanely old iomega rev backup drive and tried to use it to take some backups and it didn't work either. I've just left the server turned off until I decide what I want to replace the drives with. They're 6-8 years old, all purchased together, and with three having problems in the same week I figure I might as well just replace everything (psu, raid, drives, etc). But I did at least try to spin up my rev drive! 70gigs on a backup drive was awesome 10 years ago.

Your reply is intelligent, so I'll respond.

I've been with tmobile for 10 years or so. Not as long as you. I've always had an unlimited plan, or at least a plan so high that I never went over. A few years ago (3 or 4???) they called me out of the blue to tell me I was eligible for a lower rate. I peppered them with questions to figure out what the catch was. There was no catch. It was the same features I already had, for less money, and it was a permanent rate. Then, a year or two ago I dropped my rate again when I went to their new uncontract gimmick where you save $20/mo by not prepaying for a new phone that you might never upgrade to. Not to mention that the $20/mo fee is more than the cost of buying the phone contract-free. The way they marketed it was a complete gimmick. But for almost everybody you'll save money by dropping the $20/mo fee and buying your own phone. So yes, my rates were lowered multiple times while my service stayed the same.

In my case my service actually went up after dropping the rates down because now I have completely unlimited text on both lines, where before I had text blocked on my cell phone and only enabled on my wife's. I don't understand your comments about the 500 texts per month fee. Mine are unlimited. It's clearly unlimited in the US per the contract. Just like I can't expect to call Russia from my cell phone and not incur any extra charges (unless it is specifically listed in my contract). In foreign countries, you have to read the fine print to determine if they are free in that country or not. I believe this is a new feature that just started last summer, but maybe that's just when I found out about it. I was fortunate enough to travel to central Europe, and I can tell you that my texts were free, and so was my data service. I don't think I made any phone calls while I was over there, so I'm not sure if those would have been free.

I also don't understand your comments about overage fees and the unlimited data plans. T-Mobile's standard plan has unlimited data, plain and simple. They make it very clear that you only get a certain amount at LTE speed, and then any additional data is delivered at 3G. They actually make that part very clear so no-one can claim they were tricked. I pay a little extra so I can get enough LTE speed data that I never run out. But even if I didn't pay for the extra LTE, I would still have unlimited data (just at a slower speed). There are no overage charges for data, period. Data is unlimited. Speed is not. I greatly prefer to have it setup this way as I never have to worry about my bill. I'm not paying to get more data - that's a misnomer. I'm merely paying to get more data delivered at a higher speed. I'm not sure what you meant by it not applying to everyone. Maybe there's some old plans out there that cut you off at a certain amount? I have no idea.

Just to re-iterate, I have completely unlimited phone, data, and text on two lines for $80/month. I pay to get a bit more data delivered at higher speed for an extra $20/month. And, because T-Mobile is a worldwide company and not just US based, they allow us to use their services in specified foreign countries for free as long as we have the right type of phone (for the right frequencies in those countries). Not all countries are included, but where I went in Europe was.

If you're annoyed at overage fees, then get off the old grandfathered plans and get the new plan where everything is included. I thought for sure there was a downside to the new plans both times I switched, but there isn't. I buy my phones at retail prices, and I break even after less than two years (vs $20/mo). So even if I upgraded every two years I would still be saving money on these lower plans. And if I keep the phone for three years, then I'm just banking those savings to have more to put down on the next phone.

If you live and mostly stay in a major city with LTE coverage, there really isn't a downside. I've been to San Francisco, Vegas, and far outside Boston recently with no loss of coverage. It's a good deal.

Check out T-Mobile. I live in Chicago, and they're great. Yes, almost everyone I know uses either Verizon or AT&T. But they complain about overage charges and dropped calls. I don't have that problem.

Seemingly every year or two T-Mobile actually lowers their price. I used to pay about $150 for two lines. Now I pay $80 total for both lines, with completely unlimited voice, text, and data. They include 1GB of 4G LTE data per line per month, and then I pay an extra $10 per line per month to bump both of them up to 3GB of LTE each. But even if I used 15GB per month, I still wouldn't be charged more than the $100 ($80 + $10 + $10) that I normally pay. After I go beyond 3GB, my data speed gets dropped down to 3G. But I can continue to use as much data as I want. I just switch to wifi for data when I get home, and I have never had a problem with going over 3GB.

I traveled to another country over the summer, and I was even able to use my phone for free over there. It was awesome!

There's no downside to T-Mobile. There's no contract, no overage fees, no nonsense. If they have LTE coverage in your city, check them out.

http://www.t-mobile.com/covera...

This really is no big deal. I'm a Chicago customer and was initially a bit peeved when I heard about this. But then I read the actual letter. I'll paraphrase it, but as I recall it had a few specifics in it that all these fear mongering web articles are skipping.
1) It creates a new ssid on the router. That means anyone connecting is connecting outside my network.
2) They went to great pains to state that it was extremely unlikely to disrupt the service that I pay for. For instance, I have the option to pay for something like 100Mbps, but I choose a lower tier. Comcast obviously has additional bandwidth they can provide for this service. It doesn't impact the customer.
3) It also said I had the abity to disable it if I wanted to. This is the part that nobody gets. You can turn it off! Problem solved!

I left mine alone in the end. If it doesn't impact me because it's going to use untapped bandwidth that I don't pay for, and they connect through a separate ssid, then I simply don't care.

I haven't decided if I think all of this stuff is sensationalism or not, but it doesn't really matter. If I ask my school for a count of the number of kids in the school that are unvaccinated, and a count for the number of kids in my kids actual classroom that are unvaccinated, first are they legally allowed to share that (anonymous) data with me, and second are they legally required to share that data with me? It seems that if there is a possibility that some moron is risking my own kids health, I should be able to find out about it.