Verizon's trying to side step this with their payment plan scheme. You don't pay full price up front, just the sales tax. Then you pay monthly installments with the option to pay off the device at any time (after an initial grace period). The net result is the same as subsidies except the cost of the phone is more transparent.

I haven't looked at the statistics to see if this is working, but given the number of people that lease automobiles and get a new one every few years or so, I can see people doing the same for phones.

This.

I used to think the "right place at the right time" argument had some merit. It's probably still true a little bit, but only as an opportunity for Linus. It was when I saw how rapidly git was developed and became reliable and usable that I realized it was no fluke. Either Linus was incredibly lucky to be in the right place at the right time *twice*, or the "luck" argument is nonsense.

How stupid do you have to be to realize that what you want may not be what you need?

Nope. Linus is perfectly willing to admit he is wrong when proven so. Don't confuse that with backing down out of politeness to appease and avoid confrontation. He doesn't do that, and thank goodness for that.

Here's the thing that many people don't understand: Linus places *technical correctness* above all else.

That is one of the reasons Linux has been successful - he is unwilling to compromise that technical correctness for the sake of politeness, "getting along", appeasement, "business reasons" and the like. That, coupled with the fact that he's a very good engineer and project leader has kept the project on a steady path of constant and *consistent* improvement.

In the early years of the project, that was really important, IMHO, because Linux wasn't perfect and often inferior to an existing technology. But it was good enough, generally rock solid when it got things right and everyone could count on the fact that it would improve rapidly and consistently without much backsliding, if any. In other words, what Linux was good at, you could count on staying good, and what it wasn't good at *yet*, you could count on getting better in the future.

Now that I think about it, that sense of future reliability was probably a very important factor in the success of Linux, because it allowed people to lay the foundations for projects and businesses that relied on Linux, and by they time they were ready to go into production, the kernel was solid enough handle the job, usually at a fraction of the cost of existing commercial solutions. In other words, Linux turned out to be a safe bet. So Linux adoption was quite rapid (as soon as it was ready to take on a task, if not slightly before) and steadily increasing. I attribute that in no small part to Linus and the rest of the kernel developers, both because of the 'willingness to be wrong' (which kept the project moving steadily) and the complete unwillingness to let things stay wrong when it was clear they were.

Why pay expensive fees for "Robo-Advice" when you can just as well run your own. Maybe the advice isn't quite as good, but if you do just about as well within a range, the savings on fees is still a net gain. I wonder if something like Mycroft (https://mycroft.ai/) driving an appropriate engine with input from a wide community with the right expertise could produce a 'good-enough' robo advisor to deal with the same situations the RBS ones do.

Wow - it's a reunion. Good times. :-)

Yep. Plenty of people were mighty suspicious of user accounts, in part due to privacy concerns and didn't actually sign up for quite awhile. I held out quite a bit longer than you, though we were probably around for about the same time (pretty much from the start). And when they did sign up, they usually used a nick, not their own name.

At one point in the last couple of years, I was on the verge of bringing up the change password dialog, typing a bunch of random characters, NOT recording it and logging out. So I would not be able to log in again even if tempted.

After some consideration, rather than just give up on the site, I moved /. to the bottom of my daily links list and started focusing my time and attention elsewhere, while checking back only occasionally.

I'm beginning to be glad I didn't. Thanks for the positive changes.

The real challenge will be to get those who did give up to return and give /. another try (and then stick around).

What's that strange feeling? Why, I believe it's hope. How unusual.

And nothing of value was lost.

It's not FOSS, but VueScan (scanning software) does an excellent job of this, and is excellent in general. It's very actively maintained and seems to support just about every device out there. I bought a license many years ago and have been happy with it since.

https://www.hamrick.com/

TFA has all the factual content of a fluff piece read by the attractive yet dimwitted weekend morning anchor on the local news. There is no information at all to back up the baseless claims in the article. Not even a link to the "data" or a summary of the "data" that Google has allegedly collected.

This story should never have made it out of the firehose.

The return of the /. effect will be your benchmark.

The ability to edit our own posts to fix typos would be nice.

There isn't. That information is tied to the account that the device is associated with and communicates with over the network.

I'm glad to hear it. But your bank is irrelevant to a discussion about a networked e-reader and the many reasons there might be to perform security updates that have nothing to do with purchasing or banking, even if authorizing purchases by communicating with an online account is one of the things it can do that needs securing.