The problem isn't just that it was a (failed) data harvesting scheme, it's that Google found more efficient ways to gather and datamine information without requiring interaction.

Between analytics, free web fonts, recaptcha, free javascript CDN, the occasional image resource (like the hidden 16x16 G+ image loaded on all the slashdot pages and fed from google.com), IP tracking, logged-in GMail sessions and cookies, maybe a bit of saving all relevant HTTP request header information, etc. Google has a huge amount of information on most sites that almost everyone visits. Why bother with something publicly visible like Google+? It's not going to get you any useful information you can't already gather.

If you look at the field of "voice assistants" Cortana may still have a chance over time.

Right now there are three:

Google "we know who you are, where you are and have been, what you search for, what you shop for, every website you visit and which pages, how long you spend there, everything. We don't just know everything you like including porn, we know what kind of porn you don't realize you like. We're going to use all of this to target ads at you. Oh, and now we're getting you to add our microphones to your home even without using your phone." If you're on an iPhone they may know slightly less about your physical movements.

Amazon's Alexa "We may not know as much about where you are, but we know everything you buy because even if you didn't buy it through us you looked at our reviews of it. We've had our voice assistants in your home for years now, they do all kinds of things, oh, and by the way now we're getting into advertising as the third largest online ad platform (for now) with better conversion rates than Google or Facebook. Oh, and would you like to get free shipping with that? Have you met Prime?"

Apple's Siri "If you've bought into our high-profit-margin phones and tablets you can do some things with voice recognition, but we don't do as much or as well as the other two. On the upside we're much better about respecting your privacy!"

So right now the voice assistant universe is pretty much covered by "creepy AF," "creepy and selly AF" and "not as good but hey isn't that a nice thousand dollar phone?" I'm pretty sure there's space in there if Microsoft wants to carve out its own niche if they handle it well.

$76,470 for average federal government wages vs $44,600 for average private sector wages

What? That's an insane comparison. That's like complaining about how overpaid programmers are because average salaries at high-tech firms are higher than average salaries at janitorial companies. Why, I'm really upset that my neighbor the VP of finance at a large company makes huuuuge bucks while I'm getting $12/hour for my cashier job at the local grocery store while living in my parents' basement! We both work with money, so we should both be paid the same, right?

Among other issues, a significant percentage of lower-paying jobs being done for the government or at government facilities don't get counted because they're contracted out, often to the lowest bidder (which often charges more than it cost when things were being done in-house, but since part of that money can then be spent to invest in 'friendly' politicians....).

Between Google's various experiments with locking down storage (e.g. I have an older tablet where epub readers cannot read epub files saved to the local storage) and crap like this, it feels amazingly like my time period with Windows Phone.

I wonder if they're going to remove all the third-party SMS apps like Textra (but of course the built-in messenger and Hangouts will work). Location? That should only be accessible to Google-branded apps.

It's going to be like Apple in terms of being locked down, but without the ability to actually talk to any human beings.

What software and such is she going to need to work with? Are you using Google's GSuite? Microsoft Office? Office 365? What's your email setup? Cloud storage for standard files? Also, where will she be working? Office? Home office? Coffeeshops? Coworking space?

If you're all-in on Google's ecosystem, then a Chromebook might not be a terrible option - in a lot of ways it's kind of a disposable terminal with everything online, but connectivity with it may be more important than with Windows or Mac options. Is LTE connectivity going to be required and is it an option where she is?

If you're in the Microsoft camp (or thinking about it), there are worse options than a Lenovo Thinkpad with Windows 10 Pro (Pro because you *need* Bitlocker on it because laptops walk). An SSD is a requirement, probably in the 250GB range; 8+GB of RAM and an i5 are also a good idea (i7 is overkill, i3 may be sluggish).

If she's going to be carrying it around all the time working in coffeeshops then get something light (e.g. Thinkpad X family), if it's going to be a desktop replacement you can get something larger and sturdier. If you're getting an older model, avoid the "Tx40" generation - the 40s included a failed try at a completely new touchpad - T450s or anything newer should be fine. If you do go with older models watch out for the W series - great machines, but W=Workstation. My W530 with a quad-core i7 and nVidia Quadro came with a 170w power brick that I think weighs more than some newer ultralights.

On the Microsoft side of things you'd probably be best with something like O365 Business or Business Premium setup with hosted email and online storage, possibly through someplace like AppRiver or Sherweb (a couple $ more expensive per month, but improved support options, automated backups, etc.). That basically lets you treat a Windows laptop as a replaceable component as well, with everything stored online or synced online. If it walks out of a coffeeshop or someplace else, encryption protects your data and online sync gets you up on a new system quickly. (You can likely do a lot of the same with an Office Home subscription including setting up a separate account and sharing relevant OneDrive folders to that account, but I you'll be missing some of the access control and related functionality and won't have own-domain email. It's also not actually licensed for business use.)

I was looking recently at some of the sensor options after I saw something about a water alert one (put it on the floor in flood-prone areas, it alerts if water is detected) with a multi-year battery life.

There are a variety of other sensors available and I was thinking about use for server room temperature monitoring (possibly also door opening?), but the network coverage in the USA is only regional.

One mitigation that I saw listed was removing access to jscript.dll until the system in question could be patched. That makes me wonder if Lenovo built something using a scripting engine included with the OS, then had it yanked out.

You get what you pay for. Are you working with a vendor large enough to have folks staying up to speed on Windows, Linux, Asterisk running on Linux, probably Postfix, MailScanner, etc. if you're going that route, maybe even Apache and related packages to bring it all in-house? If so, expect to pay for that large vendor service. If you're working with a small local 1-3 person outfit then you're expecting a pretty broad experience base for them and you'd best expect those folks to be paid reasonably.

As for Asterisk, I'd absolutely go with FreePBX. Elastix was nice back when it was around, but that's now the past. Are you doing SIP trunking out to a commercial service? Getting SIP service from your ISP? Analog ports over to phone service provided by Comcast?

One reason consultants you've seen stay away from in-house homebuilt VOIP systems may be that there's plenty of potential headache and relatively little revenue upside to them, and VOIP phones "age" a lot more like PCs than like traditional dumb phones tied to an office phone system.

They can't be fixed by any consultant, but some of the impact can be mitigated. First, Windows in a business environment should be on the "Semi-Annual Channel" not "Semi-Annual Channel (Targeted)." The Targeted one is the default, and is also the faster deployment level.

A good RMM with patch management can also be used to exercise some control over patch approvals at least on business versions of Windows (you are using Pro or Enterprise, right? Not a bunch of Windows Home systems?) and can be used to push updates on a set schedule.

Disclaimer: I work in this area.

The first thing is to figure out what her expectations are. Do they need to be able to be back up within 15-30 minutes after a catastrophic server failure? Are they willing to pay a premium for immediate responses and a Datto backup system that can spin up the 15-minute backup as a VM locally or in the cloud? Or do they want to pay $10/month for remote monitoring, patch management, managed AV and remote support? Because if they want that, she's going to be disappointed with what she finds.

The simple answer is to network with other small businesses, find out who's happy and who they're using. If she's at a company in a specific vertical market it makes sense to talk to vendors who are focused on that market, particularly if it's one with special needs (e.g. healthcare, accounting, finance, construction, etc.).

In terms of costs it'll vary some by area but it's not going to be cheap - if you want to avoid hourly charges, you're probably looking at $75/month per workstation and 3-4 times that for each server. One number I've seen is that on the vendor side for all-inclusive plans expect to have 20-30 minutes of technician time per machine per month, and figure if you have skilled techs they're making a minimum of $25/hour (or they're going elsewhere in today's market). With benefits, overhead, etc. figure there's $20-30/month of technician per workstation, plus another $5-15 of software licensing for RMM, AV, backup, another $1-5 for ticketing and documentation software, plus business expenses divided across the number of systems managed, and finally some level of profit margin. You can get all of that cheaper, but if it's too much cheaper then corners are getting cut somewhere. $30-40/month is not an unreasonable amount for just the monitoring, patch management, AV and remote support, but at that level expect to pay hourly for any time onsite - and backup's probably billed separately.

If they're paying $15-20/month they should be expecting to get charged for every call or visit because that's barely going to cover the cost of licensing plus basic business expenses, and likely corners are being cut in some areas.

Finally, do they have perpetual license versions of Office or are they on Office365? If it's O365 are they getting it through the IT vendor? If so that vendor's probably paying $12-15/month or more for each license depending on exactly what they have, or if they're paying it separately the vendor's maybe getting as much as 6-8% on Microsoft's CSP program - not exactly a way to get rich or cover the cost of any support being provided.

Whoever it was that's still bullish on cryptocurrencies is correct in one thing - long-term it's likely that some form of cryptocurrency or at least a non-tamperable blockchain is going to become widely used. That does not mean that it's going to be Bitcoin, and in fact it probably won't be Bitcoin.

While the sibling AC is a bit yelly, he's basically correct - Social Security is its own separate thing, and traditionally has actually loaned money to the rest of the US government (when Social Security has/had surplus revenue it used it to purchase US Treasury Bonds, aka loans to the government). Personally, I've always called that "Greenspan's Bait and Switch" because they jacked up FICA rates back in the '80s then loaned the money to the federal government so the government could spend a huge amount without raising taxes. Since FICA is a regressive tax, it amounted to a huge tax increase on lower and middle income people but because it was "for your retirement, it's not a tax increase!" they got away with it.

2018 is the first year in which Social Security is not projected to have that surplus and in which it will instead be redeeming some of those bonds. Basically now that the IOUs/bonds are starting to come due, there's great interest by some in killing whoever those IOUs are owed to (Social Security). Any claim of "Social Security is too expensive and we can't afford it!" is *really* a claim of "We can't afford to pay back all the money we borrowed from Social Security, but we can't default either! Social Security Must Die (so we can claim to be the proper heirs and make all those debts quietly go away)"

Germany has been doing a huge push to renewables, which mostly means electricity generated from solar and wind. If they can continue to increase that electricity generation and power cars directly with it, it's a net win in several ways.

Also, despite its population Germany isn't even the largest country in the EU by a huge margin. It's also REALLY SMALL by comparison to what people in the US consider the size of a country. In terms of size, it's about halfway between Montana and New Mexico, but it also has a well-developed high-speed rail system running at up to 300kph so you can likely go from one end of the country to the other in just a few hours even including possible train changes. Even a lot of very small areas have train service multiple times a day.

Maybe I'm wrong, but isn't a big chunk of nuclear energy simply shifting when and where energy is used? Lots of energy input on mining and refining, followed by later release of energy when the nuclear fuel is used.

It's not like there have been any significant improvements in digital imaging, low-power processing, attitude and position sensors and miniaturization in the decade since Kepler and the iPhone 3G were built and launched.