Ironically, this is a fine thing to have and be able to do unless you live in the country which has just banned Periscope. Wikipedia was banned April 2017. Sucks to live under a dictator.

And in the UK you get it re-registered under "classic car" regulations, your insurance costs drop markedly and you get back on the road and drive on. Companies are very willing to supply parts at even reasonable costs and there's a whole industry surrounding having an old car. Car restoration nuts would say "Find another analogy."

Shooting support for an OS in the head is going to be irksome for those who have no need or intention to upgrade, but cutting off the software that allows them to play their paid-for library of games is not going to be a great move. If it means forking Steam so that those Users who wish to can carry on but without any extras, updates or security fixes while everyone else moves on - that's a better option than "Upgrade your system which seems to be working fine or piss off."

"Windows 10 did it." gets a "+5 insightful". Not being disparaging here because you're absolutely spot on, but perhaps Slashdot needs a "+5 that was fucking obvious". It hasn't helped any seeing the direction Microsoft has been going since they spewed out Vista. They won't be happy until they can force all Windows Users onto some form of monthly rental OS. Throwing out crumbs of a better operating system so they can justify making people use a spyware laden social media launcher isn't a good idea, neither was the brilliant plan of making DX12 a Win 10 only thing. Great, capture the gamer market then turn bloody expensive gaming rigs into glorified Xboxes. With spyware.

But Microsoft spyware is BEST spyware! Chortle. When you have an OS which detects you changing your browser and then pleads with you to give Edge a chance and people still have something better in mind, you really need to rethink your strategy. Oh, this is Microsoft we're talking about here - fuck the User and full steam ahead with the OS rental plans.

...I'm rather glad we don't have to deal with the FCC. I don't get telemarketing on my mobile and I certainly don't use voicemail, although whenever I change SIM my provider thoughtfully makes it the default option, swiftly disabled. The first thing I do after disabling it is to reset my voicemail number to my home - which has built-in storage for a lot more messages than my mobile service could handle. My wife's phone does the same - number of telemarketing messages received in the last 10 years or so = NONE. I'm quite happy with that and will remain happy unless some asshole goes and changes the system. If that happens, I'll be looking into how number spoofing works and dealing with the spammers accordingly.

They want low priority "cases" to stay away, not everybody, especially not ambulance admissions. By way of example how A&E sometimes (often) gets abused, I had a boss once who cut his finger while operating a turret press. He had the only staff member present other than myself drive him to the nearest A&E because, as a guitar player, he said he might have done some serious damage. I downed tools until they returned as I'm fucked if I'm running sheet metal on industrial hardware alone on a night shift. When they got back some hours later, the damage turned out to be a cut somewhat less than you get from shaving (which he should have seen after running it under a cold tap for 5 seconds). As he was the registered and trained first aider for the shift it should have been blatantly obvious. But no. He had to get driven to hospital and A&E staff went through their standard procedures before simply putting a regular plaster on it, which he was proud to show off the next day as if he'd he'd been in a war.

He actually wondered why I called him a cunt after we'd lost about 9 hours production between us that night and management wanted to know why *I* hadn't continued working while they were gone. Knowing the travel time to the hospital, he'd wasted nearly 2 hours of A&E time. Multiply that by the number of people who wander into A&E with "injuries" like looking for a bed for the night, got drunk - fell over, or less.

Yeah - YOU might have a need, but there's plenty who don't and they spend far too much time wasting that of hospital staff. Your next trip there might be held up by some idiot with entitlement issues, which would be a bad thing.

TL:DR - people sometimes abuse A&E and they're better off not getting underfoot while this is going on.

Abso-fucking-lutely! I'm only on 7 because M$ made a coupla changes to Direct X and the game producing herd bleated acquiescence - so if I wanted to play most recent games I needed to be on Win 7. I installed it for the first time about the time 10 came out, thus missing the abortion called 8, and then we got hit with the bullshit about auto "upgrading". Yeah. Auto updates are OFF, still running GWX control panel, any possible telemetry nuked both in the registry and on my router. So, thanks to the software rental company/protection racket formerly know as Microsoft, I now have a machine *I* control but if I'm a little lax with security it can be taken away from me by scumbags.

I hope the fuckers in the NSA are proud of their baby and I hope someone finds the fuckers now using it and double-taps them on camera. I'd pay to see that. This isn't funny anymore (was it ever?) because now we're stepping into territory where lives may be at stake. Fucking with computers is verboten as far as I'm concerned, fucking with medical facility computers should be a capital offense.

Sending people off to Mars before we can prove survivability is a really dumb way to get people killed and possibly kill future off-world exploration. First, we need to prove we can sustain a colony on our nearest neighbour, the moon, and ONLY then start thinking about sending people off to another planet. Are the people who want a Mars colony *now* the kind of people who'd send a newly upright toddler off to drive a busload of other toddlers across the country? Probably.

Pick a spot on the moon suitable for a test colony, seed the area with redundant supply drops, THEN send a risk aware space trained construction crew to build the habitats. Spend at least 5 years learning how to live off-planet, working out all the bugs and expanding, then consider Mars. And FFS, make it a multi-national effort or there'll be so much political fallout it'll kill the project as sure as explosive decompression.

Any and all nations who have planted feet on soil and claimed it for king/queen/republic/whatever is at fault. It's just a pissing contest to the nations, but the locals never seem to appreciate having colonial dicks waved in their faces.

Treated as anyone should be - as equals. Oh well, that's me banned from Trumpelstiltskin's America then. Good.

Don't forget he also starred in "The Magician" and too many people think that what goes on inside a piece of [Apple] electronics is purely magical.

I found that by keeping both thumbs & index fingers on file in the phone I can unlock it flat on the desk with either finger or with either thumb while holding it one handed (screen on with home & unlock in a second either way). I have enough trouble getting my finger on the heart rate monitor next to the camera on the S7 without needing to clean the camera afterwards so having a fingerprint reader next to the camera...? Nope, not for me. I also found iris scanning a bit hit & miss too (on the Note 7) so if they can work some magic with a face unlock that can't be spoofed, then count me in on that instead and I won't mind not using fingerprints at all.

Oh come on! I can go with execution, waterboarding & such, but that??? You're just being plain nasty.

I like it.

As long as that includes all products with a potentially dangerous lithium ion battery, I'm right behind you.

Pretty much the Note 7's display - as long as it's not on fire. Doesn't matter if it's light text on a dark background or vice versa, it looks stunning, it looks like you're just holding something printed in very high resolution on smooth plastic. For best results, about 30-40% brightness gives that effect.

I do hope there's not a second recall - I like this phone :)