I still have Plain Old Telephone Service at home, albeit with several fancy wireless handsets scattered around the house. I also have a cherry red corded handset (my wife refers to it as the BatPhone) that I can use when the wireless handsets die, like after a prolonged power outage.

Having this landline, in this configuration, is an intentional decision. It's separate from all my networking stuff, it survives power outages (when I haul out my BatPhone), and it generally works a hell of a lot better than any other technology for voice calls. Calls are clear, don't get dropped, I hear every word, and there is no latency.

I'm keeping my landline, thankyouverymuch

Who can forget Lint Warp?

Remember: don't count your weasels before they pop, dink.

It's been a very long time since I've messed with web technologies at this level, so I'm tossing the following out merely for discussion purposes: What about changing the default browser to behavior so that instead of first trying the http: prefix, browsers try https: instead and then fall back to http: only when necessary? Would that work around the 'ssl stripping' issue?

My family started a new tradition a few years ago and plan to continue it this year. The day before Thanksgiving, we'll buy a bucket of chicken from KFC and stick it in the refrigerator. At dawn on Thanksgiving, you'll find us launching our bass boat on a local lake. We'll spend the whole day fishing, tying up at some point to eat our Thanksgiving dinner of cold KFC chicken and whatever else we've thrown in the cooler.

Good times.

Stephen Hawking is probably jumping up and down for joy now.

Errr, wait....

Ah, I should have searched the intertubes again before my post. That one is relatively new. Thanks.

... sales of the Surface tablet are disappointing ...

I'm not fan of Microsoft. It's a huge bureaucracy that stifles the innovation of a lot of very bright people who work there. I would not be surprised at all to learn that their late-to-the-party tablet isn't selling well.

However, I've not seen any concrete evidence that Surface tablet sales are "disappointing." There were some vaguely-worded comments by Ballmer in a French magazine or something, and something about a few people returning the table after discovering that they couldn't run their existing apps, but that's about it. From what I've read, Surface seems to be selling. Does anyone have any concrete numbers?

I was a casual pot smoker decades ago. I tried, several times, to write code while stoned. Invariably, I regretted it in the next day. It was like looking at someone else's code and realizing that the other person really doesn't understand programming at all.

The problem (devil?), I think, was in the details. You get some terrific ideas when you're stoned. (Also some terrible ideas, but we'll stay positive for now.) Broad, general, sweeping ideas about how to do something in the most elegant manner imaginable. Better than anything that's come before. Then you sit down and actually try to write the stuff and realize that the compiler is extremely, extremely picky about everything. You also realize that you can only hold about two things in your head at a time, which makes handling complex data structures or algorithms really challenging. It's like trying to drive a cheap RC car from one point to another, where all you can do is go forward in a straight line and turn right in reverse. You can get there, but the route is torturous. Going from a broad idea to the details of writing code is not well accomplished while stoned. You have to hold too many things in your head simultaneously.

Bottom line, I discovered that it was a lot better doing other stuff stoned than write software. Programming with a perfectly clear head is way more satisfying in the long run. Of course, all this was a very long time ago. Maybe if I returned to smoking now I would think differently.

You clearly have not test driven a Cadillac CTS-V. 556hp V8, 0-60mph in 4.0 seconds. Not a track car, but it gets the job done.

Some of the "slightly older and affluent folks" appreciate that.

"The question is not, why are we getting smarter, but the much less catchy, why are we getting better at abstract reasoning and little else?"

I am not a teacher or psychologist, but I have to wonder if at least some of this can be attributed to the things we have to normally deal with on a day-to-day basis. Specifically, in how those "things" have changed over time. As an earlier poster pointed out, life was a whole lot simpler several decades ago. Technology was much simpler and therefore easier to understand. The average person interacted with fewer people, less technology, less variance in their daily routine. Now, in developed countries at least, people are forced to interact with complicated devices and many people who are not actually present (via phone, teleconference, email, whatever).

People used to be amazed by the telephone, back when it was first invented. Many thought the user was talking to the device, not through it. Understanding that the telephone enabled remote conversation is the type of abstract thinking I'm trying to get it here. Multiply this by the hundreds of devices we're surrounded by and it's no wonder that people think more abstractly than 100 years ago. People have to, in order to deal with all the technology.

These kinds of readings irritate me. They present a wonderful picture, but only when everything goes right. When all the automated thingies in the environment can correctly anticipate your next action. When you don't do the unexpected, or the unexpected doesn't pop up somewhere in the surroundings.

Who's life is that? Not mine. In the above scenario: 1) the alarm clock would wake me up on my day off because I forgot to notify it; 2) the Internet is down and I can't connect outside my house; 3) my arm is in a cast so making decent gestures at my desktop 'computer' is real chore, if not impossible; and 4) my wife is extremely pissed at me for not being able to fix a damn thing in our house. Then a major storm tears through the neighborhood, my roof is half torn off, rainwater gets everywhere and all the electronics go absolutely apeshit.

Tell me what happens when things go wrong, not right. At least a little bit, to provide some much-needed reality.

Skimming the front page, looking for a headline that looks interesting.

"Hitachi Develops Boarding Gate With Built-In Explosives"

Hey! That looks promising! Oh, wait...

From TFA:

Summing up, Vixie says: "These victims seem to feel that [they] have more important things to worry about. My gut feeling is that they're wrong, but I can't seem to prove it. My other gut feeling about all this is that we, as a digital society, are doing this all wrong."

My gut feeling is that International Business Times didn't really have a useful article but needed some more ad space, so they wrote this thing.

For the few of you considering actually reading the article: There is nothing new to see there. Move along.

Now scientists think they have found a tropical lake — some 60 kilometers long and 40 kilometers wide, and at least 1 meter deep ...

What other bass fishermen out there read that of the summary and immediately thought, "Topwater!"

(I'm going on a fishing vacation all next week. All I've been doing this week is planning rod setups, and posting to /. of course, to the detriment of my real work.)