For me, it is physical keyboard - that pretty much limits it down to a BlackBerry... I've got the KeyOne, which I love the hardware - don't really like Android when compared to BB10. But as far as I'm concerned, physical keyboard is the only way.

Given that tuition and textbook costs have dramatically increased, yet the minimum wage has not kept pace, this is not really surprising.

I remember many of my past professors that went to college in the late 60's and 70's, talked about how they would take the summer off to work and party, that they were able to earn enough to cover their entire tuition and books for the fall and spring semesters. LONG LONG LONG GONE are those days. Today, your lucky if you can find a summer job that will allow you to make rent, let alone, save any sort of money for tuition/books/living expenses. Student loans don't really help in the long term, as the future is mortgaged to pay for the present and that debt will be with you likely for a good 10+ years after one graduates.

With the current trend of steadily increased costs with minimal wage/salary increases to match, it is unlikely to improve any time soon

My biggest peeve is the lack of ports that are being put on laptop, and if you need more, you need a dongle. The last laptop my wife purchased has three UBS-C type ports - one is used for the power supply...If you want to hook up an external monitor, you need a HDMI/VGA dongle.. If you want to use a usb drive (that isn't USB-C), you need a dongle, you want to hook up some other type of device (CD/DVD, etc), you need a dongle.

I feel like I'm back in the mid 1990's with PCMCIA cards with laptops again - A dongle for everything (and I use that in the colloquial meaning, not the traditional hardware copy protection meaning). Form over function - I will admit the laptop looks great, providing you don't need to dongle things up to get things done. I will take function over form any day.

Bullshit. With this past week Anthony Bourdain, not a poor guy by any stretch and Kate Spade, also not the least bit poor hung themselves this week. So any argument about income equality is a load of crap. I won't even mention others like Robin Williams and a slew more not poor folk committing suicide.

Quit thinking in black and white terms. Stop think in strict cause/effect terms. Start thinking contributing factors, start thinking in terms of many shares grey rather than black and white.

You have mentioned 3 famous people in the span of about 4 years. Just in 2015 according to the CDC there were about 44,193 suicides https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fasta...

I'm sorry, your spouting of 4 or so famous people over the course of 4 years when compared to the 44,193 in just 2015. Your argument with income equality not being a cause (again, your B&W thinking style) and think of it as a potential contributing factor. If income equality is a contributing factor, I would argue that higher income could be insulating factor... not a cause, but a contributing or insulating factor.

The fact of the matter is, suicide is happening far too often. It's time we look at what the contributing factors are playing a role in these trends. It is time to take a look at our society and see what changes over the past couple decades could be contributing to these events. I would hypothesize that income equality plays a larger contributing factor that you will be willing to admit. But, I also know there are more contributing factors out there which haven't been discussed.

That was my first thought. I wonder how anonymized the data was? I'm sure there is a unique identifiers (or serial number) for the data, which is linked to the serialized spit bottle, which is linked to a purchase order and payment information. So much for anonymization protecting us.

Now with it in the wild, you don't even need the unique identifier as the your DNA will provide that. But then again, its unlikely your insurance companies don't already have that information. Certain laws state they can't use that against someone, but would be virtually impossible to prove that they did (unless you caught them right in the act.).

I see this as a demand for tangible products. All too often DRM servers get taken off line. There is something to be said by physically picking up a vinyl records and placing it on the turntable that that clicking a couple buttons on a digital player just isn't there. I won't go into the sound debate of digital vs analogue - as everyone has their own opinion on that.

Personally, I like the physical tangibility of the non-digital media. I can do with it what I want, when I want, sell it, loan it, etc. That is something that digital is missing - and it doesn't incur the privacy issues that is so inherent with anything digital.

Three words: User Replaceable Battery

There is absolutely no reason why Apple, and every other mobile device can't do this. But it doesn't fall within their planned obsolescence marketing strategy.

The Gedit text editor is an excellent example of how formerly-usable software has been destroyed. This is what Gedit used to look like. [wikimedia.org] At that point it had a sane, easy-to-use, functional UI. This is what Gedit has become. [wikimedia.org] It's like 50+ years of accumulated experience and knowledge has been discarded for no good reason, and the end result is a disaster.

...

What we have is a generation of software devs who are far too focused on aesthetics and trendiness, with little to no care put toward usability, security, and reliability. They go out of their way to ignore everything we've learned about doing things right. They do things their own way, and it's a disaster.

MY god! You just hit the nail on the head. I have been really hating this new interface style that has been spreading like a bad rash but couldn't really put my finger on what it it was specifically. As of recent (and by recent, I mean over the last 12 years), I found that overall software has become far less efficient to use. I'm thinking about the same time that Microsoft introduced "the ribbon" in their office suite software was the start of the real decline. Enter Windows 8, metro interface, no desktop, etc.

I was just writing it off as me getting old, and "You young whippersnappers...." and "Get off my lawn", resistance to change... But now I'm going back to thinking it is just p1$$-p00r design/implementation of technology. Something that really irked me in the late '80s and throughout the '90s - the only difference then was good established worked processes trumped trendy and aesthetics, while now it is the exact opposite.

Who would have thought that 'everyone gets a trophy' would have such a disaster on software development and user-interfaces.

Great until facebook decides you haven't been posting and participating in their social network and they use the nudes to blackmail you to participate more.

"Facebook has noticed you haven't posted in a while. Would you like us to post one of your uploaded pictures to start the conversation? [Yes] [Yes] [Close = Yes]"

He also had much less regulation with regards to IP laws - or perhaps the advantage of the IP laws at the time, no one really knew how they applied to technology. And having a rich father that will humor you with a $50k gift/loan to start up a business (not saying it's wrong, but not necessarily available to everyone). And 50k at that time was worth a whole lot more than what 50k is today.

Another example of issues with electronic storage. Information stored on paper, inherently has security within the medium itself. It is very difficult to walk out with a warehouse of paper files without being noticed (or the amount of time it would take), where as with electronic , you can walk out with the equivalent of multiple warehouses of paper records in your pocket.

Unfortunately big data is not going away. Worst part for us, we have no idea where that information is stored, who has access to it, and who it has been shared with. Virtually every privacy policy has some clause about sharing information with "our partners" or "3rd parties." Well that is wonderful... it doesn't identify who has that access, where it is stored, and who further down the line it may be shared with.

It is to the point, that privacy no longer exists.... and hasn't existed for a long while now. And to try and reign it back in is virtually impossible because we have no idea who has that information, where it is stored, and what information there is.

I guess I should put on my tin-foil hat (shiny side out) and go sit in the corner in a round room.