This is just another way to vandalize stuff. I owned a far cheaper version of this 30 years ago. Its called a baseball bat. Before that, I had a tack-hammer. My ancestors had a version too, but they called it a "brick". Even earlier versions were called "rocks".

If we're lucky, cities will start passing ordinances to make mere possession of these a crime, since there is no legal purpose for these.

The Lenovo T-series thinkpad laptops have always been good for me. The matte black non-slip exterior is a bit of a fashion statement all by itself and I guess some people won't like that, but the build quality is great.

Plus, you can field-strip it and replace literally any part of the laptop anytime anywhere using only one techie screwdriver. My thinkpads have lasted over 7 years each, and 2 of the 3 I owned were repaired in extremely austere environments (temporary plywood building in the middle of Iraq for one of them).

Lenovo spent a couple years building these with only super craptastic LCD panels, but now I think their entire lineup has an available IPS panel, and many offer optional touchscreen.

The ability to replace/upgrade/repair every part including increasing RAM and SSD size a few years after buying is a HUGE bonus that I think outweighs the stylistic differences.

So, a good bill is bad if the wrong person proposes it? Isn't that why our nation is currently paralyzed by hyper-partisanship? Politics-uber-alles?

Get a refurb lenovo t-series, put extra ram and a better HD in it if you have the cash.

Because I keep my computers longer than one hardware and OS product cycle. I've had to upgrade the RAM on every single computer I've ever owned, long before I retired the computer from use. 16GB was great a couple of years ago, and it may even be "enough" right now. A couple years from now... probably not so much. Macbook pro isn't priced as a disposable or throwaway device. If I want to put up with buying a new computer every year, I'll get a $500 refurb and throw it out / replace it annually, for the same long-term cost of a macbook.

Because 640K ought to be enough for anybody.

You get what you pay for... Remember the 2 airlines that had IT meltdowns? Cost them what, 1-2 weeks of revenue because they went cheap on their IT backend?

Plus... "Train the cheap overseas guy we're hiring so we can lay you off" is plenty grounds to skip the notice period most employers want before someone quits. Hostile work environment ought to cover any need to justify immediately quitting.

I'd quit immediately if I was told to train replacements before I got fired. Why knot the rope thats gonna be used to hang me? I don't understand why anyone puts up with that kind of crap. Passive resistance until you find another job, then quit asap before you do anything to help them get rid of you.

This is what unions are supposed to be for, things like ensuring that work rules and contracts do not permit forcing employees to train overseas replacements before getting laid off. Non-union employees need to stand up for themselves and not let themselves get abused like this. It would only take one or two instances of an entire IT department quitting en-masse to make the point that making employees train their overseas outsourced replacements is a non-starter. Get a couple CEOs fired rather dramatically when their outsourcing idea results in the company taking a multi-million dollar hit when an entire department quits before they get laid off.

You must also have the courage to buy all new equipment to work with your new phone. Car doesn't have the right connector? Buy a new car to go with your courageous new iphone that doesn't work with anything else!

Didn't IBM try this with the PCjr, back in the day? Someone might want to fwd some of those old ads to Apple since they've forgotten that someone tried this already and failed miserably.

Apple calls it courage, I call it pathetic stupidity.

I use regular headphones/earbuds with my iphone all the time and have no intention to change that. I also am all set up to use my iphone playing music in my car using the headphone jack, and I use the same earbuds for my laptop and iphone when I travel to reduce gear clutter. Apple made a huge mistake with the new iphone this time, removing the headphone jack. I could buy a complete high-end android phone for the cost of the idiotic dongles and adapters Apple expects people to buy to use with the iphone as an alternative to buying new *everything else*. Does apple really expect me to buy some goofy dongle or a new car simply because my nice current car only has a headphone jack aux input? Pathetic stupidity.

Pay nothing, get nothing. So you're saying its like Linux?

Karma's a bitch, so is payback.

I always thought a high quality recording from a windy outdoors location with no man-made sound sources would make a fine source of random values.

If you want to rise in your current company, you might consider finding out what skills you need to rise to the next level on the corporate ladder and then target those skills with individual courses. For example, my Mom was a "senior programming analyst" for about 20 years. She was told that she needed personnel and project management skills to rise to the next level of project or group leader. She decided she was having fun where she was, so her continuing education focused on a couple of courses that let her broaden her personal approach to her tasks. Her decision worked in the sense that since she was at the top of the pay scale for her job, she got the max annual bonus for many years in a row, and the company did not fire her through 3 complete corporate mergers. She did have a bachelors degree in math, but her focus was programming and the courses she took were programming courses.

UCSD has extension courses that may be available for open enrollment. That's where she went. She was a Berkeley alum but I'm not sure that was a pre-req for admission to the extension courses.

For you personally I suggest courses in software engineering, rather than "pure" computer science which will touch on a wide variety of topics that may not apply. Or pick/choose courses from the CS degree program at the university of your choice, on the theory that you can learn stuff that applies to you now and can later on be applied to a degree program. But if you're already a programmer, your next step up may be software engineering and project management.

I encrypt work email whenever it includes private or sensitive information. But that is only because my company has a global email address book and every single user has published encryption certificates. My company has also mandated that every email gets digitally signed, whether it is encrypted or not.

Which brings me to my no answer, my personal email. I would encrypt all personal email if I could, but the problem is that it is unlikely I could get all of my email recipients (or even most of them) to bother to deal with keys and making sure their email client could decrypt as required. Not only that, I use webmail a lot and it's not easy to get everyone onboard the same scheme that would allow encrypted email via webmail.

If everyone did it, then heck yes I'd encrypt all of my personal email too. If it was as easy as microsoft putting a big button "enable encryption", along with another button "send public key to email correspondent", then everyone would be using encrypted email. But they won't, so I'm pretty much out of luck.