I started coding as a high school student in 1972 and still code today. A former co-worker in his 80s is still coding I believe - I know he started in the 1960s.

I love working from home. I don't miss humans face-to-face. I still need contact via phone and IM and that happens daily. I am a programmer, and our people are mostly distributed, so an office generally doesn't make sense any more anyway. But I hate it when the big bosses come up from head office and I have to go to the office. Totally wasted dead unproductive time.

The other thing is, I never need to print anything at home - I can get by with stuff on the screen. When I worked in an office, I was always printing white papers and documents. The trees love me now.

My Mom has run stock Firefox for years, with auto-updates turned on. No add-ons or plugins. FF 57 auto-installed and was completely unusable, taking minutes to do anything. It is now shut down and Chrome installed in its place.

For me RequestPolicy is the main add-on I would like to work. I also rely on NoScript and FoxyProxy (updated I think). I have others too that are all marked as legacy, but not as critical. I will stay at FF 56 - auto updates turned off. Not good.

I LAC OF RAIN

Sad to hear. $1000 in h/w and one dedicated soul could have digitized it all. A reasonable insurance price for a $2M asset.

When I grew up there was no Internet or smartphones. Nothing seems to drain money faster today than phone contracts, based on observing my kids. I am not sure that we had any equivalent expense leaching away at us back then. I did have a CB radio for awhile, but you bought the h/w then no monthly payments to any providers.

I do not think MS should be forced to support obsolete s/w forever. It just does not make any business sense. However on the flip side, the problem for many people or organizations is that an OS upgrade implies a h/w upgrade. The h/w may cost more than the OS and required ancillary s/w updates (i.e. useful end user applications).

Thus there is an amplifier effect in the cost. A $150 OS upgrade triggers a $500 h/w upgrade, or an amplification factor of 3.33 (dollar values/amp factor are arbitrary).

I have a lot more sympathy for poor old end consumers and small businesses than I do for organizations however.

I used to wear headphones at work sometimes. Music helped me concentrate. But people could come up behind me and scare the crap out of me. Once I jumped up and uncontrollably screamed at the top of my lungs. I don't wear headphones any more.

The current rating system works for me. I generally only consider shows with 4 stars or above. It seems to correlate with my expectations. I have tried to watch stuff with 3 stars only and found it lacking. If the new system blurs 3 stars versus 4 then I will end up watching more crud that I don't want to. However, I guess we will have to see how it plays out.

Exactly. The implications for data security could be high. The NSA can tap any wire or wireless transmission but how do you stop DNA? How can you detect DNA data? Pedophiles with kiddy porn stored in a fleck of skin under their fingernails beside Cheetos residue?

The Occupied series depicts this in the "near future". It doesn't go well for Finland.

Decades ago when visiting family friends out of town, I used to call a local time/weather number. Over and over and over.

"For low cost life insurance call the Big E. Time 2:47 Temperature 67 degrees"

The "E" was for Erie. The fact I can remember this so clearly now is a testament to how often I called it back then ...

My only experience with accelerated video is with my old Panasonic DVD player. It has an option to speed up by 40%. I have used that on many movies or videos that are only moderately interesting. Also great for speeding up old historical documentaries with slow-talking old men. It doesn't work for everything, but the time saving is awesome.

Unfortunately these days most of my video watching is via crappy streaming h/w and s/w in my Sony Blu-Ray player (Netflix mostly). No acceleration options there. Heck you can't even do intelligent pause/rewind due to long lags and delays.

For TV my PVR acceleration consists of fast forwarding over commercials plus occasional FF over boring scenes and credits.

The article was nice.

I recently tried to make a small online from from a UK-based site. It was for 7 UK pounds. They declined the transaction. We called and they too were suspicious with the activity to a foreign country. Fair enough. But I had made identical 7 pound purchases from the same company earlier in the year. It can't be that difficult to check against previous transactions?

My other problem with our Visa-providing bank is that they allowed us to set up several alerts so we can be notified of suspicious activity. Unfortunately the first one occurred while I was driving in a foreign country. My wife called in while we drove, as we were both panicking that we would lose access to our card (and be unable to do mundane things like buy gasoline to reach our destination). Here the issue is my wife is the primary credit card holder. I am secondary only. The bank was annoyed that the alerts were set up to go to my email and cell phone rather than hers. I work with security stuff all of the time. My wife is somewhat technically illiterate. I need to see the alerts more than she does. They should let us decide who sees the alerts and recognize this situation too.