Consumers have gone broke and you don't get an Apple Obamaphone.

They're probably not as bad as HP, but if you have to resort to praise like that then they are terrible.

You want to talk about primitive, let's talk about fire.

It is a horribly wasteful method of getting energy into things.

Don't get me wrong, i'm not about to stop cooking my steaks with it, there are times when it's great. But given the basic issues with using fire I want to avoid it whenever it's not adding anything to the end result.

There's a reason steel plants use induction.

I stand corrected. I thought 5 was merely a far-side lander.

Buybacks signal there is nothing better you can think of doing with all your cash.

Or that you have a lot of cash and other assets and a market mob madness has depressed your stock price to where it's a really good deal to spend some of the cash to take some of the stock out of circulation and concentrate the company's value in the rest of it.

Possibly it's even such a good deal that some rich outsiders could buy up controlling interest, sell off the non-money assets, take that and the cash pile, and come out ahead. That leaves the current employees out of a job and with their unvested options worthless. Better to spend the hostile-takeover bait making the rest of your stock more valueable now, and keep the company running, than wait until the hostiles are buying and screw up the company and its stockholders with poison pills and the like.

One of the reasons COBOL lives is that most COBOL apps are is not UI-tied, meaning UI fads and changes don't affect what it does. Business and administration hasn't changed much since COBOL was designed, other than the fact we normalize a little better because our hardware got faster. People aren't tempted to refashion what they can't see. Java and C# couldn't replace COBOL's lasting power without standardizing business-oriented libraries.

The phone is not the second factor on your laptop. Your laptop is.

I'd love to see that bridge wiped out, not just damaged. Send the Dali cargo ship near it.

In a statement the [Russian] embassy said its envoy "categorically rejected the accusations that Russian state structures were involved in the given incident ... as unsubstantiated and groundless."

If they ever said otherwise, poke me until I wake up, and/or check Puttie for a fever.

Many will merge into bigger co's. In the mad dot era around late 90's, our company's secret goal was to get bought out by a bigger co. or rival, as we knew we were skating on a sketchy business model.

Live by cutting edge, get cut by cutting edge. Tech is churn and burn.

Warning: Semi-off-topic Rant Ahead

Even with "regular" software, more devs and companies are more interested in chasing buzzwords than parsimony and simplicity. The result is a moving messy target. There are tools from the 90's that dev's are 4x more productive under because they are integrated tools rather than glued-on layers, requiring about 1/4 the code per feature. You don't need to worry about "separation of UI and biz logic" because BOTH are so compact that there is almost no down-side to mixing them in the same class. The separation-of-concerns movement was to manage bloated stacks & teams better, not an evolutionary step up.

They are not web-scale and not mobile-friendly, but that turned out not to matter. Internal biz didn't need mobile after all, and we spent all that bloat and trial-and-error trying to get dual-device layouts to work right in vein. People like to tell stories about how such tools became problematic when they needed "enterprise scale", but most our internal apps are not enterprise-scale.

The assumption is often that a web/enterprise tool can scale both down and up such that it's used on smaller projects also. Wrong Answer!* That's a failed assumption, creating bloated fragile smaller apps. One Tool Size Does NOT Fit All. Internal is not external. Desktop is not mobile. Small is not Web-scale. One of the reasons the F-35 got so expensive is that it tried to be everything to everybody. Maybe one day they'll make an affordable version, but the journey was expensive and bug-ridden.

Humans, you are doing IT wrong.

* It may be possible to have the small-end and big-end tools share a lot of features, conventions, and libraries, but not be the same tool. This hypothetical set should share what makes sense to share, and separate for target size when not. Do note that lack of data volume doesn't necessarily mean "simple". Billing can get rather complex for service companies, for example, but there is typically only say 30 invoiced being generated a day, including drafts.

You can be first to eat a caterpillar steak or whatever

Sexual predators dressed as men can walk RIGHT INTO women's bathrooms and assault them. Nothing is preventing it. As such your idea is stupid and you should feel stupid.