I have a laptop I infrequently use that has Windows 10 (non-Pro) installed on. I boot it up once a month to install updates (so I don't need to wait for update installs when I need to use it for other things) and I always use the "check for updates" button to make sure there aren't any more updates to install. I absolutely do not want beta updates installed on this machine nor would it be good for beta testing them since I hardly use it. This is just giving me more incentive to finally get around to wiping it and putting Linux on it.

Yes, and they're partnering with Chinese firm Zhaoxin to design a new x86 CPU microarchitecture.

160 MHz of band 41 (2.5 GHz) spectrum is a 5G goldmine. Most 5G will be deployed in the mm-wave bands above 6 GHz which will have absolutely minuscule building penetration even compared to band 41. Sprint's band 26 (800 MHz) spectrum will also be useful in areas where T-Mobile doesn't have band 12 (700 MHz) licenses before handsets with band 71 (600 MHz) become common. Sprint's spectrum isn't necessarily terrible, it's just very lopsided towards high-band (which is great for throughput but pretty bad for coverage) and Sprint has not done a good job of managing it (partly due to lack of capital to invest in their network and partly due to incompetence).

Why not upgrade your existing home computer to Ubuntu now? Firefox is ending support for XP this year and it's the last major browser to do so; after that you get no new web features or security updates (not to mention the years of security updates for other system components you've missed out on, such as the Meltdown and Spectre mitigations).

Ah, I forgot that digital radio was a thing since it hasn't taken off in the US at all.

What? Digital television has much quality better than analog under pretty much every circumstance. Just eliminating composite color dots is a huge improvement, not to mention the resolution increase and progressive scanning. Quality is really only a problem when the broadcaster tries to cram too many streams into a broadcast signal and starves the video of bits.

The Android Edge browser is just a wrapper around Chromium with Microsoft account integration (for bookmarks/history/etc. sharing with Edge Desktop). AFAIK Firefox is the only full-featured Android browser that ships its own rendering engine.

I'm using the mainline release version (57.0.1 right now), not Beta, Nightly, or Focus (which is just a Chromium wrapper).

They definitely seem to have heavily optimized for the video playback use-case. On my slow (but cheap) Atom-based notebook video playback is noticeably smoother and uses less CPU than Firefox even though Edge is noticeably slower at actual web rendering.

I currently have 40 tabs open in my Firefox for Android session and I haven't experienced any slowdown or crashes due to it (though Firefox tends to only keep the mostly recently-viewed 2-3 of them loaded at any time to save memory).

This is the most informative comment I've seen on Slashdot in literally years.

CDMA2000 is a dead technology even without government mandates. Verizon can't wait to dump it since it uses up so much of their spectrum that would be better used for 4G LTE and the upcoming 5G standard. They are planning to shut down their 2G CDMA 1x network in 2019 and will likely kill their 3G CDMA EVDO network in the mid 2020s. They initially intended to start rolling out handsets without CDMA radios last year but I don't think they've been able to implement that due to their rural roaming partners having not fully overlaid their CDMA coverage area with LTE and/or activated VoLTE support on their networks yet.

T-Mobile hasn't had contracts since 2013 so your story is at least a few years old. Over the past few years they've completely revamped their network and rolled out lots of new coverage (mostly by acquiring "low-band" spectrum that lets them cover 4x the area per tower of their previous "mid-band" spectrum). They've also rolled out wifi calling (which lets you make and receive calls and texts over wifi) and "CellSpot" units that let you use your home internet to provide cell coverage at your house if you're in a complete dead zone.

Just use the Let's Encrypt client in manual mode (letsencrypt-auto certonly --manual) then install the generated certificates the "old" way.

Small transactions will be on the (short term) honour system.

One of the big selling points Bitcoin proponents use to try to get businesses to accept them is that Bitcoins "have no chargebacks." It seems like having every transaction "be on the honor system" is a much, much worse situation than getting virtually-instantaneous confirmation for all transactions upfront and then getting hit with a chargeback every once in a while.

I[n] the days before we had electronic credit card verification the store would take an imprint and only find out later whether the card was good or not.

Yes, and businesses also used to accept personal checks. Have you tried to use one lately? I can't think of any businesses I regularly patronize that accept them today. It used to be that the businesses had to account for bounced checks and declined credit transactions in their business overhead which was ultimately passed on to consumers. By accepting only cash, credit and debit cards with instant electronic verification (my newest credit card doesn't even have the raised lettering for imprint machines since so few transactions use them these days) they can remove this overhead and cut their prices, making them more competitive in the free market.