Excellent commentary and it's the type of discussion I was hoping for when I made my initial comment. (moderators, please mode swillden's post up).

I would invite you to look at the series "The Expanse" for a good Smartphone design—certainly one we will have long before this particular science fiction story takes place. Oh, by the way, it's well-acted.

If I understand what you are saying, the phone has pretty much gone as far as it can go and the fact that the ecosystem is in the cloud means it is not platform-specific (something Microsoft completely did not understand in the late 1990s). I do not necessarily disagree with your assessment.

Where innovation will take us will probably be the automobile. Self-driving is one direction, but another is the control systems within cars. If you look at the Tesla (please understand that I am not promoting this car) Model S, it has what looks like a tablet for controls. The Model 3 has a 15.0-inch touchscreen. The problem with the automobile is that these touchscreens and controls tend to never be upgraded, They are also very easy to crack, with very dangerous results see this report of a zero-day exploit. Obviously securing the automotive sector's systems and technologies is an area we really need to look at, but there is obviously loads of room for innovation here.

I would also note that a long-distance driverless truck would completely transform our national system of logistics.

We are just entering the era of the electronic pantry generating our shopping lists. At this point, we have refrigerators that know when we're out of milk. One wonders whether or not people who are on a diet could keep stuff they ought not to eat out of the home completely.

Lots of people here will post very specific solutions that they have been following. Each will advocate this, that or the other and each is admirable in its own way. I am a longtime user of iOS but before that I had a Palm, starting with the Pilot and going through a number of devices. But I have a different focus.

We need a third, perhaps a fourth, fifth and sixth mobile operating system because it is vital. It is very important to note that Apple and Alphabet will definitely stop innovating and will reach a point of stasis if there is no alternative. Big corporations will tend to want to rest on laurels and allow the hardware people to carry the load. We saw that with Microsoft in the late 1990s and into the early 2000s under Steve Ballmer. They simply quit innovating on all fronts and assumed that Intel and the other chip makers would carry things forward. The result was Windows XP, which became the least secure thing you could run on a computer and the most fraught with irrelevance.

Were I a multimillionaire, I would look at this particular discussion and I would support upstarts with venture capital—not because I hate iOS or Android but because you need innovation. You have to have real competition and two companies trying to outdo each other are just not enough.

And here is a real-life example: Try to book a flight now that we are, essentially, down to three major airlines. These three have whittled down competition and ceded certain aspects of innovation in a manner that exactly re-creates a monopoly. Oh, they'll tell you that they're competing, but they are simply not doing it. You can bet that Alphabet and Apple will do exactly the same.

Two software companies is not enough to keep innovation fired up. We need more than three, actually.

The radiation issue may be solved by the artificial creation of a Van Allen Belt. But I understand your premise. I think that as Mars core cooled (it was smaller than the Erth's after all), it lost its magnetic envelope, which now only exists in a few places. But we can use technology we currently have to recreate artificial protection for the planet—or much of it.

Please see this article: http://www.newsweek.com/nasa-b...

I have an iPhone 5S. My daughter has a 7 and my wife has a 6S. It is "my turn." I do not generally upgrade a phone every year or, as you can see, every other year. But the iPhone is now getting to be a mature, stable device and, based on the rumors, this next one should be a very good phone. I can always go to the iPhone 7 if the 8 requires something really strange, but I tend to buy the most memory one can buy and buy the fastest device. They last longer.

This is the precise language being used in the East.

Here on the East Coast in the Federal Circuit Courts, non-compete clauses in contracts have been declared invalid and not binding. And this will be why Veeva Systems is trying to sue in California court to make it universal—they do not want to be hauled into a court in a "foreign" state

This is a good strategy for Veeva. It is a pre-emptive move in a court of their own choice

I am not in the habit of replying to anonymous cowards. You are a troll, sir and should be modded as such.

However, I am going to provide two links. The first is an article that includes the motion before the Court in the "All Writs Act" case. Now, you are claiming that this was just a PR stunt. I don't know what planet you live on, but hiring outside counsel to appeal such an order from the FBI is expensive, and there is absolutely no profit in it. So the document from Apple cost them money and did not produce iPhones, iPads or computers. Here is the article.

But that's not all. Were this just a publicity stunt, there would have been a quiet backroom agreement that Apple did complain in the "All Writs" case. If your hypothesis that this was a PR stunt were true, the agreement would have been made in secret, Apple would have provided the code and all would be well. The public relations issue would have been handled and everyone would think that Apple had won. But that is not what happened.

Instead, the Department of Justice filed a countermotion. And you can read it here.

So your hypothesis is dead wrong, Anonymous Coward-Troll. So you can believe whatever you want, but beliefs are not facts.

I think you are asking the wrong question. Of course there does not exist a company that is completely free from the laws, regulations and requirements of the country in which it works (and that includes all countries in which they work for the multinationals).

What you are forgetting in your question is that, in the United States, CEOs are not murdered by the United States government if they oppose the chief executive, as has happened with Russians. You are forgetting that the United States is not an official kleptocracy (yet) where plutocratic friends of Vladimir Putin are free to steal from the country's resources at the expense of the taxpayers and that the government there is absolutely uninterested in transparency. You are forgetting that, in Russia, there are no checks and balances, the Judiciary is not independent of the central government, that the legislature (Duma) does not hold hearings to investigate the President or the Prime Minister and that the current President found a loophole in the country's constitution that allows him to hold onto power for much longer than his country's constitutional intent.

From this standpoint, a company that is located in the United States is unfettered by the politics of the day, as long as the company produces a valuable product and is a good corporate citizen. When our federal government asked for a "back door" (as a forinstance) into the Apple iPhone, Apple fought it. and, although the issue was declared moot, the government had to come up with a hack that would work on its own.

Were Apple's headquarters in Moscow or St. Petersburg, there would be no appeal to a court—they would have been forced to comply. And there might have been a sudden, unexplained death of the CEO were there any resistance.

So, my answer to your question is, yes. Companies are independent from our government here in the United States. They do not exist at the pleasure and tolerance of our Chief Executive as they do in Russia

A good friend of mine got his CPA as an older college student. Then he went to work for the big CPA firms in NYC. They used him for auditing and then spit him out at the end of audit season (after having told him, "You play your cards right and we'll put you on track to be a partner." Yeah, as if!). One audit he did is worth noting.

It seems this one former rocker whose group was filling the stadiums "back in the day" was accosted by a paparazzi and the rocker may have struck the paparazzi. He called his attorney when he got a letter from the alleged victim of his fist and asked for him to defend him. His attorney told him what it would cost to defend. The former rocker said, "But I'm broke!" His attorney said, "That's crazy—your music is still selling. In fact, my daughter just told me that she got your entire album from 1970-something on iTunes."

"I haven't received a royalty check for five years from anyone!" replied the former rocker.

His attorney, who drew up the contracts informed him that he had the "right to audit" the sales of his recordings. So, my friend Jim was hired to do the audit.

Here is what he found out:

• While they were a hot and up-and-coming group, the record company underreported (and under-paid) sales by 20%.
• While they were filling stadiums and touring, the record company underreported sales by 35%
• After the group split up and stopped producing music and stopped touring, the record company underreported sales by 40%, increasing to 100% over 15 years.

To say the least, after the audit, the record company agreed to arbitration and wound up paying the members of the group unpaid moneys and had to pay interest to keep the story from the press. Jim never told me who the band was, but he did tell me that I would know right away who they were.

So, the next time you see the recording industry whining about people stealing "their" music, understand that it's the artist's music you are stealing—if you are, indeed, illegally copying music. But also understand that the recording industry, themselves, are just as guilty—they blame you for what they, themselves do.

My wife has one. One of her physicians told her that he wants to see how much she is sleeping, how many steps she is taking, etc.

But this is a battery-operated device. And it needs to be charged. So I have to wonder whether or not this study held for users who were charging their FitBits all night, rather than allowing it to record their sleep patterns. I don't see the actual study on the link, just an executive summary.

I use Apple for personal email. I have had a mac.com email address since Apple came out with it. Their current server name is "me.com" and Apple does not advertise in this service, as it is a paid-for service. It allows pop3 as well as IMAP.

For professional email, I use gmail. Google does a great job of excising spam. It is advertiser-supported email, but I never use a web browser for my gmail account. Instead, I use the pop3 function. It propagates to my cell phone, my desktop and my tablet. When I delete something on my cell phone, it deletes on my tablet, but not on my desktop. For a free service, I do not think you can do any better than gmail.

We have been here before. Timothy Egan wrote a book that I highly recommend called "The Worst Hard Times" that fully describes how the prairie was "mined" for its ability to grow crops—an ability that was created over millennia of the creation of soil by the sod, the plants that were there and by the animals that freely roamed the Great Plains.

From the book:

First came the tragedy of settling in an unsettled land encouraged by rising food prices, war, and real-estate speculation. Then came the tragedy of overproduction and the incapacity to sell farm products at a price sufficient to cover the costs of marketing perishable food-stuffs.

The fact that the Great Depression coincided with this man-made ecological disaster deepened its effect. One of the solutions was to do the agricultural subsidies, that were supposed to cause land to lie fallow for years and build up and protect the soil. What we have is subsidies that are set too low to keep farmers happily accepting them or we have too much greed.

But here is where this hits me, personally. My father was born in Eastern Kansas in 1931. As a little boy, he was subjected to the recurrent dust storms. Again, from the book:

Dust clouds boiled up, ten thousand feet or more in the sky, and rolled like moving mountains – a force of their own. Cattle went blind and then suffocated [their] stomachs stuffed with fine sand. Children coughed and gagged, dying of something the doctors called "dust pneumonia.

My dad's family all got something pulmonologists called "pulmonary fibrosis." One of his sisters died of it. My dad was on a CPAP machine, which is commonly used by people with COPD—smokers who didn't quit and who need oxygen as they get older because their lungs are half-destroyed. He needed the machine to get a good night's sleep. He had a raspy cough all his life.

Three years ago, my father slipped on some ice and fell and broke six ribs. Now, that's like the "proverbial breaking one's hip" that is a life-changing event for an older person, but they do survive this. My father was in the ICU for 19 days and just could not live. He died on his 83rd birthday and a good 60% of his reason for death was the dust from those storms when he was a young boy.

This is what we are creating with greed, folks. Mark my words, when the drought comes (and it will with global warming) we will see these dust storms again.

[I]t hurt, like a swipe of coarse sandpaper on the face

Here is a link to the book on Amazon. Please note, this is not meant to be an endorsement of Amazon, it is an endorsement of the book and the author's work: The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan

Okay, you are an expert. And you patch systems and I want to thank you for the un-thanked-for work that you do all of the time. But we're talking about the Microsoft-pushed updates that destroy everything (you can see all the anecdotes, so I know you are aware.

I will offer you this: I know a company with $3M in sales that signed a contract with a (hopefully) good IT firm right in front of me that I would have loved to refer to you. Send me a private message with your location and I will refer you if you are local.

I knew someone was going to tell me that IE was invented when there were no standards. I disagree.

In 1994, the W3 Consortium was formally established with support from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA) in Europe, DARPA, and the European Commission, with a mandate to oversee development of common web protocols and promote web interoperability. Cite: Living Internet

Microsoft originally released Internet Explorer 1.0 in August 1995 in two packages: at retail in Microsoft Plus! add-on for Windows 95 and via the simultaneous OEM release of Windows 95. I don't need to cite anything because I was working with Microsoft's PR company (presently called WE Worldwide) during that time and spoke with the people at the company who had derived the code from Spyglass Mosaic. There were proposed standards for the Worldwide Web and for browsers before there was any such a thing as Microsoft Internet Exploder.

ftp has been around since early the 1970s, developed by Abhay Bhushan while he was a student at MIT. This pre-dates Windows. In fact, it pre-dates Microsoft. Oh, that's right, you couldn't figure it out and needed a nice GUI client, right? Fetch dates back to 1989 when Jim Matthews wanted something that would work in the Mac labs at Dartmouth. It was released as Shareware. And Mosaic had an ftp client for Windows that they released with their browser in 1992. but I guess you couldn't figure that out, right?

To run IIS, you need a Windows Server. I rest my case.

And Microsoft's programming languages for internet service remain pretty backwards, but I will give you this: Talking about languages is the same as talking about religion. Everyone has their preference and I prefer to not get involved in theology. But php was written in the C programming language by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994. php became truly useful in 1996, which is when Microsoft's first browser was in its infancy. Cite: php.net 1996 was when I decided to no longer try to work with Windows, except as needed at work.

Macromedia invented Dreamweaver in 1997, and was maintained by them until Macromedia was acquired by Adobe Systems in 2005. Dreamweaver has always adhered to W3C web standards.

So, Mister anonymous coward, you have identified yourself as a Microsoft fan-boy who does not know what happened when and does not know what standards are and when they were released. And I'm old enough to know when things were developed, because I was using these tools then. I do not think I am jaded, but, I suppose you can go ahead and think that I am. I don't really care much what people think of me, I know who I am and I know what I know and that is fine for me.

Mod this up, folks!

I know at least five different business environments which have been, essentially, shut down by a Windows update. One of them was signing a new service contract as I was talking to him—he had been down all day, unable to see his customer files, his books, the jobs his company was supposed to be doing, unable to route his employees to where they were supposed to go. They went back to a paper only system they have not used since 2002 and they were guessing at that. They were taking credit cards over their website, but could not record the result in their books and had to just save all of the emails and spend an additional day or so just doing data entry into their bookkeeping system.

Of course, these are anecdotes (which is what the anti-vax community uses instead of Science). The problem is not the update, it is what Microsoft does to the computer upon emerging from the update. Elsewhere, people have written of resetting all of the browser preferences, BSODs and other issues. Microsoft needs to restore the previous state of the computer or server (as much as is practical) after the patch. They need to go in like a surgeon with the same motto: "First, do no harm." And if they figure out how to do that, their updates will be seen as innocuous as Apple's